Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  Right after the network’s head of current programming made his creative and personal preferences clear, Heidi burst into tears, picked up her bag, ran out of the conference room, and left the Dawson’s Creek offices. I never saw her again.

  Production of our show was shut down shortly thereafter.

  THIRTEEN

  Adventures in Hair & Makeup

  “If civilization survives…it will be possible for each person to have his own TV channel.”

  —ISAAC ASIMOV, “THE FUTURE OF TELEVISION,” 1977

  The production shutdown was another in a long line of unexpected costs for Sony. Although our sets were still up and our staffs still compensated, nothing was being made. At this same time, Alex Gansa was basically relieved of his duties, though not his multiyear, multimillion-dollar salary. Just like Tammy and all the others, he kept getting paid. Heidi Ferrer was paid too, of course, even though the work she provided was not used. It was the same story for another freelancer who had been brought in. These were just a couple of many Dawson’s Creek scripts that Sony paid for but did not use. I had just finished writing one about a winter storm that traps the characters at school entitled “The Ice Storm.” The assistants, my colleagues, my bosses, all loved it, but the script never made it out of our offices. Just like on Hyperion Bay, we were going to “revamp” the entire series, and that meant new stories, new scripts, new overall direction, and new investment. For starters, we would need another new showrunner, and that meant millions more.

  But this kind of spending raised few eyebrows, certainly not among Sony’s senior management in Tokyo. From the summer of 1999 to January of 2000, in less than nine months, Sony’s stock price rose more than 350 percent. This was the story all over town. In 1999, Paramount went on what the trades called a “spending spree.” Along with Milch’s $15 million deal, the studio spent another $10 to 15 million on John Sacret Young (China Beach) and Glenn Gordon Caron (Moonlighting). Then the studio went on to spend another $45 to $50 million on Bochco—even more than his landmark deal with ABC back in 1988. That’s $75 million on just four writers in less than a month. Unprecedented demand for writers and speculation fever gripped the industry.

  At exactly the same time, Mike Ovitz invested $100 million of his own money in a new television company, Artists Television Group. Instead of following the traditional approach of slowly starting up operations, Ovitz rushed headlong into the business, quickly spending more than $60 million on talent deals and outbidding all the major players for TV writers like Darren Star, Adam Chase, Paul Haggis, and Tom Fontana. Even though he had no revenue stream like the big studios, Ovitz was convinced of the immediate value of speculative development deals.

  The major money machine fueling all this was advertising revenues. Starting in 1993, ad rates for television programming did nothing but rise sharply and steadily, year after year. In 1999 the six broadcast networks raked in well over $7 billion in advertising revenues, an unprecedented amount. However, 1999 was also the first time every one of the major broadcast networks had single-digit composite Nielsen ratings for the season.

  The inverse relationship was astonishing: As ad dollars rose to record levels, audiences shrunk to record levels. It was completely irrational. But the money kept coming in. By 2000, studios would take in more than $8 billion, much of which would get funneled back into writer deals, back into development, back into keeping shows like Dawson’s Creek afloat. It was one big freewheeling party. If anyone was looking for a crescendo, a bubble that was about to burst, this was it.

  By early fall of 1999, Greg Berlanti’s lawyer renegotiated his contract with Sony. This multimillion-dollar, multiyear deal made Greg the showrunner for the rest of the season and the following season, and allowed him to go into development after that. As it turned out, unlike Hyperion, shutting us down was the best thing the WB could have done. While the Kiss created the series, these next weeks were when the series was birthed.

  Greg made several trips to Wilmington, not only calming the actors but getting them excited about the new story line. Bonnie and Hadley did not have their options picked up. And Tom, Gina, and I began to spend a good deal of time in the story room.

  Tom had begun to speak. He claimed that he said nothing the first few weeks because he didn’t know you were supposed to. I never quite bought that. His first episode, #307, “Escape to Witch Mountain,” which was very well received, was a stand-alone, meaning it was little affected by the weird winding plots that the rest of us were running through our episodes. I think he had been behaving just like his episode, wisely staying out of the mess.

  Gina not only was speaking but she did so a lot and with increasing excitement and volume as her work began to make an impact on the series. She made it her mission to become the series historian, and she approached this task with nothing short of obsession. She knew absolutely every historical fact about absolutely every character on the series, to the point where she lived and breathed these characters and spoke of them like they were all cherished family members.

  Tom and Gina were my colleagues and dear friends over the next few years. As we went through the war together, the more I got to know them the more I realized that they were nut-jobs, pretty much total nut-jobs, just like nearly every other TV writer I had worked with so far.

  From Milch to Earl to Bob Brush, from Ron Cowen, who would lie on the sofa clutching a pillow while he broke story, to Joe Dougherty, who chewed out the network, to Alex with the sheep thing, I was working with a bunch of lunatics. And these were my bosses. My colleagues were even crazier. As my career progressed, I used to think that it was just TV fate that brought me to such oddballs. But by the time I was on Dawson’s Creek, I was sure this could not be simple chance. There was a definite pattern here.

