Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  If money is the heart of the problem, consolidation is the force that is squeezing the heart. In what has to be one of the great paradoxes of our time, the FCC ultimately got rid of Fin-Syn and deregulated media so that the unfettered marketplace would encourage all voices and interests to join in and compete. You know, laissez-faire free-market capitalism and all that sort of thing. The theory being that the best would rise to the top. But here’s the rub. Who’s to say what’s best in television? We can easily say what’s most watched, but unlike other industries, popularity does not necessarily correlate with value. As we have seen, TV’s appeal is purely subjective and absolutely unpredictable. We are all touched, moved, and tickled in entirely different ways. We all like different kinds of TV. There are millions of different strongly held beliefs about what is the best television, and they are all valid. Deregulating the mechanisms that produce and distribute entertainment and expecting the best TV shows to then rise to the top is like putting a few hundred random paintings up for auction and assuming that the ones that fetch the most money are the best. The deregulation of the media has created a market where those with the most money get the best TV shows made for them. And those with the most money control access to the production and distribution mechanisms, thereby creating barriers to entry that are virtually impenetrable. If you are a wealthy white kid, yeah, TV is good.

  Forget about the implications that media deregulation and the consequent consolidation has for our press and our political system should GE, owner of NBC, a company that was the third-largest producer of nuclear weapons and still sells military hardware to the Pentagon, really be reporting the news?; combining the producers and distributors of nearly all television into a small handful of entities is the greatest obstruction to diversity in entertainment. This plays out in all aspects of television, from what is broadcast, to how new shows are pitched, to how existing shows are run.

  Those with the authority to green-light would like nothing better than to pick up the next big drama from a minority writer with a minority lead. But when shows like Bochco’s acclaimed City of Angels, made in 2000 with African American writers and African American actors for CBS, struggles to find ratings, then is given a pickup anyway but still fails, executives think twice about such a move. Who knows why it failed? Maybe it was the behind-the-scenes problems with some of the original producers and actors. Maybe African Americans didn’t like the show. Maybe they didn’t know where to find it. Maybe the show would have eventually found an audience. CBS claimed it was doing everything possible to support the show, but in the end, after a season and a half, City of Angels never achieved the ratings necessary to justify the expense of production. The cancellation was just business, nothing more or less. But after these kinds of attempts, a major studio-network simply cannot responsibly explain to its shareholders that it is developing similar programming because maybe next time or the time after an important show will find traction and become profitable. When networks are under pressure from their corporate parents and stockholders to attain rapid and demonstrative success, those with the authority to green-light are under great pressure to pay attention to the business model of the WB.

  Likewise, why would a writer, black or white, male or female, bring a pitch for a cool new show with a diverse point of view to one of the big studio-networks, where it would have little chance of getting picked up and little chance of getting support? If a writer did have such a concept, his or her representation would bring the writer to the appropriate cable channel or specialty network. On several occasions I presented ideas for a new show to Dan, who took me specifically to Lifetime or specifically to Fox. When you add this to the void left by the disappearance of the independents, the major networks aren’t even presented with many good options for broadly targeted shows.

  And likewise, remember how those recommendations come into play when staffing a show? What this really means is that showrunners are staffing their shows almost entirely with their friends and friends of friends. Friends tend to run in the same circles and, as we all know, these circles tend to be defined by age, sex, and race. However, in Los Angeles, these circles are tighter and smaller than in perhaps any other city in this country. Once again, this is a function of money more than anything else. There are many cities and communities in America where an individual can live just fine on $36,000 a year and a family of four can live just fine on $60,000 a year. This is hard to do in Los Angeles. To be blunt, there is no middle class in L.A., not in the way there is in the rest of America.

  Particularly in the entertainment community, people have either great abundance or they live hand to mouth. The more I worked in the business the more I saw that those who work regularly tend to live a lifestyle predicated on the former, and consequently they become removed from the greater society. Usually, it happens slowly at first. A nicer car. Then a house in a hip part of Venice. Then a gardener, a personal trainer, and the next thing you know you’re living behind gates. Suddenly and seemingly without warning, you know much more about Lutron light switches and automated curtains than you do about the people who install them. Your real and direct connection with the greater culture is severed, supplanted strictly by what you talk to other working writers about, hear on certain radio stations, read on certain blogs, and especially by what you see on TV. It is a strange and ironically self-perpetuating pseudo-reality where what is important is decided by hearsay rather than by direct experience. Many white writers in L.A. will tell you quite openly that they just don’t know a lot of black people. They don’t know stories they feel they can tell with real authenticity beyond their own experiences, and the longer they live in L.A. and the more successful they become, the narrower those experiences become.

  Every showrunner I ever worked with wants to make strictly meritocratic, color-blind decisions when reading through a pile of scripts. In fact, I watched many try hard to do this. But when push comes to shove, especially on a new series or a series that isn’t a keeper yet—which is most shows—staff hiring decisions are made in the comfort zone. It’s understandable. With the support writers used to get from studios gone, replaced by creative mandates from meddling executives and the fear of a fate like Joe Dougherty’s if they are not met, showrunners are under fire from all sides. The fact is, in the wake of the consolidation that began in the nineties, Hollywood became more insular and closed than anytime in its history.

