Seinfeld is a good example of this newfound wealth that poured into Hollywood through off-net syndication. In 1998, the syndicator, Sony Pictures Television, sold the series to all the Fox local stations in nineteen major urban markets in the country. Each local station paid about $480,000 per episode for the right to air the series. There are 151 produced episodes of Seinfeld available. This means that the show brought in more than $1.4 billion in revenues, shared by the studio and profit participants, such as Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. (Larry David, by the way, reportedly earned more than $200 million for his stake in the show.) But that was just the first major cycle. In the beginning of 2004, every one of those nineteen local stations renewed its license fee for the show, guaranteeing that Seinfeld will be seen all over the country through March 2011. The second cycle will generate about the same amount of money as the first, plus additional revenue for barter advertising. And this is on top of whatever the show also earns in basic cable. So, in the end, Seinfeld could end up being worth well over $3 billion. Not bad for a television show about nothing. The promise of this kind of money coming from something as intangible as an idea in Larry David’s head drove entire companies to near madness.
From 1992 to 1994, trying to exercise greater control of my life, I took a bunch of interesting and eclectic assignments. (Okay, some more odd than interesting.) Instead of working on staff, I freelanced numerous TV episodes, a few of which I have managed to keep off Internet Movie Database. I wrote several video games. I developed an Internet series for Paramount Digital Entertainment. I went on the road with Yakov Smirnoff, the Russian comic, and helped turn his act into a sitcom. My time writing What a Country material in Laughlin, Nevada, is a subject for another book.
Some people take up things like skydiving when they go through “a period of growth.” I took Judy Carter’s famous stand-up class, which required me not only to perform my act at venues such as the lounge of a Holiday Inn in Granada Hills, but culminated in ten minutes at the Improv. The skydiving would’ve been much less frightening.
After ending up in a fleabag room off Hollywood Boulevard, penniless and in deep trouble, Delbert realized that he was an alcoholic. I attended some meetings with him where people discuss such things. The Beverly Hills men’s meetings were especially memorable. I’ve never seen so much cigarette smoking and cookie eating in my life. Huge celebrities, who I cannot name, joined guys like Delbert telling tales of drug and alcohol abuse that were mind-boggling. I firmly believe there were people in attendance for no other reason than to hear some of these stories. And I know there were several agents in the room who were there only to scam clients. As often happens between twelve-steppers and their former friends, Delbert and I stopped spending a lot of time together.
In 1994, I fell in love with the girl who I would marry. Leaving my house and my pool, my soon-to-be fiancée, Elizabeth, our dog, Maggie, and I rented a cozy house on 25th Street between Pico and Pearl in Santa Monica. It was, for lack of more specific words, a magical place.
Under the palms and jacaranda trees in the backyard, there was a sprawling, well-tended garden replete with grapevines, seasonal greens, and a million different varieties of heritage vegetables. We dined out there year-round, lawn picnics during the day, candlelit suppers at an ancient wooden table at night. Most notably, the house had a guest suite with its own entrance downstairs, which became my office. Immediately upon moving in, I began to focus intensely on my writing and I was soon quite prolific. After numerous freelance assignments, I eventually wrote new spec scripts and a screenplay.
One of my gigs was to cowrite a pilot for Paramount and ABC with a tough but gracious writer named Michael Piller (cocreator of Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and The Dead Zone). Although ABC did not pick up our show, the experience changed my life, because one night Michael brought a bottle of La Tache burgundy (Pinot Noir) to dinner at our home. It was the ’87, which I was told wasn’t even one of the more profound years, but still, I had been drinking red wine for years and I had no idea such a thing existed. Michael and I worked on several more projects together. He also taught me how to buy wine, which we started doing together regularly, at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Butterfields.
Rather than going to Vegas several times a week and blowing money at the Frontier’s craps tables, my life now became one of long, reflective hours spent writing alone in my basement office during the day, and long and memorable dinner parties with friends, writers and actors, and showrunners and movie stars, which went well into the night.
It was a very happy, dreamlike time.
At one dinner party with two other couples, one of the attendees had had more than his fair share of the ’86 La Turque that Piller helped me acquire. Jack, a buddy ever since my days in motion-picture marketing, wanted to know why the pretty young woman next to him, a very close friend of ours, had chopped her hair so drastically short.
The young woman tried to explain that she had just finished acting in a film called Boys Don’t Cry, in which she had to play a boy.
In a city where half the residents are “actors,” Jack could not seem to comprehend that she had actually made the movie and it was really going to get released.
“Well, stick with it! Maybe you can get some friends together and get the thing produced!” he slurred. “You gotta have perseverance in this town, Mrs. Toupee.”
She smiled politely, as did her husband.
The next day, Jack called us. “I just watched a rerun of Life Goes On and I have to say, that guy at your house last night with the shorthaired girl looked exactly like Chad Lowe.”
“That was Chad Lowe, Jack.”