  At Ogilvy & Mather there was a girl down the hall who collected Pez dispensers. Anne Hamilton, however, showed up for work on C:16 with boxes of toys and kitschy decorative paraphernalia—things like a glow-in-the-dark St. Clare, the patron saint of television—and a Costco-sized collection of Tums, Maalox, and Pepto-Bismol. Once notes starting coming in from the network, Joe Dougherty passed out cans of Go-Away-Evil air freshener to his staff. By this point I knew that, quite simply, there is just no other group of professionals anywhere in the world that are like television writers. I once wrote a pilot with someone who refused to stop working for any reason once we got on a roll—even when his wife was in labor in the next room. Hang in there, Linda! Jeffrey and I are almost finished with the second act! I worked with a writer who had OCD so bad he couldn’t punch-up a joke without tapping his hand in highly ritualized patterns—crazy, yes, but man, he was funny. I worked with a writer who moved his bowels frequently during the day and pitched his best jokes to me through the door while he sat on the toilet smoking a cigar. I worked with pencil-biters, nail-chewers, people who burst into tears. I worked with screamers and whisperers and those who say nearly nothing at all. The collection of tics and quirks and phobias and dysfunctions and downright paroxysms that I saw regularly displayed by a group of people in this country’s top tax bracket must surely be without equal. The people I knew and worked with were so neurotic they made Larry David look tame. When my colleagues walked by my office and heard me in there mumbling to myself, no one thought twice about it…well, usually.

  I know at least two television writers who talk about parents who took lithium. One is fond of saying “Growing up with the mentally ill was an excellent preparation for a career in television.”

  After giving away more than a million dollars to numerous women he didn’t know in order to give them time to write, David Rosenthal quit his job at 20th—the studio that was paying him $2.5 million a year just to “think funny”—so he could pursue his life’s passion wholeheartedly, having sex with supermodel Heidi Klum. I read in the The New York Observer that his father had two guards and a psychologist pick him up and take him to UCLA Medical Center.

  Why are TV writers like this? By Se
ason Three on Dawson’s Creek, I had developed a theory. First, like so much in TV, I think money has a lot to do with it. I think it messes with writers’ heads. In most businesses you work your way up, earning more and more each year, expanding your lifestyle and expenses accordingly. Even in industries where young people can make a ton of money, like Wall Street, there is a training period of some kind. Even seven-figure-a-year brain surgeons start out living like monks during their many years of residency. Even Mike Ovitz and Barry Diller and Bernie Brillstein started in the mailroom. But none of this applies to the new TV writer who presently starts at an absolute minimum of $3,581 a week but usually makes much, much more.

  Professional sports is perhaps the only useful comparison. But even athletes don’t all of a sudden one day discover that the entire world thinks they have talent and is willing to throw money at them. A kid who’s drafted into the NBA has had a pretty good idea for quite some time that professional success was a real possibility. But in television, one day you’re cranking out a spec in the Starbucks on Third Street wondering how much longer you can keep writing all day without having to start working behind the counter, and the next day you’re putting a Warner Brothers parking sticker on the windshield of your new Saab and talking to Realtors in Marina del Rey.

  And because of this, the sudden success and the seemingly arbitrary nature of it, the sense in TV writing that your success is all a big mistake never really goes away: How did I do it? This time they will find out I’m a fraud! In basketball, you make the shots, you get the stats, you validate the pay. You validate it for all to see, including yourself. In TV, there is no such clear measurement of success, so no one ever really takes comfort in his or her laurels, no matter how grand they may be, no matter how much money they may have generated. Most TV writers will tell you—I sure as hell will—that there is almost always a pervading sense when facing the blank page that up until now it has all been One Great Fluke, and that this time I will be found out! Living like this tends to make one a bit wacky.

  In addition, there is the pressure of regular regimented inspiration that is so unique to television writing. Sure, all kinds of writing and all kinds of creative endeavors require good ideas and innovation, but try coming up with twenty-two TV episodes every single season, year after year. It simply is not the same as writing a book or writing a play. Not even close. TV writers under this kind of pressure do all kinds of nutty stuff. I have heard of sitcom writers who won’t work during the day because they think they can only be truly funny after nine o’clock at night. I heard about a one-hour drama writer who gets much of her writing done naked. I know another who conceives entire stories in the bathtub. I know an Emmy Award winner who likes to take transcontinental plane trips just so he can write. I keep a pen and small notepads in my car, my bathroom, my kitchen, my nightstand, and in a pocket of my bathrobe. On more than one occasion, I have pulled off the road and written whole outlines with my hazard lights on.

  And finally, I think TV writers are nut-jobs because TV writers are nut-jobs. I think a lot of them come into the world wired this way and somehow find their way to Hollywood. Everyone has a good story to tell and many people actually work on them. And history has been very clear about the personalities of writers; everything from alcoholism to opium addiction to clinical insanity is well documented. But imagine the mind of someone who can sit in absolute solitude behind a computer day after day, night after night, year after year, making up imaginary stories. Imagine the kind of person that can sit in a closed room sixteen hours a day making up stories with a bunch of other people. I’m talking about people who not only want to do this, but have a need that compels them to.

