Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  Although there were only three entities writing the show, we also had a nonwriting executive producer on staff, a highly experienced producer who had also served in this capacity on several popular series during the 1980s. Just as the name suggests, the idea is to attach someone with producerial experience to a show, ideally to free up time for the writing producers to spend more time writing. As we will later see, throughout the nineties, nonwriting EPs became frequent additions to TV shows, because when executives left a job at a network, they were given something called a “POD” or producer overall deal, which was not only a way to compensate executives who were squeezed out, but also a way for the network to exercise control over a show.

  Over the coming years I would work with several nonwriting producers who were great additions to staffs, usually when there was a clear demarcation of duties. However, this was not always the case. Often, making an executive who does not write an executive producer in a writer’s medium can be like putting a military officer who doesn’t read music in charge of a symphony.

  Although most nonwriting executive producers, in fact, see their jobs as conductors, and see their compensation as payment for providing such services, I think it is important to point out that not all do.

  On one of the shows on which I worked, after I finished developing a story with the other writers, creating an outline and then writing two drafts of an episode, the nonwriting executive producer approached me privately and told me that he wanted to put his name on my script. He smiled and said not to worry, he would pay me back the money he received for his portion of the script fee. The residuals we would sort out later. I didn’t get it. It sounded like he was saying that he wanted me to agree to have him share the “written by” credit or maybe to give him the “story by” part. He tried several times to explain to me what he was telling me to do but, I swear, I just couldn’t understand. So he had to spell it out. He explained to me that he took a credit or two every year or so on scripts, so that he could qualify for the Writers’ Guild health insurance.

  I had never encountered anything like this before. I finally understood and said no. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do politically, and I was learning that to survive on a staff you had to think about this stuff. But it sure felt good.

  Sisters did not pick up my option for the following season. They called my agent and told her it just wasn’t a good fit.

  Getting fired sucks. For one thing, the same buzz-driven momentum that moves you forward, changes direction at the drop of a hat. But aside from that, it hurts. You see, the trouble with all the hoopla and fuss that everyone makes about you is that you start to believe it. Just like the agents and execs who define you by the bullet points distilled from the buzz, you start to do the same to yourself. And when you buy into the positive stuff, you have to likewise buy into the not so positive. I got the news weeks before my contract expired, meaning I didn’t have to keep coming in but I still got paid. I was earning $5,500 a week at that point just for my staff work, and I can tell you that despite popular belief, there is little joy in collecting money when you’re not doing something to earn it.

  There was also, however, a deep sense of relief. When they told Beth it wasn’t “a good fit” they were being polite. Let me give you an example. In a scene that we were working on in the story room, Alex (played by Swoosie Kurtz) had just installed a security system in her home. The writing executive producers wanted the alarm to go off in the middle of the night, Alex to jump out of bed, pull a gun, and almost shoot her daughter, Reed (Ashley Judd). And right before the accidental shooting took place, they wanted the recorded alarm to not only scream “Intruder! Intruder!,” they also wanted it to say things like, “Nice hair, sweetie,” and “Do something!” when Alex walked by. Well, I couldn’t get on board with this. I couldn’t understand how you could expect the audience to stay in the moment when you not only had a comedic beat, but you completely broke reality. This was a realistic drama. You can’t just one day decide to start breaking the fourth wall. “How could you have a recorded security system talk to a character? That’s not real!” I said in a variety of different ways. Even though my bosses loved it and simply could not stop laughing at how cute it was, I just couldn’t let it go. It seemed so clear-cut to me. I argued this and argued this simply because, at the time, honestly, this one little moment on a modestly rated TV show seemed to me like the absolute most important thing in the world.

  After getting fired, I watched the show and, naturally, there it was, the security system talking to the character:

  Panic Master: Code Red! Code Red! Intruder outside master bedroom! Do something!

  (Alex shoots the security alarm a look and then talks to it.)

  Alex: I’m trying to!

