Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  As I continued to work in television, I also started to develop another theory. Scripts are hard. That is, they require reading, evaluation, consideration. In the middle of pilot season, when on any given day an executive has fifteen meetings at the office as well as meetings over breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks, as well as dozens of phone calls to return, as well as dozens of memos and e-mails to weigh-in on from colleagues’ meetings—a fifteen-minute pitch often gets much more attention than sixty-nine bound pages, unless the first of those pages has J. J. Abrams written on it. Moreover, if an executive buys a completed script and green-lights it for production and it fails, unless the lead actor was truly psychopathic, or the director had a serious crack problem, the green-lighter’s tastes are much more accountable than if he or she simply hired a writer to start from scratch. Everyone knows how invariable the development process can be and, thus, it is much more forgiving—a safer, as well as easier, way to go.

  Consequently, most TV pilots are sold in pitch meetings during pilot-development season. The prevailing wisdom on this process is to bring in a concept that is generally familiar but a little bigger than the biggest concept presently on TV. It should be immediately identifiable but somehow cooler, pumped up a notch. For example, series are often pitched as: “Think [insert hot familiar TV show of choice] meets [insert another hot familiar TV show of choice] on acid.” Or “It’s [insert hip familiar movie of choice] meets [insert another hip familiar movie of choice] on steroids.” Or “The series is basically [insert hot familiar TV show of choice] meets [insert hip familiar movie of choice] but with lesbians.” Or “dope-smoking priests.” Or “lesbians who sleep with priests, do acid, take steroids, and smoke dope.” The general idea is to walk in and say, “This one’s just like the others that have worked, but ‘this one goes to eleven.’” And then you’re given a quarter of a million dollars or so to go home and figure out what the hell you’ve sold them.

  No matter how passionate a network may be about a pitch, the reality is that they have no idea what they’re actually buying. If you pitch to five different executives in the room, they all have different mental images of what you’re talking about, and that is assuming that they are actually listening to you as opposed to thinking about the previous pitch or the subsequent lunch meeting. Most TV shows are born and manufactured on nothing short of a giant leap of faith. Networks rarely really know what they are going to get when they write a check, and so they often do not know how to judge what they do get on its own merits. This begins to explain how Fox let Dawson’s Creek slip through its fingers.

  In 1995, Paul Stupin had recently left a position as a network exec at Fox and taken an overall deal to develop projects for Columbia TriStar Television, Sony’s major television production arm. It surprised very few people who met Paul to learn that he was a former executive. A collector of trendy gadgetry and a consumer of all things pop, Paul was Sports Club/L.A. fit, the kind of guy whose shirt was always tucked in, even at midnight, standing in line in Westwood for the latest Harry Potter release. Paul’s major claim to fame for his time at Fox was his involvement in the development of Darren Starr’s Beverly Hills, 90210, the series that pretty much put Fox on the map in the nineties. So the executives at Columbia TriStar listened to Paul when he championed Kevin Williamson—who had just sold his spec screenplay, Scream—for the development of a new youth-oriented series. Since this was a market in which all nets were becoming increasingly interested, the idea of Kevin was very appealing to Columbia. Paul and Kevin talked for quite a while about developing a TV show. Numerous ideas were kicked around. Kevin really did not have anything concrete. Eventually, he just started talking about his life, where he grew up, experiences in high school. Paul thought there could be a show in all that somewhere. Kevin went home and outlined a series about a boy who lives on a creek, always dreamed of being Steven Spielberg, and shares his bed with a girl he’s known since early childhood.

  At the beginning of the pilot season, Paul then took Kevin to his former employers at Fox. Kevin pitched the idea and Fox essentially bought it right there in the room. Kevin was hired to write a pilot script. Later, as pilot-production season was just gearing up around the holidays, Fox passed on the show. They weren’t thrilled about the script and thus were not going to produce it. A Fox executive said that the script seemed odd, old-fashioned. He felt that Kevin’s dialogue was stilted and archaic.

  Pilot-production season, which usually occurs between Thanksgiving and March, is the time of year when a handful of pilots are given the green light for production. (This, by the way, is “staffing season” for actors. Every actor in town jockeys for a spot on a pilot that he or she hopes will become a series-regular role and make them a household name.) This is when a network has to make a real substantive decision about how much they believe in a project. A script is sixty pieces of paper, a couple of brads, and a few hundred grand. A pilot episode is millions of dollars and a major undertaking. Dozens of writers wait by the phones, wondering if they will be future showrunners, or back on the market. About fifteen to twenty scripts per network are green-lighted for production.

  But Paul refused to give up. He took the script to a brand-new network that was struggling to find its way. They decided to give it a shot. The new WB network did not commit the resources to a full produced pilot for Dawson’s. Rather, a thirty-eight-minute “pilot presentation” was produced. A pilot presentation is made by producing just parts of a pilot script, as opposed to the whole thing. An order for a pilot presentation, used by executives to judge a show’s potential merits, essentially means “We love the project. We are BIG fans. Just not big enough to commit $5 million.”