  So you see, there are a lot of reasons why there were no black people having A-stories on the A-shows on the WB network. But at the end of the day, here’s the main one. It has been twenty-eight years since the first interracial TV kiss, between Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner on Star Trek. It is hard to imagine that the Hyperion Bay kiss was deleted because the network feared controversy. A few months after the kiss was removed, the writing staff on Dawson’s, of which I was a part, dreamed up a female African American character who would befriend our lead, Dawson. Her name was Nikki. We cast her with a young actress named Bianca Lawson. We pitched the idea of a romantic relationship between her and Dawson to the network, but that never got very far. Nikki appeared in four episodes before we stopped writing her.

  The interracial kiss on Hyperion was not deleted because anyone was afraid it would cause a stir. It was removed because it did not fit the brand.

  TWELVE

  Kissing Katie Holmes

  “Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.”

  —ANI DIFRANCO

  At the end of October 1998, the same week that Joe Dougherty was fired and Frank South and John Litvack took over, we got the double blue lines: my wife was pregnant. I’ll be honest. As all-consuming to the point of shameless narcissism that a life in TV can be, this news had a way of putting everything into a new perspective. I have no doubt this is one of the main reasons I not only stayed with Hyperion, worked my ass off, and wrote five scripts, but also did these things with a smile on my face.

  To be sure, getting pregnant immediately causes you to re
evaluate everything in your life, from where you live to how you spend your time to who you spend it with. As all who have had children can surely attest, there is nothing more life-altering. However, when you live and work at the center of popular culture, impending babyhood causes a special kind of assessment. For as anyone who grew up watching Kevin Bacon in She’s Having a Baby knows, having a baby is historically proven to take a toll on one’s cool quotient.

  Now, that’s not to say that TV writers don’t have kids. As they become elderly and approach their midthirties, many do. And many find a way to temper the loss of cool by joining the Hollywood baby culture. It’s an odd culture. Your Lamaze class is filled with celebrities who adorn the cover of Fit Pregnancy, women who are swapping names of the best night nannies because they sure as hell aren’t gonna be getting up at three A.M. to comfort a colicky kid. The militant La Leche League ladies who stop by to instruct you on how to breast-feed are out-of-work sitcom actresses who leave their headshots on the way out. We had friends in other parts of the country who were giving their kids hip throwback names like Max and Hannah and Maddie, while the people we hung out with were going for unheard of things like Zoe and Eliana and Sydney (which, as of this writing, I think, are now broadly popular).

  On the advice of several high-profile female writers we knew, my wife and I got the name of one of the best ob-gyns in town, a woman who we were told delivered everybody’s baby. We had a hell of a time finding this physician’s office because her door was unmarked, which we later discovered was to keep the paparazzi from staking out the place. While we met with her, trying to decide if we wanted her to deliver our child, the woman made a point of not only referencing her traditional credentials, but of repeatedly name-dropping as well as providing a few spicy details. She had delivered everybody’s baby, and she wanted us to know about it.

  It is a common practice among all business owners in L.A. to let you know who their customers are. Every single dry cleaner you go into has that wall of headshots. Auto repair places have them. Insurance sales offices. While you wait to be seated in nearly any restaurant in town, you read signed 8 x 10s by people like Farrah Fawcett and Dom DeLuise and Ellen DeGeneres declaring their special affection for a particular course and expressing their gratitude for “Not only the best baklava but the best service in town, too!”

  However, my wife and I felt that gynecological care is where we had to draw the line. Not only did we go with a highly experienced and significantly more discreet ob-gyn (we didn’t find out until after our daughter was born that he had recently delivered Maria Shriver’s baby), we also began to wonder if we really wanted this kind of baby-makes-three life in Hollywood.

  My wife had a very successful career in print modeling. You know when you go to buy a picture frame there’s that temporary picture of a woman in the frame? That’s my wife. You’ve seen her on digital camera boxes, Fortune 500 shareholder reports, the IHOP menu. She’s the woman on the Pizza Hut point-of-purchase display biting into that cheese in the crust pizza. Often hired as “the young mom,” she spent a lot of time working with Hollywood kids, and this had a strong effect on her attitudes about child-rearing. Eight weeks pregnant, after finishing up a fourteen-hour shoot for a GMC Safari ad on the Santa Monica Pier where she posed as a mother with a young boy, the young boy model refused to release her. He literally would not stop clutching on to her. Evidently, this kid, who had missed school all day, was so lacking in parental attention and so burned out from being dragged around to auditions that he just wanted to go home with her. That experience put my wife over the edge, making her determined to find a way for us to keep working in Hollywood, but to raise our kid as far out of it as possible.