You can imagine Jack’s reaction when the shorthaired girl walked onstage to receive her first Oscar a short time later.
Television wasn’t the only medium competing for the services of TV writers during this time. After Beauty and the Beast was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991, it became readily apparent that animated films were no longer just cartoons. They had great artistic and financial potential. To be sure, animated feature-length films would soon provide the content that would feed many of these companies from top to bottom. From rides at their theme parks to fodder for their TV shows, animated films poured great newfound money into the business.
When the studios saw the value of feature-length animation, they started bringing in professional screenwriters to work on them, as opposed to just using storyboard artists. But the studios quickly realized that screenwriters worked alone. They did not know how to work collectively in a room with board artists on a regular basis, a task necessary for the ongoing development of an animated movie. TV writers, however, were quite accustomed to this.
I spent 1994–96 working at Walt Disney Feature Animation. Rita Hsiao, a former Wonder Years assistant who was working full time in feature animation, recommended me to Disney. After they read my Northern Exposure TV spec, they asked me to develop a movie for them. I was presented with three options, the first two of which were fairly fleshed-out stories that seemed to be pretty far down the development pipeline. The third was just a premise. It was explained to me that Michael Eisner was very passionate about making a feature film about bears, presumably because of the possibilities of selling plush bears in the company’s retail stores. That’s pretty much all I got, bears. And of course, given the CEO’s passion for the project, I elected to find my own passion for it, which was not hard. Actually, once I signed up I did receive some notes that had been kicked around with Eisner. There was a page that said “King Lear/Joseph with Bears” and another that said “Antigone.” These included a few paragraphs inserting bears into the classical themes. I would later learn that this was Disney’s philosophy of storytelling. Find a well-known tale, borrow the bones, Disney-fy it. Hey, it worked.
Being a student of drama, I was in my element, though at one point I developed a Jazz Singer version of bears, which the executives loved, but it ended up being a bit weird for Disney. I
spent months developing characters and a story for these furry critters, which was the first iteration of an animated feature later entitled Brother Bear, released at the same time the ubiquitous plush bears were released in retail outlets worldwide.
While I was working on the teddy bear flick, Disney asked me to join the team that was developing Tarzan. They had a script that was written by a screenwriter, but the directors said they weren’t pleased with how it turned out. So, working closely with the directors and board artists, I spent nearly a year reconceiving and rewriting the film. It was great fun applying classic story craft to hand-drawn pictures. I had a brand-new office that was painted in bold primary colors. I hung out with storyboard artists, some of the most unappreciated storytellers in our culture. Most had low six-figure salaries, long-term contracts—some were signed up for as long as seven years—and they were required to fill out time cards. I worked with artists who had been at Disney so long they had worked with Walt. We’d have long, laid-back discussions about the same story point for weeks. Whether or not to kill Kerchak, Tarzan’s ape dad, went on for months. The vast majority of my time was spent rewriting story sequences, little one-to two-page scenes. I’d rewrite the same page or two for weeks, over and over, while board artists drew new pictures for the scene. For this I was paid $6,750 a week. The studio happily paid my membership to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 839 (aka, the Cartoonists’ Union), which I was required to join because Disney Animation did not want the WGA anywhere near their place. I came in at 9:30 A.M. every day and left at 5:30 P.M. every day. I ate leisurely at the shiny happy Disney commissary during my lunch break. I played lots of foosball, pinball, and Ping-Pong with the board artists. I did not work weekends or holidays. There was no stress. No Room. No pressures of production. Our actors were all drawings, and unlike their live-action brethren, they caused very little mischief.
However, after a couple years of writertopia, hanging out under the giant Sorcerer’s Hat, I realized I missed the pressures of TV. It took ten years for Brother Bear to go from page to screen. There was no pressure at Disney Feature Animation because it took a decade to make a ninety-minute story! As fun as it was, and it was a blast, I missed not only writing something and then seeing it produced and aired just days later, I missed the excitement that only comes from the pressure of production, from being on a TV staff. At the end of 1996, I was ready for it again, in a big way.
By no coincidence, 1996 was also the year I got married, on a warm night in December, on the pool deck overlooking the ocean at Shutters on the Beach. This was also about the same time that what is widely regarded as the great tipping point in television took place: when the FCC finally repealed Fin-Syn (the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules) with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Networks were now allowed to own their own shows. Networks could now make money off the syndication of the shows they aired.
With this major regulatory hurdle now gone, television was no longer treated like a public trust, which is how the FCC initially conceived it, but as any other product in a free marketplace. Now, networks were no longer obligated to serve the public by carrying certain types of mandated programming. Some estimates put the value of the airtime given to broadcasters with this act at $70 billion. The implications were profound. In fact, the end of Fin-Syn is widely regarded as one of the defining industrial events of the twentieth century. The repercussions have shaped how we get, who controls, and the content of our news, information, and entertainment.
