Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  C:16 was mercifully laid to rest in November after just seven episodes, although due to fans writing in, ABC aired the remaining six in the summer of 1998 on Thursday nights. Several of the writers became extremely close friends, some of whom spent a great deal of time dining outside in our garden after the show was canceled, since much of what I planted that weekend back in staffing season had sprouted and grown like mad by the late fall. And over the next few months, as we waited for the coming season, we had plenty of time to kick back and enjoy it, which we did.

  Three premiered in February 1998 and was summarily canceled in March 1998. Dawson’s Creek premiered on January 20, 1998, and was a huge hit, even bigger than we all imagined. Making it part of our appointment viewing, my wife and I watched every single episode.

  ELEVEN

  Vertical Integration and Segregation

  “Everybody comes from a dysfunctional family—it’s the nineties.

  The only happy families are in TV syndication.”

  —PACEY WITTER

  “We become what we behold.”

  —MARSHALL MCLUHAN

  The 1998–99 season was also another record one for writers, the peak of nearly a decade of sharp and steady increases. That year, 3,137 writers worked in all forms of television, about half full-time on staffs. I was one of them. This season I had even more meetings, of all sorts. There were silly meetings, like one in a Wilshire Boulevard penthouse with Laker Rick Fox, who thought he might want to make a TV show. There were humbling meetings, like one I had with showrunner Joanne Waters, who just a few years earlier had been a student at Carnegie Mellon in a seminar that I went back there to teach. Her show To Have & to Hold was one of the hottest new series on the schedule that season. And there were meetings where everything just clicked, like the one I had with Joe Dougherty at Warner Brothers on May 26,1998.

  A writer with whom I cowrote a script on C:16, Anne Lewis Hamilton, had worked closely with Joe on thirtysomething. They remained friends even after the show was canceled, partially due to their curious shared interest in kitschy disaster memorabilia. When it looked like his new series for the WB, Hyperion Bay, was gonna go, Anne called Joe and recommended me. This is, by the way, how nearly all writers eventually end up on staff, through recommendations made to showrunners by their friends and colleagues. By this point in my career, I was able to see a clear chain of recommendations, starting with Wells. Even with jobs where I had the right specs, recommendations still came into play. For C:16, Piller had called Duggan on my behalf. By this point I had figured out that while screenwriters have the luxury of being monsters if they are so inclined, playing nice with others is a key attribute of a writing career in episodic television. Perhaps this is why there are lots of books written by insiders about the movie business, but no one wants to do the same about TV.

  I was hired as a coproducer and started pretty much immediately. I couldn’t have been happier. My first day of work the first week of June was a one-on-one story breakfast with Joe at DuPars on Ventura. A former playwright who was initially hired and trained by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick (creators of thirtysomething), Joe was a gifted and highly respected television writer. Possessed of a Michael Moore–like zeal, Joe loved working with individual writers, and he especially loved teaching younger ones. I felt honored, lucky to be working so closely with someone like this. Not only had Joe won the Humanitas, he had been nominated for three Emmys and won one. Still, even after a single breakfast, one had the distinct impression that if there was no television business, Joe would either be a professor at a junior college or sitting on a bus bench somewhere screaming at a stranger about Howard Hawks.

  Hyperion Bay was created to be the WB’s answer to thirtysomething. People around town sort of nicknamed it “twentysomething.” Like my previous gig, this series showed tremendous promise. Mark-Paul Gosselaar led an outstanding cast. Joe handpicked a talented and atypically small eclectic staff, along with the two of us, Bernie Lechowick (Home Front), Marlene Meyer (Law & Order: CI), and Wendy Goldman (Room for Two). After the first couple weeks we moved into our permanent offices in an old double-wide trailer next to the Warner Brothers wood shop on the ass-end of the lot. If you ever wonder just how valuable your show is to the studio, you can always tell by where they put you. For example, if you worked on Friends, you spent your time in the plush high-rise digs of Bright/Kauffman/Crane’s offices with an awesome view of the Warners lot and all the double-wide trailers below.

  Nevertheless, we all took great pride in what we were doing, and you could see this in the show. It was meticulously, even lovingly, developed. Every detail, no matter how minute, was considered and reflected upon. One day Joe marched into the story room and made a big announcement to us. After several weeks it had finally crystallized in his mind that Marjorie (the protagonist’s mother, played by Cindy Pickett) did not wear a watch. This was a big deal. Watching Joe reflect on and develop character and story reminded me very much of the sorts of things we did in drama school.

  Bernie Lechowick and I went to the summer TCA tour with Joe that year. This is the Television Critics Association tour, when about two hundred journalists who cover television from around the United States and Canada meet with the producers of TV shows in L.A. to get the scoop on the new fall season. Well, standing by Joe’s side at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, I don’t think I ever felt so proud of a TV show. Our characters were all thoughtfully conceived. Our story lines had resonance and irony and poetic poignancy. The quality of the show made everyone involved with it proud. Unfortunately, the ratings did not.

