Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  Although the Freaks and Geeks piles nearly covered the windows at DreamWorks, I knew that in May 1999, Paul Stupin’s were probably among the highest in town. And I knew that if I had any hope of getting to the top of one of his piles, I would have to do something. So I called my friend Rita Hsiao, who had recently written a pilot for Paul. She was delighted to call Paul on my behalf. Paul told her he had just hired a new EP and would talk to her about me. The new EP was Tammy Ader, another Beth client and a very dear friend of mine during my first five years in town. She read my Felicity and liked it. I met Paul and Tammy on May 5 at the Dawson’s offices, and a good time was had by all.

  That night, as I sat in our Valencia Lamaze class with the other excited dads and noncelebrity moms-to-be, I felt good. I knew something was in the works. It’s a sensation that most TV writers tune in to at some point. Yes, at the end of the day, an insistent showrunner is the main reason you get on a staff. But more often, especially in the post–Fin-Syn world, staffing is a more complex and often even diplomatic process. Often, getting a staff job, particularly on a great show, requires a tremendous amount of enthusiasm from many different fronts. Sometimes it requires so much buzz, in fact, that you can just about feel the stars being pushed into alignment. You know that your senses are correct and that the alignment is occurring when they call your representation for your quotes (your last episodic rate, which, in 1999, had to be topped), and when you get called in for the official executive vetting.

  Six days after my Paul-Tammy meeting, I was asked to appear for the vetting. Driving onto the Culver Studios lot where Columbia TriStar Television was located, I passed a huge billboard of my wife. Though she looked quite happy in her Air New Zealand flight attendant uniform, I knew all too well that behind the girl-next-door smile she was really thinking, “Get something good this season. Please don’t bring Carmen Electra into our lives again.”

  The management offices were in The Mansion, a massive grand colonial mansion used in the opening of Gone with the Wind, a perfect replica of Mount Vernon replete with sweeping lawns, manicured hedges, and ever-blooming rosebushes. As I parked and walked across the historic old backlot, I put out of my mind the images that were filmed here of my hometown Atlanta burning to the ground.

  The head of current programming at Columbia TriStar, Sony’s TV arm, was an extremely nice lady named Jeanie Bradley. Her job was to represent the studio’s interests in Dawson’s and the other Sony shows currently in production. Having been involved in shows like Who’s the Boss?, Designing Women, and Mad About You, Jeanie had been a television executive for many years, quite a feat for most who do this sort of work. It didn’t take long after meeting her to understand how she had been such an integral part of Columbia TriStar’s long legacy of success. She was graceful and understatedly able in a way you don’t often see in a Hollywood executive suite. So much so that later I found myself wondering how she managed to tolerate what was happening to her studio. Let me explain.

  In 1998, Columbia TriStar Television (CTTV) developed a new comedy called The King of Queens. However, right before giving it a pickup, CBS reportedly refused to put the show on their schedule unless CTTV agreed to share ownership of it. Realizing that they were being shaken down, the executives at CTTV debated it, looked at all their options, and came to the conclusion that they had none. Unlike Disney, which had ABC, or Warner Brothers, which had the WB, or 20th Century, which had Fox, or CBS Productions, which had CBS—Columbia TriStar Television studio did not have its own network. So if CTTV wanted one of the shows it made to get on the air, it had to do whatever a network wanted, including sharing the back-end profits.

  This was how business was now being done. CBS ordered seven new series that year. It co-owned six. NBC reportedly refused to renew News Radio unless Brillstein-Grey shared ownership. ABC extracted longer license fees from studios because, well, it could. According to Variety, ABC flat-out refused to pick up Columbia TriStar’s Cupid unless CTTV lowered its already prenegotiated license fee by as much as a hundred grand an episode. The fact is, it took a lot more than grace and competence to run a successful TV studio at this time, it took a network, which Columbia TriStar most certainly did not have.