  I first saw the Dawson’s pilot presentation tape in the spring of 1997. Everyone in the entertainment business heard about it and wanted to take a look. It quickly became the “it” show of the new season. You just knew the WB had something really special on their hands. Whether or not they would know what to do with it was another issue. It was only two years earlier that ABC had dropped the ball with My So-Called Life, another “it” show. When I saw the Dawson’s presentation, I felt the same way as when I first saw The Wonder Years. I knew I wanted to work on that show.

  Visitors to Los Angeles often remark how beautiful the city is year-round. It is true that lavatera and hibiscus, even some bougainvillea varieties, adorn the L.A. basin throughout the year. Still, there is nothing as far as I am concerned that compares to the jacaranda tree bloom in late April. For me, and I believe (on some level), for most TV writers, this is like a billion little purple flags being run up thousands of flagpoles from Burbank to Santa Monica, signaling the official commencement of television staffing season. No matter where you live or what you do, if you are an Angeleno, you can’t miss it. When I saw the purple flowers all over the city that spring in 1997, I knew that the meetings were about to start.

  Staffing season, which traditionally takes place between late April and the beginning of June, is best described as a game of musical chairs. Here’s how it works. Writers who know they are going to be on the market during staffing season begin their preparations as early as possible. Often series get canceled after the initial order of a pilot plus twelve, so the show’s writers know around late November that they’ll be available. Sometimes the network waits until the very last minute in late May after a full season of twenty episodes have been made to announce that a show is not coming back. Even if you are the most beloved staff member on a top-ten show that is definitely coming back, sometimes your showrunner gets fired, followed by everyone on the writing staff. Sometimes a showrunner takes a huge development deal, leaves the baby he created, and a new showrunner is hired who brings in a new writing staff. Sometimes the network and/or the studio decide the show needs a change in direction and thus new writers. Sometimes a showrunner or another key staff member will cannibalize the writing budget of the show, double or triple their own salaries, and let other staff writers go. When Beth Uffner sa
id, “You want security, go sell insurance,” she wasn’t joking. The truth is, even in the best of years, part of the job in a television writing career is writing and part of the job is getting your next job. Since you never really know for sure how long your current job will last, one way or another, even in the best of years, you are always working on the next.

  Writers do several things to prepare for staffing season. First, they get their spec material in order. That season my agency sent out my five-year-old Northern Exposure script because Dan felt it was sort of charmed by the success we had with it at Disney. He also really liked the teaser, which opened with a man bleeding from the wrists and collapsing in the center of town. Dan liked these sorts of things. He got quite worked up when he pitched them to executives. Listening to Dan pitch the opening of my Northern Exposure to an executive over the phone one day, I got worked up. He made me sound thrilling. I felt like I’d written Marathon Man.

  But he strongly believed that we needed something else that season, too, something darker. That was a word you heard a lot from agents about this time, partially, I think, because of the influence of Chris Carter’s work on the one-hour market. Dark became the new cool. And then edgy became the new dark. Naturally, like most writers, I never quite new what the hell any of these terms meant any more than I knew what “soft” meant. Although I did know that in the days of Millennium and The X Files agents told us that people did not respond if you were too soft, but they were big fans if you were dark, and really big fans if you were edgy.

  I told Dan about how Simon & Simon loved my Molly Dodd. He told me not to ever mention Simon & Simon again. “You want people to think you’re like fifty?” Dan rasped. He took the show off my credit list that the agency sent around with my specs, and he also advised me to talk a lot about how I had earned my brown belt in karate, presumably so that people would know that I was not soft.

  Now determined to approach television as work rather than full-time play, I professionally acquiesced and specced that laugh-riot Profiler, about an FBI criminologist on the trail of a brutal pathological serial killer. And as it turned out, Dan was absolutely right. That script ended up being the absolute perfect piece of material for the show I would get that season. This was because, as my agent pointed out, he was a genius. And also, as we have repeatedly seen now, in TV, you just never know.

  In addition to writing, TV writers also prepare for staffing by engaging in intelligence-gathering ops. This begins by following which new shows might get on schedules. During pilot-production season, most agencies generate a list that meticulously tracks all available information about each and every show in development. Every piece of data is collected: who has been cast, who is directing, which writers are attached, and how the studio and network like the project so far. Mind you, this information is not collected through official channels or some formal process. It is all simply word of mouth. Agents talk to executives who leak tidbits of information. Writers tell their agents what they have heard. Agency assistants talk to their assistant pals at the networks and studios. All this rumor and hearsay and speculation is compiled. Finally, the assistants in charge of the list at each agency will often tactfully share intelligence with each other the way kids trade marbles. At any given day during pilot-production season a good lit agency can fairly accurately lay pickup odds for most pilots. My agency sent me the List every few days as it was updated.