  After fairly respectable promotion, we premiered on Monday, September 21, 1998, in the 9:00 to 10:00 slot with a 3.7/5-share. Not too shabby for a new network, but from there it was pretty much downhill. By the time the fourth episode aired toward the end of October, it was fairly clear that the show was not working. It was a valiant effort, it really was. As Wells would say, we fought the good fight. But in the end, the show was not prevailing. It happens in TV. It happens a lot. This was not a case where the show needed more time to find itself. It knew what it was. That network at that time simply did not have the audience for the show we were making.

  Now, when C:16 hit this point, the drinks started flowing, we finished up our commitment to the network, and that was the end of it. And if Hyperion Bay had been made in any previous season, that too would have been the end of it. We would have eventually met with a dignified and noble end. We would have died a natural death.

  But this was not a season like any other that had come before and this was not a show like any other that had come before. Hyperion Bay was the very first television series that was made by Warner Brothers (the studio) and broadcast on the WB (the network)—both owned by the same parent company, TimeWarner. We were not gonna just go quietly into the night.

  Even before the ratings started coming in, the notes arrived from the network. And they were radical and substantive. The network seemed to be asking for something that was in many ways antithetical to what their own studio had sold them. They kept saying “Melrose” to their thirtysomething-trained showrunner, who was told in no uncertain terms to find hipper stories and pick up the pace. Directives like “It’s not Ibsen! It’s television!” were not well received. By episode #3, to say that our showrunner’s relationship with the network had become contentious would be, well, courteous.

  In the third week of October, Joe was fired and Frank South, the former executive producer of Melrose Place, was hired. Suddenly, our carefully and lovingly developed series was Spellingized. We burned down our set. Relit the whole show in bright, vivid colors. Played campy music under all the scenes throughout the entire show. Gave the actors great hair, put them in skimpy clothes, and wrote them stories where they were running around sleeping with each other. Oh, and we hired Carmen Electra, an artist who ruffled more than a few feathers for our costumers, lighting designers, and several cast members when it was discovered that she refused to wear und
erwear.

  It wasn’t long before we had a fairly fleshed out character for Carmen—we called her Sarah and made her a Harvard MBA. At that point, one of the writers literally broke down crying to me as we walked from the parking lot, saying she just couldn’t do this. She was able to get out of her contract. Another writer had already quit. In the end, Bernie and I (and one more young staff writer who joined us) helped Frank make “The New Hyperion Bay.” In a heartbeat, we went from being associated with Emmys and the Humanitas to being “Hyperion Baywatch” or “Hyperion Place.” As silly as it was, though, I have to admit, I thought it was actually fun. Writing lines where Carmen Electra talks like a brilliant, Ivy League–educated, razor-sharp CEO is an experience very few TV writers ever get to have.

  After Joe’s departure and Frank’s arrival, the network effectively took over. I don’t know how much of this was simply the sheer force of personalities at the WB and how much was due to their clear and unambiguous focus on their mission, but it seemed as though the studio threw up their hands and said to their network, “Do whatever you want. You’re owners of this thing now too.” The voices that I heard now on speakerphones were network voices. The notes I was given I was told came directly from the network. Most of what I heard and was given came from the WB’s head of current television, John Litvack, a man who obviously had great authority and yet, curiously, could not have been more different than his associates. Although those above him were about my age, John was just about old enough to be our dad. Replete with pallid white beard and nicotine-yellowed teeth, one was reminded much more of a Civil War officer than a creative executive on the hippest network in town.

  To fully appreciate this point you have to understand that television—and the WB in particular—was thought to be so age-conscious in its hiring practices that thirty-two-year-old writer Riley Weston felt she had to lie about her age, claiming she was nineteen, in order to get hired onto Felicity. Everyone believed her story: the producers who put her on the show, her agents at UTA, even the executives at Touchstone, who so felt she was an authentic teenage voice that they gave her an additional $300,000 development deal to create new shows. Entertainment Weekly listed her as one of Hollywood’s 100 Most Creative People before she was found out. How could all these people fall for this? Partially because Riley, a divorced professional actress whose real name is Kimberlee Kramer, was so young-looking. And partially because the premium for delivering young audiences was so significant, and the need for new writing talent that could speak to those audiences lagged so far behind the proliferation of new programs being created for them, that producers, agents, and executives did not want to ask too many unnecessary questions when they found someone who seemingly fit the bill. Nevertheless, despite the downright obsession with youth, Mr. Litvack seemed to have absolute authority. In addition, it was impossible for a writer not to note his devotion to what he was doing.

  Though everyone in and out of town naturally assumed that the “new” Hyperion Bay sprung full-born from the mind of Melrose’s Frank South, this was in truth not the case. Shortly after being hired, Frank realized that he was there to give the network precisely what they wanted, something his predecessor refused to do. John Litvack insisted that there be a “Heather” (à la Melrose) on the show leading to the hiring of Carmen. He literally demanded that our young ingenue, played by Cassidy Rae, take off her shirt as soon as possible on the show. In fact, he was so steadfastly committed to seeing this particular actress engage in a story line that would culminate in such an action that the objections of the actress were met with outright disdain.