  A few days later, while I was working at Warners, my wife went looking at houses. She called me late in the afternoon.

  Wife (over happy noise in the background): Hi, honey!

  Me: Hi. Where are you?

  Wife: Mimi’s Cafe.

  Me: Where’s that?

  Wife: It’s the most adorable little restaurant filled with moms and kids and…

  Me: (suspicious): Where are you?

  Wife: Valencia.

  Me: Not gonna happen.

  Wife: I love it up here.

  Me: Honey, there is no way in hell that I am moving to the suburbs. Trust me, it’s not gonna happen.

  Cut to: Three months later, the moving truck unloads our belongings in our new house in Valencia.

  Valencia is a rapidly developing planned city thirty miles north of Los Angeles. It has good schools, paseos (pathways) that wind behind the houses, and a plentiful and convenient assortment of brand-spanking-new Super Targets and Olive Gardens. When Realtors in Valencia hear that you are “in the business” they are quick to point out that a lot of industry people live there. I soon discovered that this was true, although the “industry people” were the so-called below the line (referring to where one’s name falls on a TV show’s call sheet) employees, meaning truck drivers, grips, cameramen, teamsters. This began to change right after we moved up, but I’ll get to that.

  Many of our friends thought we were crazy. Hilary and Chad literally did an “intervention,” confronting us and finally trying to talk us into Westlake Village, an “above the line” suburb down the 101 just past Calabasas. But my wife was determined, and after I got used to the idea and realized that I could, in fact, still be a writer, I started to love it.

  We bought a big, brand-new, 3,500-square-foot box, on a tiny 5,700-square-foot lot, for $437,500. It was ugly as hell, cheaply constructed, and the property line was precisely sixty inches from the house—all the property lines were like this—so if I reached out my bedroom window and my neighbor reached out his, one of us could hand the other a cold Bud. In fact, the houses were so close that we used to pick up our neighbor’s children crying on our baby monitor, as well as other things that it would not be gentlemanly to go into.

  But the neighbors were all very nice. They had wonderfully boring jobs and fascinatingly regular lives and couldn’t have cared less about what I did. The house had all the modern appliances and conveniences they stuck in these big boxes. Getting a gallon of milk from the just-built Super Ralphs with all the special “Expectant Mommy” parking at anytime, night or day, was not only easy, it was safe. We held hands and took long walks with Maggie on the paseos at night. Looking, I’m sure, like the treacly sweet couple on the cover of the “Welcome to Valencia” brochures, we were about to have a baby, and life was great, no matter how uncool. In fact, I reveled in my uncoolness. And that was somehow kind of cool.

  We moved into our new house the exact same week that Hyperion Bay met an unnatural death and was finally canceled on March 8, 1999. Not surprisingly, the Carmen Electra version of our show did not do any better in the ratings than the original version. It was now time to prepare for staffing season again. So you see, even though we were living in the suburbs, we were still very much living an industry life. I think it’s fair to say that we were the only people on our street who had just moved into a brand-new house, started furnishing it, were expecting a baby in a few months, and had no job. That’s a life in TV.

  I think it’s also fair to say that I was the only man on my street sitting around his house in sweatpants all day during April 1999 writing a spec Felicity.

  After staying up all night on Thursday, April 15, I sent my Felicity to Dan on Friday, and on Monday got word that he wanted to use my Northern Exposure and Profiler again that season. He did not respond to my new spec. I was bummed. Not just because of all the recent effort I’d put into it, but because I knew in my bones the thing worked. On the first couple pages, Felicity, about to have sex for the first time, ends up having to do the Heimlich on her boyfriend Noel, who chokes on the condom wrapper. By this point in my career I’d realized that the first few pages of a spec were by far the most important, and at the very least the teaser in my new script, this first scene, worked. I asked him to give it to his assistant, which of c
ourse he did. In a town where your assistant can literally be running a TV network a few years after she’s answering your phone, Dan knew to trust her taste. She loved it. He sent it out, and, sure enough, readers responded. Within days I had a batch of fresh meetings. Some of the more exciting ones were at DreamWorks for Freaks and Geeks, Granada for a new series, Cold Feet, and with a screenwriter, Les Bohem, for his new Spielberg-produced miniseries, Taken. But I still kept thinking about Dawson’s. Despite some inexplicably peculiar episodes in the second season, I remained a huge fan.

  Whenever you go to these staffing meetings during this time of the year, you always see stacks of TV scripts in executive and showrunner offices. These are scripts from all the other writers who are also in consideration for a job on the staff. Some of these stacks are five feet high. Most have fancy, powerful covers on them from the likes of CAA and UTA and ICM. And you often know whose scripts they are because some poor assistant with an MBA has just spent many late nights writing the writer’s name in black Sharpie on the spines of the scripts. So as you sit there, waxing on about how blown away you were by the show on which you are meeting, you realize just how many other highly qualified writers, many who you know, are also in consideration. You also know just how hot a show is by the height of the piles.