Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  This eased a bit the gnawing sense of guilt Perry felt about sitting in judgment on other writers, and his uneasiness about the whole process of writers having to come and sell themselves.

  In Perry’s own career as a writer he had never been required to “take meetings,” but simply to write his stories and put them in the mail. The first and only meeting he ever “took” was the one at the network with Archer, but he luckily did not at the time comprehend its import.

  Had he known then he was supposed to be selling himself as well as his writing, he would, have freaked out and stayed home. No matter how tough it was to gather rejection slips, opening envelopes from your own mailbox in the privacy of your own home was far less agonizing than actually having to talk a good game at a meeting or pitch your story in a way that would sell it. Then, how degrading to read the indifference of disappointment on the faces of those with whom you were taking the meeting.

  Yet Perry could see how it was necessary; he did not want to find himself working with some writer who he might feel was a schnook, or a bore, or had bad breath, no matter how brilliantly he put words on paper. Still, it was awful, and he bled for those candidates who obviously would not get the call alluded to in the obligatory phrase “We’ll get back to you.”

  Perry quickly learned that writers with any success in the rugged field of television would not deign to do an hour of anyone else’s series, for the form known as episodic television was lowest in pay and prestige (and the two always went together out here) of all the network script possibilities. So the writers who came seeking assignments for the show were basically the young ones who were breaking in and the old ones who were hanging in.

  Perry’s heart went out to the old guys, the veterans who in their forties and fifties were trying to make a living by knocking out some episodes for other people’s shows, a “Hart to Hart” or a “Dynasty” or maybe now a “First Year’s the Hardest,” while keeping the dream that one of their own original scripts would someday hit the jackpot.

  This could be me, Perry realized with chilling recognition when he saw the older applicants pitching a story.

  Perry knew from reading their work that some of them were men and women of true talent, with unproduced screenplays or theater pieces that seemed to Perry every bit as good as or better than most of what was making it big, but who simply had not had the right combination of elements to make it happen—the star or director or producer or packager who could get the right pieces all to fit at the right time. Still, they hung in; they toiled and smiled and came to these meetings with new ideas, pitched their wares with humor and intelligence and decency, and then, with thanks for the chance, went off, to wait hopefully to hear a yes to something, anything.

  “There’s a term for it,” Perry explained to Jane after work one night, “when the writers have to come in and sell themselves. It’s called ‘tap dancing.’”

  “Ugh,” she said, making a face. “It’s disgusting.”

  She got up and started toward the house.

  “Don’t blame me, I didn’t invent this system,” Perry said.

  “I was just going to get a drink.”

  “Oh. Would you bring me a glass of that good Chardonnay?”

  Jane saluted in silence and went inside as Perry sank deeper into the hot tub. When he got down all the way to his chin and closed his eyes, letting the bubbling jets massage him, he almost didn’t mind the deprivation of being without his own swimming pool.

  “Here you go,” Jane said, coming back out and handing Perry a long-stemmed glass filled with an almost golden-colored wine.

  “You’re not joining me?” he asked.

  “I still have to do it a little at a time,” she said, tentatively sticking a toe in the cauldron of water.

  “I mean with the wine,” he said.

  She was holding a can of Michelob.

  “I’m thirsty and hot and I feel like a beer,” she said. “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not,” he said, lying.

  She had never been a big beer drinker until this summer, and he secretly suspected her sudden love of the suds was not as she claimed because the heat and smog gave her a thirst that wine didn’t slake, but rather because she regarded his sudden connoisseurship of California wines as more affectation than appreciation, and refused to share his enthusiasm.

  He also minded that she was wearing her old one-piece, flower-patterned swimsuit from home, instead of the brief Day-Glo spandex bikini he had bought her. If she felt her body couldn’t bear comparison with the sleek beauties on the Southern California beaches, that was understandable, but her refusal to wear the sexy bikini even in the privacy of the backyard hot tub, he took as an act of defiance, a purposeful turndown of the simple turn-on he was asking for.