  Though the impulses for these kinds of salacious characters and stunts may have been to pump up ratings on what was perceived to be a floundering series, they actually ended up doing much more damage than good to the show. In retrospect this is very easy to see. But at the time, there was virtually no recourse for the show. Joe’s treatment at the hands of the network and the studio was a clear and present cautionary tale for the cast, crew, and staff, as well as for other TV writers around town.

  In the days when MTM produced television shows, the studio’s executives actively participated in the creative discourse that determined the overall direction of a series. Since the studio was concerned not with provisional stunts that would just keep a show going week to week but with its overall quality—which translated into better syndication sales—a studio supported the writer and the integrity of his or her vision. With the studio now out of the equation, this checks-and-balances system between studio and network were gone. The network now had free and unadulterated run of all aspects of a series, from marketing to casting to story. Television was now, quite literally, at the mercy of an individual network executive’s personal predilections.

  Network executives, who had previously been a gear in a complex and balanced system, became autocratic heads of the entire operation almost overnight—and they were charged with running everything. It was a creative coup d’état financed by the world’s biggest media giants, and while the global business possibilities were very exciting, to say the least, the effects this had on the actual product were detrimental. Removing the studio from the mix was like taking Congress away from the president. There were no advisors, no forum for debate, no creative due process. Dissent was disallowed and dealt with harshly.

  In the thirties the studio system rose to prominence. In the fifties and sixties, this was usurped by the rise of the star and their agents. By the eighties, the true golden era of television was born, ushered in by the supremacy of the writer and the competitive spirit of the independent production companies. In the late nineties now, TV had entered a new era: the age of the conglomerate.

  When I was in college in the eighties, there were about thirty major media companies. As of this writing there are six: GE, Viacom, Bertelsmann, TimeWarner, Disney, and News Corp. One way or another, through coproductions with each other, a stake in a formerly independent subsidiary, or complete vertical ownership—meaning the studio that makes the show is owned by the same company as the network that airs it—nearly all TV today is made and broadcast by just these six companies.

  By the time Joe Dougherty was let go and John Litvack took over, much had changed in the ten years during which networks like ABC loved writers so much that they not only insured their lives, they valued their souls—so much, in fact, that they left them alone. In the 1998–99 season this change was most readily apparent on shows like Hyperion Bay, but it would soon become apparent on many other shows as well.

  Although from a purely business perspective, the consolidation of media made a great deal of sense, the conglomerates did something that did not. As they drove the price of writing talent to irrational levels, they simultaneously disempowered the talent that they so desperately sought.

  In many ways the entertainment business came full circle in the late nineties. Once again, just like in the early thirties, writers were increasingly perceived as replaceable labor, simple properties of the studio to be used or not used as executives saw fit. The big difference, of course, was that now there was a rock-solid union. There were contracts and powerful, moneyed representatives who lived to enforce them. So while the companies could move writers on and off projects, as they so frequently did in the early days, there was now a cost for doing so. You see, when a TV writer is “fired” or someone is brought in over him (which I think is technically what happened on Hyperion), what this essentially means is that he or she is told to stop providing the originally agreed-upon services for a show. It does not mean that he or she stops getting paid. Unless a settlement is negotiated, writers continue to collect their paychecks from the company that “fired” them while they begin working on something else and often for someone else. Although Joe went home, he continued to collect his massive executive producer salary from Warner Brothers, a burden the production had to carry. More and more, as executives became creative participants, this became a common scenario throughout the writing communit
y.

  Even after firing the unrepentant Emmy winner, John Litvack continued to be nothing short of outraged at Joe Dougherty, infuriated that Joe still had to be paid from the show’s budget, hampering the network’s creative options. Even though writers were being paid more and more money, it was with greater and greater derision. Given the tremendous amount of work that network executives were now putting into the TV shows they covered, especially creative work that was once done strictly by writers, it is easy to understand their growing frustration with talent whose jobs they were essentially doing. It was as though John saw Hyperion Bay not as a failed TV series created by writer Joseph Dougherty. John saw it as his network’s property, as his show. He talked about it in first-person terms. I would soon see these same kinds of attitudes about authorship represented again on Dawson’s.

  Honestly—and I recognize I must sound quite naive here—Joe’s dismissal was very disconcerting to me, as well. By this point in my career, I’d seen plenty of writers get fired. I’d known of showrunners in whom the studios had lost faith. But I’d never seen such a swift and forceful turnaround during my time in Hollywood. Just a few months earlier Tony Jonas, the head of Warner Brothers Television, came into our story room (which was a very big deal), threw his arm around Joe in front of the writing staff, and declared how much the studio loved him. I think there was even a hug of some sort. I remember thinking, “Man, I am lucky to be on a show that is so loved and protected by the studio. This baby is gonna run forever.”