Hacking Hollywood: The Creative Geniuses Behind Homeland, Girls, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Lost, and More

by Chuck Salter

  Each of the team members has spent at least a decade, some almost two, at HBO. They’ve forged their identity in the margins of television production as being almost defiantly different. Even as their accomplishments have exploded into the mainstream, they remain vigilant about maintaining fresh eyes and freedom from convention. “It’s interesting that people always fixate on the content freedoms at HBO as a kind of unfair advantage,” says Strauss. “But the freedoms that are really important aren’t the freedom to swear, or to be naked, or to blow somebody’s head off. They’re about expressing a distinct point of view and allowing the creator’s voice to come through in as unencumbered a way as possible.”

  It turns out that the great talent of the members of the original-programming team is their ability to work with creative talent. First, they respect and trust the writer-producers they choose to work with. “They say, ‘We want your voice. We want your vision. We want the story that you see.’ And they mean it,” says Alan Ball. “That might seem obvious, but at the networks, every decision is second-guessed by every single executive. At HBO, they leave you alone for the most part and trust your instincts.”

  When the team does offer feedback, it’s usually about one thing: helping the writer inhabit his own skin boldly. When Ball submitted his script for the Six Feet Under pilot to Strauss, her response was, “It’s a little safe. I’d love to see the whole thing be a little more fucked up.” She was telling Ball, she says, that “the characters need to be as complicated as people are in real life. Their problems aren’t easily resolved. And there needs to be a level of reality and emotional truth that expresses the logic of the show—which is really about a family dealing with the very real disconnects born of a lifetime of not communicating with one another and a bunch of adult children trying to become adult adults.”

  Along with the story points, Ball heard another message: “She was telling me that I don’t actually have to be a bad writer here! After five years of working on a network show where you always had to put the subtext in someone’s mouth—‘Gee Dad, I guess I’m mad at you because you did X when I was 12’—you could just let the subtext be the subtext and let the characters talk like real people. You don’t have to be a hack!”

  It’s that kind of luxury that has talented writers, directors, actors, and producers lining up to work with HBO. Countless Hollywood stars have petitioned Ball to make a guest appearance on Six Feet Under. Tom Hanks has signed up for a third project with HBO (after executive-producing From the Earth to the Moon and Band of Brothers, with Steven Spielberg). Callender is currently overseeing production on several star-studded films, including a New York production of the Tony-winning Angels in America, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson.

  Aware that there’s a “limited supply of supremely talented people who can create successful television” and that most of them “have a better chance of getting rich and famous elsewhere,” Albrecht is dedicated to making the experience worthwhile to every HBO partner. “If you’re interested in the work, there are very few other places in the broadcast business where you can call your own shots as a creator,” he says. “We’re there as guides and to lift the limits, but basically what we want is for people to take their guts out and put it on film every week in a series or in one of our movies.”

  [SCENE 3: “IN THE GAME,” SIX FEET UNDER, SEASON TWO]

  NATE: Chinese checkers. Always hated that game.

  NATHANIEL SR.: That’s because you’ve never played it for money. Nate, why don’t you meet a couple of friends of mine? Uh, this [indicates slickly-dressed middle-aged man], well, this is the man. Death. The Grim Reaper.

  DEATH: Cigar?

  NATE: Uh, no thanks.

  WOMAN: [fleshy black woman dressed as a television psychic] Good for you, baby. That stuff is nasty!

  NATHANIEL SR.: And, uh, this, well, this is—

  DEATH: My partner.

  LIFE: Oooh! That sounds so professional! I love it!

  DEATH: Life.

  NATE: [incredulous] Shut up!

  LIFE: Oh, yeah. It’s a whole yin-yang thing!

  NATE: You telling me you two are in business together?

  LIFE: [laughing] Honey, me and him are in all kinds of shit together!

  DEATH: Let’s just say it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.

  LIFE: [to NATE] It’s your turn.