  Yeah, it was cute, but like I thought, it was also silly and completely defused the tension in the scene. But you know what? The show did not, in fact, fall apart. The show wasn’t canceled. Viewers didn’t write in complaining. Nobody talked about it in the trades. I began to realize that the only way to have a career writing TV is to know when to shut up.

  Beth sent me on a variety of meetings. To be honest, a twenty-nine-year-old with a bunch of money in the bank doesn’t pull off that wide-eyed “I’ll kill to work here” enthusiasm very well unless it’s for a show for which he really felt that way. I did not have meetings with any of the shows I felt that way about for the 1992–93 season.

  In a meet ’n’ greet with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, I spent much of the time interviewing Winnie Hervey, the EP, about the working hours and conditions. Although Beth said I was a shoo-in for the gig, I did not get an offer.

  While I was trying to figure out what I would do the following season, late in the afternoon of April 29, 1992, a man named Reginald Denny was pulled out of his truck at the intersection of Florence and Normandie and hit with a brick. Evidently, a lot of people in the city were very upset about the verdict that came out that day in the Rodney King trial. But I didn’t notice, because not only was I consumed with life as a TV writer, I was also breaking up with my girlfriend. I heard about the beating on the radio of the U-Haul that we’d just rented so that we could move her out of the house. While the city literally burned around us that night, with LAPD and the National Guard using the Santa Monica Airport right behind my house as a staging area, we had our big breakup.

  As I said, she was very nice. A kind of backslapping pal, she was a great friend to a lot of people, including me. But she was extremely frustrated. More than anything in the world, and I mean that quite literally, more than anything she wanted to be a TV writer, and it was not going real well. I would come home from a shitty fifteen-hour day on Sisters and she would want me to read and help her with her spec scripts, which I did. But, frankly, they never quite knocked my socks off. I didn’t respond. Still, I introduced her to William Morris, who signed her and represented her as a one-hour drama writer. This did not go well. She wrote a script for a Bochco show; this did not go well. Went on pitch meetings; they also did not go well. I figured this had to be more than just bad momentum. One day when she came home nearly in tears because she was so nervous during a pitch that she spilled Diet Dr Pepper all over the leg of the executive producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I thought to myself, for Christ’s sake, get a job, stop hanging out by the pool, and go be a dental hygienist or something!

  Well, she did get a job. I did not work in television that season, but she did. Days after splitting up, she went on the staff of a new sitcom. And they loved her. Everyone loved her. She was a star. Within a year she was a coproducer on a hit series, and a year later a coexecutive producer on another hit series. The next year she cocreated and ran a hit series. The year after that, she cocreated and ran another even more successful show, one of the best and biggest hits of the decade, Dharma & Greg. She quickly became one of the best and most sought-after writer-producers in television.

  As you might imagine, I did some serious soul-searching. I th
ought a lot about what had happened since I arrived in town. Unlike other occupations where you stay with the same company for thirty years and eventually get a gold watch, writers move around a lot in TV. Writers frequently leave or get kicked off one show and move on to another. I started to think of a TV writing career as like being in a large fraternity party and frequently moving from room to room. Every room has its own little mini party, with new people and new material. In addition, the overall career span is very short for most TV writers. The WGA estimates that in an average season 20 percent of the entire workforce turns over as established writers leave the business and new writers join. But I started to think that maybe with me, something was going on that was more than just the regular rhythms of the business.

  Until 1992, I kept getting jobs, great jobs. And while momentum and good fortune were certainly responsible for giving me many of those shots, I was succeeding on my own skills when I took them. I had written my way onto both The Wonder Years and Sisters; both gave me audition scripts before putting me onto their staffs. And my first staff scripts were very well received. Not wanting to lose me, The Wonder Years even exercised their option on me for two years when they got their midseason pickup. So the decision to leave before that contract was up was ultimately mine. Beth felt I should only work someplace where I could be a runaway success, and Bob wasn’t as enthusiastic about my later scripts as he was about my first ones, and it was pretty much the same story on Sisters. I began to realize there was a pattern here.