  I liked Jeanie a lot. We had a terrific meeting. I called my agent before my car was even off the lot and told him how much I looked forward to working with her. Although I would hear Jeanie’s name mentioned (always in a positive and upbeat light) over the coming years, the day I left The Mansion was the last time I saw her or spoke with her. I know that the Dawson’s nonwriting executive producer sometimes spoke with her on the phone, and I saw her quoted in the trades a few times as the studio’s representative of the show, but during the seventy-three episodes in which I was involved as a writer-producer, I had no further contact with her. My interactions with executives for the next three years, especially on creative matters, would be almost exclusively with those from the WB, the network. The notes and direction I received came mainly from John Litvack. The story pitches I delivered for episodes were to him. All major casting choices were run by him. He was the ultimate creative arbiter of the show. What I would come to see is that Dawson’s Creek was run much more by the network that aired it than the company that made it. It was molded by the network’s input. It conformed to their brand. The only nonnetwork person that I dealt with during my tenure was a low-level Columbia TriStar studio executive, an easygoing young woman named Melissa Kellner, whose father was Jaime Kellner, the head of the network.

  As these things often go, right before I got an official offer from Sony I started to have second thoughts. On May 19 I met the writer of Cold Feet, Kerry Ehrin, at a Coffee Bean at Fashion Square Mall in the Valley. As much as I liked her pilot, I really liked her. On Friday, May 21, Dan was fielding offers for both shows.

  When you work on a new series, ratings become a major part of your life. The first time the pilot episode airs, the entire staff is fixated on the numbers. You call before the sun rises on the West Coast to get the “overnights,” the ratings of the major markets. Then you wait breathlessly throughout the day for the rest of the markets to report in. Everything is considered. Do you hold your lead-in? Do you drop off? How’d you do in the half-hour—did people leave or stay or join in? And how were those demos?! This scenario is repeated every week, every time an episode airs. You just pray you don’t drop too far down from your splashy pilot numbers. You just pray the network is happy and picks up “the back nine” (the rest of the season order) in October. For TV writers, our lives are led by those numbers. Sometimes, like Bernie Lechowick was fond of saying, this is “a rich man’s problem,” meaning you have no idea whether or not you can plan to attend a big family vacation that is six months away. But sometimes the overnights quite simply determine whether or not you can pay your mortgage.

  As I was starting to figure out, the trick to the whole thing—where you earn $50,000 a month but have no idea how long that will last—was to get a mortgage far below the ones the bank excitedly told you they would fall all over themselves to give you when they see your 1040s.

  My wife agreed that Cold Feet was awesome, as was any executive producer down-to-earth enough to meet at a Coffee Bean. But after several years of living Nielsens-to-Nielsens, and with a just about overdue baby constantly kicking at her bladder, let’s just say that I was strongly encouraged to go to Dawson’s, which, aside from being a show that I also loved, had a pickup for a full season and was as close to a slam dunk as you get in TV to run for several more. (My wife, as always, was right, by the way. Cold Feet was canceled after just four episodes.)

  Dawson’s Creek was a one-hour drama focusing on the lives of four teens, all close friends, growing up together in a small seaside town in Massachusetts. It is best described as a quint-essential coming-of-age show, only there had never really been anything quite like it before.

  I arrived for my first day on the show the first week of June 1999. My credit was producer. The writers’ offices
were off Olympic, less than a mile from where I had just moved in Santa Monica. My new house was only thirty-eight miles away, but in order to make a ten A.M. meeting, I had to leave my house before eight. There is an entire culture that I became a part of on the 405 every morning. Driving up the hill from the Valley, crawling inch by inch, I watched people eat complete meals, read the Los Angeles Times, read scripts. I watched men shave. I watched women spend well over an hour applying their makeup. I watched people tend to all sorts of personal and private matters. It was fascinating—well, for a while.