  NATE: Uh, shouldn’t I wait for you to start a new game?

  LIFE: This game ain’t never gonna end.

  DEATH: You’re either in the game, or you’re out.

  NATHANIEL SR.: On or off the bus, if you’d prefer.

  NATE: All right, I’m in. [sits down]

  NATHANIEL SR.: You need to put some in the kitty, son.

  NATE: What are you betting?

  ALL: Everything.

  NATE: All right. I’ll bet everything. Whatever.

  “THE BIGGEST HURDLE TO OUR SUCCESS IS OUR OWN SUCCESS.”

  Colin Callender woke up on the morning of the 2001 Emmy nominations to learn that HBO had earned a whopping 94 (in contrast to NBC’s 76, ABC’s 63, and CBS’s 46). He immediately called Chris Albrecht. “We both said simultaneously, ‘What the hell do we do next year?’ Our first thought wasn’t, ‘This is great. We did it!’ It was, ‘How the hell do we top this?’ ” says Callender. “I think that, for better or worse, we’re all genetically programmed to keep pushing ourselves.”

  The question of “what’s next” has acquired a new level of urgency for HBO’s original-programming unit. There is an end in sight for both Sex and the City and The Sopranos. The expectations are so high and the winning streak so pronounced that the vultures are waiting for a flop. The reviews for The Wire, the series launched this summer, reflect that reality, observes Albrecht. “They say it’s a great show, that it gets better every week, but it’s never going to equal those other shows,” he says. “What that tells me is that you can’t have a business based just on things that are unbelievably extraordinary. You also have to base the business on things that are very, very good. And if you focus on that, your chances of getting something excellent are that much better.”

  The good news is that HBO’s original-programming strategy is working. The bad news is that it’s working so well, it keeps changing the game. “Chris bears the brunt of that pressure on his shoulders,” says Bewkes. “Because everything we’re doing is on a TV screen—it’s highly visible and highly copyable. Everything that we’ve tried has worked better than we ever would have imagined. So we have to keep setting the bar higher for our next act.”

  Nothing demonstrated that reality more than the unprecedented phone calls that Albrecht received earlier this year—from network programming execs desperate to learn where HBO had scheduled The Sopranos’ fourth season. “We’re playing a much broader game, much more actively,” says Albrecht. “That means that we’re going to have to be even more aggressive and take even bigger risks than we took before. We’re very aware that the biggest hurdle to our success is our own success.” The higher the stakes, the more gut-led leaps Albrecht’s team has to take to continue to make an impact with its programming. Most recently, Albrecht made the unconventional move of ordering three series for the fall season from three pilots, including the dramas Baseball Wives and Carnivale.

  He’s also taking a page from the network book in amping up the value of his franchise with “HBO Sunday Nights,” featuring a powerhouse lineup of original series that regularly draw huge ratings. It’s the most visible and lauded lineup of appointment TV since NBC’s “Must-See TV.” Keenly aware of the fate of that once-golden programming concept, Albrecht is intent on “reoccupying territory that others have abdicated in order to create television worth paying for at a time when people are increasingly dissatisfied with the television that they’re getting for free.” Asked to describe that territory, Albrecht gives a typically uncompromising response: “The best: a vast but very speci
fic target that we’re always striving to hit.”

  __

  Fast Company, September 2002

  “READ ANYTHING GOOD LATELY?”

  By Franklin Leonard, creator of The Black List

  Leonard is one of Hollywood’s youngest kingmakers. In 2005, as a midlevel executive in his 20s, he surveyed execs throughout the industry for the best new screenplays that weren’t reaching the screen. That became The Black List, which is now a Hollywood institution (and site, blcklst.com). So far, more than 200 Black List screenplays have been made into feature films. They’ve generated more than $16 billion in worldwide box office sales, 148 Academy Award nominations, and 25 Oscars, including best picture for Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech.