  I was capable of doing the writing. The issue, I think, was that I hadn’t quite figured out the balance between the writing and the living, the writing and the being a writer. Part of this was all the distraction coming from the buzz and the money. In truth, I had a very large line of credit at several establishments in Vegas, which I visited quite often, sometimes just for the afternoon. Why not, I thought. Milch spent half his life at the track and much of it at the craps table. But of course, I was no David Milch. I was just a schmuck from Atlanta trying to figure out not so much how to write TV, but how to be a TV writer.

  And part of this was an inability to fully appreciate that being a TV writer meant working on a TV staff, which, as it turned out, was more of a job than I fully understood. I left the windowless offices at Ogilvy & Mather because I wanted to write, not work. Well, as it turned out, writing on a TV staff was in fact not just fun and games and writing cool stuff, it was also tolerating and negotiating—knowing when to shut up. At times, it was being rewritten. And at times, it was getting an assignment you didn’t love and finding a way to love it. Writing TV on staff was often, in fact, work.

  The truth is, when you took away all the trappings, I was still just a kid behaving as such. Mine was not an uncommon story during this period in Hollywood. What I would realize over the next two years is that if I was gonna work in this rapidly changing business—hell, if I was gonna have a life—I would have to change too.

  NINE

  The Hollywood Gold Rush

  “There are many ways to talk about television. But in a‘business’ perspective, let’s be realistic: basically, our job is to help Coca-Cola sell its product. To make the advertising message well received, the audience’s brain must be available. Our shows are here to make the brain available, to entertain it, to relax it, to prepare it between two messages. What we’re selling to Coca-Cola is available human brain time. Nothing is as difficult as getting this availability.”

  —PATRICK LE LAY, CEO OF TF 1, THE MAIN FRENCH TV CHANNEL

  If this were a movie, this is that point in the second act when you’d see a montage, a series of intercuts between things that were happening to me and things that were happening to the industry, as both progressed. Here is the prose version of that.

  Most people living in L.A. between 1992 and 1994 felt a certain Job-like quality about their lives. It was if the universe was challenging us, testing our resolve to stay. On February 10, 1992, a “100-year storm” swamped the 101, killed eight people, and caused over $150 million in damage. A couple months after the April 1992 riots—which killed fifty-four and caused over a billion dollars in damage—on June 28, 1992, at 4:47 A.M. the 7.3 Landers earthquake rocked the city. It was followed a few hours later by the 6.4 Big Bear quake. In January 1993 another torrential storm and subsequent flood again caused more than $150 million in damage. In October 1993, the Malibu fires caused more than a billion dollars in damage, followed by related floods and mudslides of near biblical proportion. And at 4:30 A.M. on January 17, 1994, the Big One hit. The 6.7 Northridge earthquake was so powerful it literally knocked me out of my bed. Smelling like a heavy dirty rug that had been beaten hard for a good long time, the broken city shook and growled with aftershocks for weeks. The quake killed sixty-one people and caused over $42 billion in damage. And all of this took place in the middle of a massive recession, partly caused by the collapse of the region’s aerospace industry, that saw more than a half million people leave metro Los Angeles. Add to this the daily perils of life in L.A.—smog, traffic, killer bees, and regular insanity like O.J.’s June 17, 1994, slow-speed chase—and life in L.A. during this time felt like some sort of Darwinian rite of survival.

  However, if this was indeed some sort of test or rite, I passed. I knew a lot of young writers and industry folks who joined the other half a million, threw up their hands and got the hell out of Dodge. But I met even more young writers who were pouring into the wanton city during this time. Between 1993 and 1998 the Writers Guild admitted 3,077 new members, the vast majority of whom went to work in television. You see, despite the worst that nature could conjure, and despite whatever personal reasons were driving us, we stayed in and came to L.A. mainly because there was never a more exciting time to be a television writer. What can only be described as a modern-day gold rush was now under way, and we were at the epicenter of it.