  By this point in my career, even on a show that had a multi-season guarantee and gave me a rock-solid contact, I had learned never to show up for work with more than one box of belongings. I had learned to think of myself as a perpetual freelancer, or more precisely, as a migrant worker. When a very well-respected playwright I had befriended quit a show we were both working on, she came into my office the day she left and gave me a big black Jolly Roger flag that she always hung on her door when she started staff television jobs. “Remember,” she said to me, “when we do TV, we’re pirates.” While I agreed with her, I opted not to hang the pirate flag on my first day of work at Dawson’s.

  Usually when you join a successful show—that is, a show that is returning—you’re the new guy. But this was not the case with Dawson’s. Groups of veteran Dawson’s writers were not hanging out in the hallways swapping stories about last season. The assistants were, but except for Greg Berlanti (returning for his second year in the business), all the other writers were new to Dawson’s. Furthermore, except for me and Tammy, the other writers were essentially new to television staff work: Tom Kapinos, Gina Fattore, and a writing team, Hadley Davis and Bonnie Schneider. Everything felt fresh, fun, promising. We all knew we were dealing with a tabula rasa, and if anyone had any doubt, all he or she had to do was look at those big white dry-erase boards hanging all over the story room with nothing written on them yet but “Season Three!”

  The first few weeks on a writing staff are like the first few weeks in a new relationship. You are on best behavior. Great effort goes into hiding all potentially offensive or embarrassing habits. You not only keep your true feelings about important things to yourself, but you are pathologically agreeable. In fact, everything that you hear not only sounds like a good idea, you also want to talk about it, explore it, roll around in it. There’s a glorious “Kumbaya” quality to it all because you are so lucky to be together. This, of course, does not last.

  During the first two weeks, with Tammy at the helm, the seven writers and Paul all piled into the story room and pitched all sorts of ridiculous things that we got ourselves all excited about. Tammy quickly started leading us down a Risky Business story where Pacey gets Dawson a hooker. She stood at a dry-erase board scribbling down all kinds of possible ideas for the story. Sounding as good an idea to me as any, I joined in, pitching possible moments that came to mind that might help create the episode. As the only one in the room who really knew the characters, Greg probably felt we were high, but being the first two weeks, he lent his support too. Whenever a new idea would be pitched and the story would grow, Paul scanned the faces in the room, looking for one that would tell him if this thing would make a kick-ass season opener, inevitably covered in a front-page story in Entertainment Weekly, or whether it would be a humiliating disaster, ultimately resulting in another entire new staff of writers. At one point, someone, Bonnie, I think, was concerned that the story was no longer simply being inspired by the movie but that it was sounding exactly like Risky Business. This immediately worried Paul. But right before he threw cold water on the whole thing—and revisited a curious idea he had for constructing a story around a satellite that was circling the planet—someone, Hadley, I think, suggested making Dawson aware that it was just like the movie. “That’s right,” I confidently shouted. “We’ll claim it!”

  “Claim it” was among my favorite story-room buzz words. To claim something in a script means to have a character consciously reference the material you are stealing. That way you looked smart and cool because you meant to do it, instead of looking like you were just incapable of developing your own original story.

  I loved story-room buzz words. “Resonate” was another one of my favorites, as in “The A-story really works because it resonates off the B-story.” I loved “dramatize” too, as in “Great idea, but how do you dramatize that in sixteen beats or less?” And “intimacy,” as in “Yes! There can be so much intimacy in that one moment, it makes the entire story work for me.” These words, of course, are essentially bullshit, and the more they are in use the more you can be certain that your stories are pretty much bullshit too. But hey, you have to start somewhere, and that is precisely what those first two weeks are for.

  So that was pretty much the pattern for the beginning of the season. Throughout much of it, Gina Fattore said very little of substance. She just feverishly jotted down notes and twirled her hair with ever-increasing nervousness. And Tom Kapinos not only said little of substance, he said nothing. Although he periodically grinned like Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade—causing me to wonder What the hell was going through this guy’s mind!?— he just quietly observed, leading some of the staff to quickly discount him. This would later prove to be a mistake, as would much of what went on at the beginning of Season Three.