  I WAS WORKING as a development specialist at a production company and was sleeping very little and reading tons of screenplays. One day I got a phone call from a screenwriter’s representative who said he had Leonardo [DiCaprio]’s next movie, which was not an unusual call. I probably got it a half-dozen times a day. In this movie, Leonardo would play an oil company lobbyist—we’ll say for BP—and he has a girlfriend who is a meteorologist for a local D.C. station. And she’s going to break up with him because she doesn’t like the fact that her boyfriend is contributing to global warming. This has all come to a head because there’s a giant hurricane that’s going to slam into the East Coast destroying everything.

  I was like, “So you’re pitching me Leo against the toxic super storm that will destroy humanity.” His response—I wish I was making this up—was, “When you put it like that, it sounds ridiculous.”

  A large part of your job as a development executive is separating the Super Storms of the world from the Slumdog Millionaires. Obviously, the easy way is to read them. But the reality is that the Writers Guild of America registered 50,000 pieces of new material last year. Maybe 5,000 of those clear various filters—agencies, management companies, screenplay competitions. You’re required to sift through all of those and identify the one or two you think should be one of the 150 films that the major studios release for the year. God forbid, you wake up tomorrow to the front page of Variety and there’s a million-dollar screenplay sale that your boss is like, “Why weren’t you in front of that?”

  It’s like walking into some members-only bookstore that has all the best and exclusive titles in the world but is organized alphabetically and all the covers are the same. And you have to find the best book. The job becomes triage. You take every phone call from every agent or representative telling you Super Storm is the next Avatar. And you get off the phone and try to discount how much to believe based on their lies in the past.

  That’s where I was in 2005, working in an anonymous office on Sunset Boulevard, staring down that anonymized bookstore and having read nothing for months but bad scripts, which was not what I had in mind when I left management consulting and threw in my law school applications and went to L.A. I was about to go on vacation for two weeks and didn’t want to read more bad scripts.

  So one evening, right before I left town, I emailed 75 people with whom I regularly had the “Read anything good lately?” conversation. That’s the anthem of the overworked Hollywood film executive. I have that conversation dozens of times a week.

  This time I asked them to send me a list of up to 10 of their favorite screenplays that met three conditions. The first was they loved the screenplay. Second, the film version would not be in theaters by the end of the year. And lastly, it had to have been written or discovered in the previous 12 months.

  I was shocked that out of the 75 people I emailed only three didn’t respond. Several of them said, “A friend of mine wants to be involved. Could you let them participate?” What was unique was that it wasn’t, “Hey, have you read anything that might make me tons of money?” It wasn’t, “Have you read anything that might make me look good for my boss?” It was, “Tell me what you love.” In a business that can be very cynical but is still populated with people who came to it because they love movies, it was a rare opportunity.

  So the first Black List was born. I gave it a vaguely ironic name. There were 186 scripts the first year, and 68 have been made into feature films. That number continues to grow. The top five scripts were Things We Lost in the Fire, Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, The Only Living Boy in New York, and Charlie Wilson’s War. Four have been made so far. In 2007 both Diablo Cody (Juno) and Nancy Oliver (Lars and the Real Girl) were nominated for Oscars. Diablo won.

  Industry trade publications now refer to projects as Black List scripts. In 2009 more than 330 executives participated in the list, which represents about 60% of the people at major studios and the production companies that service them. I’m told there are three directors who have a conference call every year—they live on different continents—to discuss what scripts are on the Black List. Which just floors me.

  This is all great, but the Black List is not a catalog of screenplays that, if you make them, you’ll make tons of money and win lots of awards. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Some of them bomb. More than anything, the list is a snapshot of what Hollywood is reading and liking in a given year. It puts a mirror in front of the executives who participate and makes them consider bigger questions about what we like, what works, what we care about. Hopefully, it forces a conversation about what creativity is and what stories we want to tell.