  A similar process also tracks which positions might be available on returning shows. Agencies try to figure out which shows will definitely come back and which one are “on the bubble.” Information is collected about which showrunners and writers on these series might be going into development or moving on to better shows. Information is also collected about which showrunners and writers might not be having their options exercised. It is not uncommon for this knowledge to be on the information market before it is known to these showrunners and writers themselves.

  And along with intelligence, pilot scripts and tapes are furtively passed around in the TV writing community. Starting in the fall, when the pilots are green-lighted for production, agencies begin sending their clients pilot scripts. In later years when I knew I would be on the market, Dan sent me as many as fifty scripts a season. My friends and I would loan and trade these scripts with each other.

  In order to stay abreast of what was going on in the market, you had to read these scripts. Even more valuable are tapes of produced-pilot episodes, like that Dawson’s presentation tape I got. By the end of pilot-production season, around late March to early April, these tapes start appearing all over town. No showrunner, studio, or network wants rough cuts of their pilots to get out into the community. So sometimes it can take as long as a week or two before they do. A veritable black market exists for these shaky bootleg tapes. It’s an odd feeling you have when you start one of those tapes, somewhere between fear and excitement. For this rough approximation of a potential TV series may turn out to be a living hell to which you get yourself contractually tied, or it may be the show where you spend the next seven wonderful years, the show that forever on appears in parentheses after your name.

  All of this, the intelligence, the scripts, and the tapes, creates—that’s right—buzz. And you hear it everywhere. I always made appointments to see my dentist during this time. Partially because I knew I was gonna get busy and partially because not only did he work on actor-producers like Mel Gibson but also several A-list showrunners, so he always had good info about what was hot. I also found that the waitresses at Art’s Deli seemed to be in the know. As pilot-production season segues into staffing season, during April, the whole town goes as mad as bees making the season’s first honey.

  Then the meetings start, first with the execs. There are essentially two varieties of television executive, development and current. The studios and the networks usually have both. Not surprisingly, the idea is that development execs develop TV shows and current execs oversee shows currently on schedules. There are also usually executives who specifically develop or oversee drama, and others who develop or oversee comedy. Those highest up on the food chain (presidents, senior vice presidents, etc.) manage both genres in both stages. The way this all operates is no big surprise, either. When you pitch a pilot, it’s to the development folks. When you meet for a show that has been picked up, it’s with current. If a show might get picked up, you might meet both.

  By the end of April to the beginning of May, the entire town is engaged in a whirlwind of these meetings. My agency would call me several times a day during this period to schedule meetings, sometimes three at a time. They would often call back an hour later to cancel and reschedule meetings. During this time writers are never away from their phones. Just as writers and their agents track shows during this time, executives track writers. Just as writers compete for a limited amount of good jobs, the networks and studios all compete for the best talent. It’s a feeding frenzy.

  The purpose of these staffing meet ’n’ greets is not to sell any work, pitch any ideas, or present any potential TV shows, it is simply to let those in charge at the networks and studios get a look at you so they can give their blessing. Ideally, executives and writers get to know each other a bit, get a sense of each other. But when an executive has a dozen of these meetings before lunch, simply putting a name with a face, a script with a person, is often the main result. I had meetings during this time that lasted maybe ten minutes. And I’d have several in any given day. To make a comparison to dating, or better yet speed-dating, is not wholly inaccurate, although I would actually liken television executives more to the watchful parents of the potential date. Because at the end of the day, although they do have the contractual right to put down their foot and dig in their heels and say “over my dead body is he coming to work here!” it is, in reality, the showrunning writer’s decision. As important as it is to have “network approval” and “studio approval,” the bottom line is that if a showrunner wants you, everything else is pretty much meani
ngless. That’s not to say that good executives can’t help their busy and totally overwhelmed showrunners make good staffing decisions. But from what I was seeing, I started to think of TV executives, in the best cases, mainly as trusted advisors, as wartime consiglieri.

  When I first came to Hollywood it was my impression that the development executives were just a little hipper than their counterparts in current. They dressed a bit more fashionably. Had slightly trendier haircuts. Meet ’n’ greets featured discussions about favorite TV shows (of course) but also included lengthy riffs on the latest subtitled film at the Laemmle or the one-man play at the Zephyr, and impassioned conversations about travel, particularly to retro-hip locales that were decidedly anti-L.A. These meetings were shameless improvs that wove Brand Falsey, Mamet, and grits into a tapestry of cool, leaving the participants assured that they belonged to the same club.

  Current executives, on the other hand, seemed to talk the talk of research departments. Conversations included Nielsen numbers, up-front ad sales, and the benefits of working for the particular studio. Meetings felt more like legitimate interviews than jazz sessions. And the current executives looked…not just a bit older physically, but older soulfully. They knew how to manage an unmanageable showrunner. They were accustomed to keeping stars in line. They knew how to put out fires, and frankly, they didn’t take a lot of shit.