Just the Funny Parts

by Nell Scovell

  In my first movie, the crew warmed to me by the end. In my second, relations grew colder. The third to last day, we had a killer schedule with ten pages to shoot. I came in with all my blocking and approached the DP to discuss. He refused to talk to me. I pressed him to tell me what was wrong.

  Obligatory director sitting on a crane shot. Nine years later . . . same purple Patagonia jacket.

  Courtesy of the author

  “The actresses broke my heart,” he said. “I no longer care about this movie.”

  And they say women are emotional.

  I had no idea what the DP meant by his statement, but I couldn’t question him further because he walked off the set. We were on the clock so I went over my shot list with a cameraman, who was inexperienced but present. The actresses came in fully prepared and ready to work. Miraculously, we made it through six pages before lunch.

  I returned from our break to block a shorter scene in the same set. Suddenly, the DP reappeared in an upbeat, chatty mood.

  “I have an idea for how you should shoot this next scene,” he said, then launched into his suggestion.

  His method seemed complicated.

  “Let’s stick with what I’ve got,” I said. “It worked this morning.”

  “This will be faster,” he said.

  I was skeptical. The DP called the producer over and pitched him the plan.

  “It would take three hours. Tops,” the DP said.

  The producer turned and looked me straight in the eye.

  “That’s the way you should shoot that scene,” he said.

  I ignored Arthur’s advice and let them take control. It was a disaster. Four and a half hours later, the two-and-a-half-page scene still wasn’t complete. We were grabbing closeups when the producer returned to set.

  “You’re done. This scene’s over,” he announced. “Moving on.”

  “But we don’t have all the pieces,” I said.

  “Too bad,” he said, then added, “You did this to yourself!”

  I bit my tongue a lot on that shoot but not this time.

  “You know I didn’t design these shots. And you know you’re the one who approved them,” I said.

  “Don’t play the blame game!” he screamed.

  That was the day I ended up sobbing on the floor of a coat closet on the phone with my friend Jesse Dylan. I was so lucky he was available. Jesse’s advice to “Go down fighting” snapped me out of my tailspin. I returned to set and, in the last three hours, I got what I needed. Sort of.

  Back in LA, Stu Bass took the footage and performed his editing magic, teasing out both the comedy and the suspense. The actresses turned in superb performances under trying conditions and the friendships they formed shone through onscreen. Lifetime changed the title and the film premiered on November 11, 2007, the same week that I turned forty-seven. The previous week, Hollywood was shut down by a Writers Guild strike which lasted through February.

  Once again, I hoped to build momentum, but as it turns out, the third movie is the hard one to get. Since then, I’ve only had the opportunity to shoot one half-hour episode of the MTV show Awkward. It’s hard to know if I could have become a decent director. A person supposedly needs 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master proficiency in a skill. I’m currently about 9,500 hours short.

  In 2009, I visited Arthur and his wife Peggy at their home in NYC. In his eighties, Arthur had recently suffered a medical setback. We went for a short walk over to Central Park, then returned to the apartment. Over tea, I mentioned that I’d just seen an article about the fiftieth anniversary of the Broadway debut of The Miracle Worker.

  “I re-watched the movie recently,” I said. “And it’s a very different experience as a parent. I cried so much harder at the beginning.”

  Arthur nodded. He had grown quiet. Maybe he was knocked out by our walk so I continued talking.

  “When was the last time you watched The Miracle Worker? You know, I’ve never seen either of the movies that I directed since they aired. It’s too painful when you know the difficulties behind every scene, but then I’ve only made low-budget cable movies. You’ve made beautiful movies, nominated for Oscars. You must be able to watch and enjoy them, right?”

  Arthur shook his head.

  “You always remember the compromises,” he said. “It’s a bargain with the devil.”

  Chapter 12

  The Ones That Got Away

  Anosmia: an•os•mi•a

  1. the loss of the sense of smell, either total or partial.

  2. a great name for an X-Files episode

  DO YOU ENJOY DISAPPOINTMENT? YOU DO? THEN I have the perfect industry for you.