  Tom and Gina, along with Greg, achieved rapid success on Dawson’s Creek. While I had worked with many good TV writers by now, most of them had fairly established careers when I met them. Writers like Dougherty and Anne Hamilton had an ability to turn a phrase, construct a story—you could tell them about something that happened on the way to work and they would look at it the way a sculptor looks at a fresh block of marble. They could just see something in there, something that many others did not. My three colleagues on Dawson’s were cut from the same cloth.

  It’s hard to explain in succinct terms just what makes a good TV writer, and by association good TV, because of course you’re dealing with something that is subjective. But by this time, just like I saw a pattern in the pathology of all my colleagues, I saw similarities among the most talented. Obviously, they all have good skills, a mastery—or, at least, an intuitive understanding—of craft. But with hard work and commitment that can be picked up. There’s something else, too. The best way I can explain it is that they have a sensitivity to the world around them, a sort of sixth sense. They pay attention to the little things that others miss. Every outing to the bank, mall, or post office is a chance to people-watch. They listen for subtext instead of just what someone is simply stating. They watch body language, what someone is wearing, how someone is behaving. They always look for the inside joke. They examine and consider how everything tastes and smells, to the point where even a simple lunch from Baja Fresh is subjected to extended critical analysis. Everything is turned over, reflected upon. They look for connections in the chance. Meaning in the random. Metaphors in everything. Their interactions with the world become a process of looking for secrets and clues that will unlock the Great Truths, so that these things can be examined and written about for the ever-approaching next episode.

  Now imagine most of your friends and colleagues, the people you eat with, go to the movies with, share your life with, all having not only unique, but dare I say neurotic personalities, but also a degree of this intense awareness. That was my life.

  At times, frankly, this life can be downright exhausting, when every little thing from the shoes you chose to wear to the haircut that’s overdue to the entirely unintended double entendre that slips out in a story session all become subject to notice, analysis, and lengthy discussion. However, to be a TV writer, to hang out with TV writers, is one of the most fascinating and interesting ways of life imaginable. Simply put, TV writers are original and whacked-out people. And by the time I got to Season Three on Dawson’s Creek, I knew for certain that they were my kind of people.

  During Thanksgiving week of 1999, Greg, Tom, Gina, and I, along with temporary consultant Doug Steinberg—a writer whose ability to bring adult diaper humor into the story room was a welcome respite—all wrote episode #312 together. Culminating in a moment where Pacey watches Joey sleep, this would be the episode that first introduced Pacey’s affections for Joey. On December 2, I flew to Wilmington to produce the episode.

  This trip, which would become a major part of my life during my time on the show, always began with a crack-of-dawn limo pickup. Because of the time difference and the required transfer through Charlotte, the first-class trip was an all-day affair. While I was in the air, the first production draft of the script, called the “Full White,” was simultaneously e-mailed to the Wilmington production offices, then published and distributed to cast and crew by nightfall, right about the same time I arrived.

  The very first thing you see when you pull out of the tiny Wilmington International Airport is a prison. If this does not give a writer pause, the very first thing you see moments later upon pulling into Screen Gems Studio does: a sign at the front gate that reads: CHECK ALL HANDGUNS AT THE GATE. If you had any doubt that you are in the deep South, it is now gone.

  Not having any handguns on my person, I was swiftly whisked through the front gate and led to see Greg Prange, the ranking producer on location. A director who had been living in Wilmington since the beginning of the series, Prange was affectionately called “Kurtz” by the writers, because he had been upstream so long.

  Indeed, to really know what it was like to make Dawson’s Creek, you have to understand the profound disconnect between L.A. and Wilmington, between the writer-producers and the cast and crew. There is a clash of these two c
ultures that always exists to some degree on television shows. Part of it is simply a matter of such fundamental differences in working styles. Life on a set follows precise, to-the-minute scheduling. Actors must be ready and must know their lines at a certain time. No matter how many magazines are featuring them on the cover that week, they are subject to the production schedule, even if that requires a three A.M. pickup for hair and makeup and a blocking rehearsal at five A.M. Job descriptions for the entire crew are likewise clear and regimented. A grip or a boom operator or a director can work on ER one day and Law & Order the next with virtually no learning curve. They often do. But life in the story room is nothing like this, because with writers, every series is different because every Room is run differently, and because every showrunner has his or her unique way of somehow coming up with a season’s worth of shows.

  On most TV shows, which are shot in L.A., the two worlds are bridged by the showrunner, who at any given moment can take a call from the set, march out of the story room on a lot, zip down to the set in a golf cart, talk to the actors about a scene, tell the director to make sure certain shots are covered, make the entire cast and crew feel that they are being looked out for, and head back to the story room.

  But this didn’t happen on Dawson’s, of course, because the story room was on the other coast. Now sometimes showrunners would spend time in Wilmington, but between the end of Season Two and the middle of Season Three, four showrunners—Kevin, Tammy, Alex, and Greg—had cycled through, and soon, Tom would take the reins. Let me put it to you like this. One of the showrunners characterized working on Dawson’s Creek as “Every man for himself!” That this had more to do with factors surrounding the nature of making TV at this time, rather than simply the goals of those in charge, mattered little to the cast and crew.