  In a practical sense, the list shines a very bright spotlight. For screenplays that haven’t been picked up by a studio, it can mean a second life. For these writers toiling in obscurity, this is an opportunity for everyone in town to know who you are instantly.

  When the first list came out, there was a 25-year-old writer named Josh Zetumer. He was working as a secretary to an inactive producer and teaching drums on the side so he could make rent. In what little spare time he had, he was writing. He wrote a screenplay called Villain, a thriller that ended up No. 4 on the 2006 Black List.

  Right after that, my boss and I had a project we were looking to fill with a writer, and we both said, “This guy’s really good. We should meet with him.” Josh came in and gave an amazing pitch. We hired him over several big A-list writers. Since then, he has done a production rewrite on the most recent Bond movie and on Sherlock Holmes, and written a draft of the Dune adaptation and the most recent Bourne installment. He teaches drums now for pleasure, not for money. He’s a working writer.

  That’s been the most gratifying thing, seeing people like Josh, who are incredibly talented and who I genuinely believe would make it on their own, but perhaps the list is hastening that process. And hopefully it’s leading to better movies for us all to go see.

  __

  This article is adapted from Leonard’s presentation at Fast Company’s 2010 Innovation Uncensored conference.

  ACT 2

  LEGENDS

  A couple of Hollywood giants

  share the keys to a long and creative

  career—when to take risks, how

  to pick your battles, and how to play

  well with others, even studio heads.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: THE VISION THING

  By Rick Tetzeli

  At 69, AN AGE when most Hollywood directors have been packed off after a hollow cavalcade of plaudits, roasts, and nostalgic fetes, Martin Scorsese is once again panicked about hitting a deadline. His new movie is Hugo, a 3-D children’s movie being released by Paramount Pictures this Thanksgiving weekend, and Scorsese has never before directed in 3-D, nor, God knows, made anything resembling a kid flick. But this is what life is like for Marty, as everyone calls him. The director has achieved the trifecta of a fulfilling, creative life: enough money to do only what truly interests him, enough freedom to attack those projects in a way that is satisfying, and enough appreciation from his peers to tame—just slightly, just ever so slightly—the neurotic beast of self-doubt. After 22 movies, five commercials, 13 documentaries, a handful of music videos,
three children, five wives, and 25 studios; after insolvency and misery, after box-office failures and years of going unappreciated; after the one Oscar and all the others he should have won, Marty Scorsese has earned the right that every creative person dreams of: the right never to be bored. And what all this adds up to in his case, what this really means to this particular man, is that he has earned the right to continue to fret every little detail in the world well into the next decade and for as long as he cares to make movies.

  So as he sits down for the filmed part of a fastcompany.com interview in his office screening room, a comfortable unostentatious cave surrounded outside by posters of classic films like The Third Man, Citizen Kane, and Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief), Hollywood’s eminence grise starts off by wanting to get something straight: “Let me ask you: Do I look like Quasimodo? Am I sitting too far down in the chair? The shoulders on this jacket, against these chairs, they can scrunch up so I look like Quasimodo. Okay, is this good?” Yes, Mr. Scorsese. And how are you feeling today?

  “I’m good. I’m tired. I’m tired, but in a good way. There’s just so much to do. What I’m worried about is, is there confusion in the film? Because there’s so many things going on, especially in a movie like this, in 3-D. There’s the color timing; Bob Richardson has done the film but he’s in Budapest right now shooting another film, and he’s got to get the timing right, but he’s doing it through Greg Fisher who’s living here now, but originally Greg did it with Bob in England, so there’s that problem. Rob Legato is living here now for the special effects—he doesn’t live here, but he’s here in New York till the picture’s finished. These special effects are hard! Some take 89 days to render—89 days to render! And what if you don’t like it when it comes back? I tell them at a certain point, you’ve gotta tell me, you’ve got to say: This is the point of no return, Marty; you’ve got to make up your mind right now about this facet of the shot! So, you know, that’s when you’ve got to make up your mind.”