  Hollywood disappointment comes in all shapes and sizes. There’s the bittersweet early disappointment that can still make you smile at your own naïveté. There’s the late-in-your-career disappointment where you’re surprised to learn that you still care enough to feel let down. There’s even the inexplicable disappointment where you feel bad about not getting offered a job that you didn’t want.

  I’ve had a wide variety of disappointments, but if I had to choose, these are the top five projects that I wish had turned out differently:

  The X-Files

  In the spring of 1995, I signed an overall deal with 20th Century Fox that included an assistant and a corner office. On my first day, the operations manager walked me over to a warehouse filled with furniture. Since my title was Executive Producer, he ushered me over to “the good stuff” and told me to pick out whatever pieces I wanted. Using Post-it notes, I tagged a desk and a lamp, then searched for a sofa. Most were black or brown leather and looked like they’d light up one of those CSI DNA semen detection tests. Then a couch covered in a pink-and-green floral chintz pattern caught my eye. It was positively girly.

  “Is that one available?” I asked, pointing to the flowery couch.

  “Yeah,” the operations guy said. “It belonged to Lucie Salhany.”

  “Seriously?” I said. “That will make my power naps feel more powerful.”

  Lucie Salhany may not be a household name, but her influence on our culture is enormous. In the eighties, Lucie helped launch four syndicated shows that hit almost every demographic: Entertainment Tonight, The Arsenio Hall Show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Hard Copy. In the nineties, Rupert Murdoch brought her in to be Chairman of FOX, making her the first woman to run a major broadcast network. She had an extraordinary first year, overseeing the network’s expansion from four nights of programming to seven and leading the negotiations to secure NFL game rights. The third year, Murdoch reportedly breeched a guarantee in Lucie’s contract. She lawyered up and resigned.

  “The reason I left was very complicated,” she told me on the phone in 2017. “Rupert and I never really got along. He didn’t like the fact that I didn’t check in with him all the time or go to his house on Saturday, and he lied to me. He was a bully, distrustful, and discriminated against me, as he did with most women.”

  Lucie is fearless and funny. We only recently connected when I called to confirm that we had shared the same chintz-y couch.

  “Yes!” she said. “That was mine.”

  I told her my theory about the other leather couches being covered in genetic material.

  “There was no semen on my couch,” she assured me. “Just a lot of blueberry, yogurt, and pineapple smoothies.”

  I thanked her for that, and for something else. While Chairman at FOX, Lucie greenlit The X-Files, one of my all-time, favorite TV shows. From my FOX office window, I could see creator Chris Carter’s bungalow. Even better, I knew one of the writers, Howard Gordon, who went on to help shape the cult TV trifecta of The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and 24. Occasionally, I’d stop by Howard’s office to chat. One day, I worked up the courage to ask him if I could pitch some story ideas. They only had one freelance script left, but Howard said he’d check with Chris. To my amazement, Chris said he’d be happy to hear my pitches.

  I knew
moving to the next stage was a long shot. As a female writer, the odds of writing an episode for The X-Files were slightly worse than surviving The Hunger Games. This is not an exaggeration. During the show’s original run, only seven of two hundred episodes (3.5 percent) were written by women. Meanwhile, one out of twenty-four survived The Hunger Games (4.2 percent). Katniss had it easy.

  The morning of my pitch, I got out of bed and almost threw up. That was partially because I was nervous about meeting Chris, but also because I was twelve weeks pregnant. My condition made me self-conscious. The X-Files was—and still is—a boys’ club, and boys don’t get pregnant. To cover up my puffy abdomen, I dressed in an oversized button-down shirt and tied a sweater around my hips. When I entered the bungalow, Chris greeted me warmly and I sat down quickly. I pitched three stories and both Howard and Chris sparked to one called, “Anosmia.”