  Right after the 1988 strike redefined the role of the writer, two events took place that redefined the entire industry: the Berlin Wall came down and the satellites went up. The opening of foreign markets, combined with numerous new ways to deliver TV to those markets, spearheaded the explosion. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties had an unforeseen and radical effect on the TV industry. Overnight, privately owned TV stations replaced state-owned monopolies in places like Russia, Israel, Malaysia, Greece, Finland, Norway, and all the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. Huge, global satellite networks popped up and started broadcasting. Cable companies laid millions of miles of coax all around the planet. Even the most remote locations in the most far-off countries could now receive television. And there was only one kind they wanted—American.

  Hollywood syndicators—companies that represent TV shows—began to actively court these previously closed markets. And representatives from these new stations flocked to trade shows like NATPE (National Association of Television Program Executives) and MIPCOM in Cannes in search of American programming. By the mid-nineties, entertainment became this nation’s second-largest global export, surpassing traditional factory and agricultural products. By 1996, international sales of U.S. entertainment products would total $60.2 billion, and television made up nearly half of that. In that same year there were 1.4 billion TV sets around the planet, three times as many as there had been just sixteen years earlier. The entire world suddenly had an insatiable appetite for American television.

  And just as this explosion took place in the foreign markets, the domestic market started heating up as well. In 1972, HBO had launched the first pay cable network service. First using underground cable and later satellites to deliver the signal, HBO provided paying viewers with entertainment content. In 1976, entrepreneur Ted Turner broadcast his local Atlanta UHF station, WTCG, Channel 17, all across the country on RCA’s Satcom 1 satellite, creating a basic cable channel. Turner’s station was relaunched in 1979 as WTBS, the first so-called superstation. In 1987, Rubert Murdoch launched an entire fourth network, Fox. By the early nineties,
there were hundreds of new channels and, like the foreign stations, they all needed content: TV shows.

  In addition, scores of new local stations, many not affiliated with a broadcast network, also popped up in this country, and they were also in need of programming. And those local stations who were network affiliates still needed to fill their non-network timeslots. Suddenly, TV shows became one of the hottest goods around.

  Two venues in particular took off like never before: basic cable and free television. The Wonder Years sold into basic cable when Nickelodeon purchased it in the mid-nineties, right about when the prices started to go through the roof. Fox Cable Networks paid $400,000 an episode for Dharma & Greg. Lifetime paid just over $600,000 an episode for Party of Five. TNT paid more than $800,000 an episode for ER. TBS paid $1.15 million an episode for Seinfeld. On average, a standard hit show started earning about $100 million dollars for its production company in basic cable. Since this is the range in which most shows are deficit-financed, a strong basic cable sale can help a production company break even on its investment. All reuses of the series after that puts it in the black.

  But the real money is in “off-network syndication” on free television. Simply put, syndication is the sale of a television program to multiple television stations without using a broadcast network for delivery. For example, M*A*S*H is no longer broadcast on CBS, but it is still syndicated in local markets all over the country. Twenty years after it was made, the series still makes millions of dollars for its original producer. (Some shows are produced for “first-run syndication,” like Oprah or Earth: Final Conflict. These shows were broadcast for the first time in syndication and sold to individual local markets, not mass broadcast on a major network, like ABC. Though some can be very profitable, like Baywatch, first-run syndies still don’t make the kind of money that off-net syndicated shows, like Everybody Loves Raymond or Friends do. Some shows can also be “off first-run,” like Paramount’s Star Trek franchise. This means that after they initially air in first-run syndication, the episodes are further syndicated around the country.) Off-net syndicated programming can take many forms. Some shows are “strips” that run every day. Others run once a week. Some deals include “barter” rights, in which the syndicators get a portion of the ad revenue generated by the local stations. Syndication deals allow shows to be exhibited for a set period of time, known as a cycle. After the cycle is up, the deals must be renegotiated. Many popular shows are picked up for numerous syndication cycles generating enormous wealth for the companies that made them years earlier. And the small stations share in the wealth through the enormous advertising revenues garnered by rerunning these hits.