As soon as the rules were repealed, nearly overnight, a tidal wave of mergers and acquisitions, start-ups, and consolidations took place. NBC immediately formed its own studio, NBCP (NBC Productions), so that it could supply and profit from its own shows. CBS formed CBSP (CBS Productions). Paramount and Warner Brothers, joining Fox, immediately launched their own in-house networks, UPN and the WB. CBS merged with Westinghouse, and then, a few years later, with Viacom. TimeWarner acquired Turner Broadcasting System for $6.5 billion. Not to be outdone, the Walt Disney Company purchased its own network too—ABC, for $19 billion—more than three times what General Electric paid for NBC just seven years earlier. It was an extraordinary time for Hollywood, a historic time for American industry. The entire known world seemed to shift on its axis. At exactly the same time that all these new markets, foreign and domestic, clamored for TV shows and drove up the price of syndicated programming to previously inconceivable levels, new entire networks—also in need of programming—joined the fray.
While the accumulation of great wealth by ostentatious Wall Street traders received thorough coverage in the American press during this era, TV lit agents, especially those at the boutiques, quietly amassed eight-figure fortunes. Though agency packaging fees on TV programs had been around since the early days of television, never before had they become so prevalent or so valuable. A 5 percent packaging fee on a $1.5 million-an-episode network license fee for twenty-two episodes generates $1.7 million a season for an agency. If an agency had a few shows like that every season—on top of their standard 10 percent commissions on talent—they could have nice regular paychecks.
But as hit shows became more valuable, the studios started charging astronomical amounts when they negotiated or renegotiated license fees with the networks. For example, Warners demanded a license fee of $276 million a season from NBC for ER when it went into its fourth season. Imagine the packaging fees an agency gets from a quarter-billion-dollar-a-year license fee. Not to mention the riches generated by a 10 percent adjusted gross back-end on the billions of dollars in syndication revenue from a Seinfeld.
If a studio were to balk at demands from an agency to pony up a packaging fee—a very reasonable response when you consider that these fees are essentially a tax on a production, the only production expense that doesn’t somehow appear on screen—the agency could just take their writer and their writer’s show down the block. But this didn’t happen. To the contrary, studios and production companies tripped over each other, literally fighting for the privilege of paying whatever they had to pay to get in business with writers and the shows they were creating.
Along with the new writers who were arriving, a new breed of agent now came to Hollywood as well. Up until this time, most of the major literary agents, like eighties television shows, could be described as “old school.” Deals were made easily and quickly. Beth would call me in the afternoon, tell me a show was interested, and before she went home, she’d have a multiyear deal all worked out. She considered the studio’s needs as well as her client’s. Think I’m exaggerating on the impact this woman had on people? Another Beth client, Rob Long (who ran Cheers), wrote an entire book about her called Conversations with My Agent. In it he says she was “just a giant in the business. She has a complete uninterest in money or deals; she’s always focusing on having a show on the air that’s good.” I’m not so sure I would say that she was entirely uninterested in money, but her primary agenda was not to let any nonsense from any party stand in the way of a good TV show. I’m sure she knew that packaging fees from good TV shows that went into syndication was the way to retire rich, which is what she did in the mid-nineties.
Before she retired, though, as part of my plan to make fundamental changes in my career and my life, I knew I had to start with my mother-agent. A couple of young and rising agents at Creative Artists Agency had been aggressively pursing me, and I agreed to a lunch with them, where I told them that I would seriously consider having them represent me. I think I asked for a few days to think about it, which in my mind meant that I’d hem and haw for a few weeks like a high school kid trying to decide which college to go to.
I swear, I wasn’t back from that lunch for more than two hours before Beth called me and wanted to know why the hell I was talking to CAA. I learned two things that day: 1) assistants all talk to each other all over town, and 2) Beth really did know everything. Naturally, she proceeded to chew me out, and I felt like an idiot. Her par
tner, Bob, called me and said that if I had a problem with Beth, he’d rep me. Bob was an amazing agent, but I felt even guiltier and stupider. I stayed with her for several months but, not surprisingly, I did not get invited to her Passover Seder that year, and let’s just say that some of the love was gone. Though I did not go with CAA, my consideration sped up something that I really did need to do. After a brief stint with a former ICM heavyweight, Jack Dytman, I signed with a new young agent named Dan Brecher in 1995.
Until this point, most TV lit agents either started as execs or came up through the famous agency training programs, such as the ones at William Morris or ICM. Beth was an executive at MTM. The new breed of agents that came to Hollywood in the nineties came from other places. Yes, many also went into those training programs—like Gavin Palone, who roared through the ICM program to become an agent at age twenty-two—but many had already had other professional training or even other careers first. Many were coming out of Ivy League law schools and MBA programs and fighting each other for the privilege of serving in mailrooms. Many were also skipping the mailroom and going right to work as junior agents. Naturally, all this new business not only created a massive need for writing talent, but also for people to represent that talent.
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