  The story kicks off with a kooky cat lady who contacts the FBI after her cats go missing from her Florida apartment complex. Agent Mulder investigates and finds that tensions are running high between the mixed-race tenants. Mulder gets a whiff of what’s wrong: the government is releasing an alien scent through the apartment ventilation system. The scent drove the animals away. The humans weren’t as smart. Soon, tenants start dying off under strange circumstances—as one does in Florida.

  I told Chris and Howard that smell was the first sense to develop and it was so successful that, in time, the small lump of olfactory tissue on top of the nerve cord evolved into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from the olfactory stalks.

  “We think because we smell,” I said.

  Chris suggested that in addition to the alien scent affecting behavior, there should be something in the environment that triggers a “hate response.” One of us suggested that watching TV news could be that trigger. FOX News was only two years old and fairly mild so we had the idea first. The meeting wrapped up. Chris said they’d discuss my ideas and get back to me.

  Howard called the next day with good news. Chris dug “Anosmia” and because my pitch was so detailed, I was approved to go to outline. I’d snagged the last freelance X-Files episode of the fifth season. I did a happy dance around Lucie Salhany’s couch.

  I’d never written an outline for a drama, but I’d seen every X-Files episode and knew the show’s rhythm. My teaser opened on a twelve-year-old African American boy swimming in a courtyard pool. His mom runs upstairs to get a towel, figuring the boy will be safe because he’s surrounded by neighbors. Bad plan in Florida. A watch falls from a balcony into the water. The boy dives down to retrieve it and the watch mysteriously pulls him down. When the mom returns, her son is floating in the pool, face up. Drowned.

  Scully immediately knows something is wrong since a drowned body would be facing down. During the autopsy, she lifts the boy’s eyelids and discovers that the whites of his pupils have turned yellow. The boy’s system appears to have been flooded with bile. Scully explains that long ago, scientists believed that bile was the seat of bitterness.

  “So what killed the boy?” asks Mulder.

  “Medieval ‘doctors’ would have determined that his cause of death was hate,” says Scully.

  With each act, the body count rose. The not-so-subtle message of the episode was that humans had not yet evolved to the point where we could co-exist with alien species. In fact, we could barely co-exist with each other. This was the final paragraph of the outline:

  Mulder runs back downstairs to help Scully. As they try to revive Kathleen, Mulder finishes his voice over: “There are many kinds of evil on earth, so it’s easy to forget that evil is not only the thing that destroys but also the thing that allows evil to destroy. It’s easy to recognize evil when it’s obvious and cruel, but ignorance and apathy can kill as swiftly and as sure.” As the camera floats back to Mrs. Bryant watching TV, we fade out. END OF ACT FOUR

  It took me a week to finish the outline. As a freelancer, it’s hard to know all the rules of a show so I figured I’d get a lot of notes. A few days later, Chris’s assistant called my office and asked me to hold for her boss. My heart started racing. I really wanted Chris to love the outline. He picked up and sounded cheerful. Good sign!

  “I have an update,” Chris said. “The show has some exciting news that hasn’t been made public yet.”

  “Really? What’s that?” I asked.

  “It turns out Stephen King is a big fan and he just reached out to us. He wants to write an episode.”

  “That’s amazing!” I said.

  “Yeah, the problem is we only have the one freelance assignment left . . .”

  Oh. Chris wasn’t calling to give me notes. He was calling to let me know that I was getting replaced by Stephen King. I went from sixty to zero in five seconds.

  “We’ll definitely pay you for the outline,” Chris said. “And maybe next season, we can talk again.”

  I hung up the phone. My office had gotten eerily quiet, like abandoned-hotel quiet. I’d been so excited and now I didn’t know what to feel. No writer could be angry about getting bumped by the Master of Horror. It’s like learning that Picasso wants to paint over your mural. “Have at it, Pablo.”

  King and Chris ended up cowriting “Chinga” which featured an antique doll who makes people tear out their eyes. I couldn’t bear to watch so I know how the victims felt.