  As we continued developing our stories those first weeks, we hit several bumps in the road. Some of these came out of left field, like the day James Van Der Beek, who played the cerebral and self-effacing protagonist Dawson, walked into the story room looking like a linebacker. He looked this way because when he finished the football movie Varsity Blues, he didn’t stop working out. So we had to write in that Dawson had been strangely “lifting” all summer.

  But some of the bumps were built into the show. These were story problems that we inherited, and as we got further and further along it was becoming more and more apparent that the show was in fact not such a blank slate after all. Many of the stories we wanted to do were hindered by the backstory of the previous season. In fact, we soon realized that while those storyboards may have been blank on our first days of work, they might as well have been halfway filled in because Kevin Williamson and what had remained of the previous year’s staff had painted us into quite a corner.

  No matter what kind of spin Entertainment Tonight might put on things, let me assure you, television shows do not turn over their creators and entire staffs because the writers got bored and needed “a new challenge.” What I eventually learned while working on the show was that the path Dawson’s Creek had taken since the first time I had seen that brilliant pilot was indeed a bumpy one, to say the least. No doubt, all new TV shows have a rocky road to travel, but by most measures Dawson’s had been especially rough.

  Most fans of the series always use the first twelve episodes of its first season (half a season, really) as a sort of revered touchstone. Famous Season One stories include tomboy Joey (Katie Holmes) appearing in a beauty pageant; her sister Bessie having her baby in Dawson’s (James Van Der Beek’s) house; and all the characters surviving a detention together, à la The Breakfast Club. There were groundbreaking stories like fifteen-year-old Pacey (Josh Jackson) dating his teacher. There were extensive and explicit conversations about penis size, masturbation, and sex. Lines like Jen’s (Michelle Williams’s) “Well, I guess I’m no longer the Virgin Queen of Dawson Leery’s handheld fantasies” had never been heard before on network television. The show was an instant hit from the very first episode. The young, previously unknown actors became overnight sensations. A series of collectible TV Guide covers featuring the four stars followed soon after the premiere. An Entertainment Weekly cover came out as well.

  Dawson’s was also a sociological phenomenon, referenced in wide-ranging and diverse places, talked about as the defining show of a new generation. It was hot. The way the characters spoke, with verbose, self-referential language filled with sophisticated allusions drawn from p
olitics to pop culture, had never been heard before on television, certainly not coming from the mouths of angst-ridden teenagers. And real-life teenagers related to it.

  The show was also immediately surrounded in controversy for what critics perceived to be a preoccupation with sex. While Kevin Williamson always maintained that this was not his intent and that the show was not about sex-starved teenagers but rather about romance—“weak knees and sweaty palms”—many parents and watchdog groups saw it otherwise. L. Brent Bozell and the Parents Television Council declared that Dawson’s was the absolute worst show of the year—the best thing he could do for the series, of course. The controversy only helped the ratings.

  However, after the Season Two opener, which featured Dawson and Joey in bed yakking after their first kiss while the new Fastball song played loudly, the show went south. The writers tried to find what they had in Season One, but it just wasn’t there. I knew they were trying too hard when I saw the episode where Dawson’s dad wants an open marriage and befriends a wife-swapper. The show suddenly had an “ick” factor. Season Two had its moments—like “The All-Nighter” episode in which all the characters study all night for an exam—but as the season wore on, those kinds of episodes became few and far between. What had been a cool, provocative series suddenly became a simple soap. Pacey’s girlfriend, Andie, went crazy. His former lover and teacher inexplicably returned to “unload some real estate.” Dawson went on the requisite drinking binge. And my personal favorite: Joey wore a wire to entrap her father for the Feds and send him back to jail on drug charges, something to which every teenager can relate. And, just as we had been instructed to do with the Hyperion makeover, Season Two culminated with a primary set (The Ice House) being burned to the ground. So you can see, as the other new writers and I faced those boards at the beginning of Season Three, we had a hell of a lot of history to deal with.