  Since then, I’ve thought about how so many of King’s novels revolve around everyday folks whose lives are upended by an agent of chaos like the rabid dog in Cujo or the Clown in It. These Stephen King monsters come out of nowhere and wreak havoc on unsuspecting rubes. And it occurred to me that the Stephen King monster in my life was Stephen King.

  Robert Altman

  In 1976, my father took me to see Robert Altman’s Nashville and it blew my teenage mind. Altman wove together story lines for over a dozen oddball characters and brought them all together for a shocking climax. Driving home afterwards, my dad and I talked about the themes of politics, motherhood, fame, and violence in the film. It was my first grown-up movie discussion and Altman became my favorite director.

  In the late eighties, I watched every episode of his HBO mini-series, Tanner ’88, which was set on the presidential campaign trail and blurred the lines between fiction and reality. Tanner ’88 was a success and a year later, Altman started pulling together a similar project that would be set in the world of entertainment and star Carol Burnett. When my agent told me that Altman was interested in meeting with me to discuss the project, I thought, “Seriously? Why me?” But I said, “I would love that.”

  “The premise is simple,” Altman explained as we sat in his New York City hotel suite. “Carol is touring the south, for real, and her concerts provide the backdrop for backstage drama, all fictional. We surround her with a cast of characters—assistant, hairstylist, family members, agent. We’ll develop story lines, and because of Carol’s skills, we want the actors to improv a lot. But we’re also looking for a writer to sit on set and throw out lines. Does that interest you?”

  I nodded vigorously.

  “And you’re familiar with Carol Burnett?”

  I worshipped Carol Burnett. As a kid, I watched her variety series religiously and bowed down to her performance as Winifred the Woebegone in Once Upon a Mattress. Winifred belting out “Shy” was my kind of princess.

  Altman and I brainstormed ideas for ancillary characters: a driver selling secrets to the tabloids, a hairdresser hiding that he’s straight, an All About Eve–type assistant who has no talent. We laughed a lot and he offered me the job on the spot.

  “We’re moving quickly,” he said. “Could you pack this weekend and meet me and Carol in Atlanta next week?”

  “If a family member were on life support, I’d pull the plug so I’d have nothing to keep me from leaving town,” I said.

  “Great,” he said. “We’ll be in touch soon.”

  I floated home to 57th Street. It was a Friday afternoon and my agent promised to get into the d
eal with the network first thing Monday morning. She cautioned me that the pay would be low. Really low. That answered the question, “Why me?”

  Over the weekend, I called my dad with the news.

  “Wow,” he said. “You’re in the big leagues.”

  Monday came and I hung out at home, waiting for the call while cleaning my apartment in case I needed to bolt. Early afternoon, the phone rang. I heard a brusque male voice.

  “Nell, it’s Bob.”

  I was confused.

  “Bob who?” I said.

  “Bob Altman.”

  Oh. Right. Bob is a nickname for Robert.

  “The deal’s off. CBS is screwing around so it’s not gonna happen. Okay, I gotta go.”

  And with a click, that dream job would forever remain a dream.

  Pre–Daily Show Jon Stewart

  Jon Stewart has so many Emmy awards that he could leave one at every exit on the New Jersey Turnpike and still have a couple left over. But before he landed at The Daily Show (created by Lizz Winstead and Madeleine Smithberg) in 1999, Jon sought out potential partners to develop his own show that would shoot in NYC. I’d just come back from directing my first movie when my agent asked if I wanted to meet him. I called Becky Hartman, a mutual friend and comedy writer, to ask what she thought.

  “Yes!” she declared. “You will love Jon.”

  Jon and I got together in LA and we talked about ways to shake up the talk show genre. We were dissecting the format when I pinpointed what I perceived as a dead spot on every late-night talk show. After the host finishes his monologue, he heads back to his desk, which forces him to turn his back on the audience. To cover this staging faux pas, the host typically throws focus to the bandleader. Letterman always introduced “Our good friend Paul Shaffer.” The camera would then cut away to Paul wearing a new pair of zany glasses while Dave scurried to the desk. It felt like filler because it was filler.