  “Yiii—help!” she yelled, as she edged down into the boiling waters, squinting with pain and holding her beer can aloft.

  Perry tried to ignore this childish to-do, closing his eyes and taking a sip of the golden Chardonnay. He swished it around in his mouth, ruminating on the flavor, then opened his eyes.

  “Is this the David Bruce eighty-one?” he asked suspiciously.

  “It’s whatever you had in the fridge,” Jane said, hunkering down in the bubbling waters like some kind of refugee on the lam.

  “Darling, I think that was the Simi Valley Cellars Sauvignon,” Perry said moodily.

  “For all I know it was the Bob’s Bargain Basement Burgundy,” she said, belting back a swig of her Michelob.

  “Never mind,” Perry said, taking a gulp of whatever the hell he was drinking.

  “I didn’t mean to blame you about the ‘tap dancing,’” Jane said. “I know it must be tough on you, really, having to decide people’s fates like that, and knowing how hard they’re trying.”

  “It’s the worst with the older guys,” Perry said. “I feel for them, but when push comes to shove, I find myself wanting to go with the bright young faces.”

  “Why?”

  “The point is, you can’t afford to be doing someone a favor out of some misguided notion of charity. Or sentiment. It’s your own ass on the line.”

  “But I thought you said some of the old veterans were really good writers.”

  Perry took another sip of wine and shifted a bit in the tub, trying to get a jet of water in the itchy place in his back.

  “Well, you begin to wonder, though, if they’re really good, how come they’re still doing episodes of somebody else’s series?”

  “You’re not exactly a boy genius yourself, darling.”

  “That’s what makes it so painful when I feel myself edging away from some of these older guys.”

  “Still, you find yourself doing it, huh? Going for youth?”

  “Going for what’s good for the show. That’s the bottom line.”

  Suddenly Jane pulled herself up from the tub and shook herself as if she were a dog drying off.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just can’t stand being boiled alive any longer. I’m going in and read for a while.”

  Perry made a grunting sound of acknowledgment and took another sip of his wine. He wondered if the mention of reading was a bit of a barb since Jane noted recently that Perry didn’t seem to have time for it any more. She went every week religiously to some intellectual bookshop on Sunset Boulevard and in addition to new novels, came home with copies of the New Republic, the Nation, sometimes even Hudson or Partisan Review. Seeing those little intellectual publications lying around on the coffee table seemed odd to Perry, as if they were artifacts of his other life back East; these magazines that seemed familiar at home struck him as exotic out here, a cultural juxtaposition, like finding the latest Good Housekeeping lying around some bazaar in Tangiers.

  Of course Perry hadn’t stopped reading, he was reading just as much or maybe more than he ever had, it was just a different kind of material. In the search for writers he had read dozens, hundreds of scripts and books, and in addition
to that, he was now reading everything he could get his hands on about young married couples and graduate students in order not only to get ideas for the show but to make sure that everything in “The First Year” would be authentic, real. He had even had Ned’s secretary call Washington to get all the government statistics and studies on youthful marriage and couples in grad school. He wanted every scene of his show to be not only dramatically but sociologically valid. He felt he had a mission, not merely to entertain but to inform, to raise the educational as well as the entertainment level of prime-time television in America.

  He finished off his wine, set the glass on the rim of the tub, and tilted his head back. The day was not only hot but the smog was heavy, making his eyes smart and his nose burn. Such small discomforts, however, were canceled out by the fine native wine and the action of the jet-streamed water massaging his flesh. He didn’t even mind the smog, for it was like a trademark of the place; he imagined for a moment the brown film staining the sky above was like the smoke of action hanging over a battlefield and he was a general, calmly preparing for the fray, experiencing now a thrilling hint of the charred scent of triumph.

  “Jack and Laurie would never go to a porno flick,” Perry explained. “They’re not prudes, they’d just find it boring, kind of beside the point.”

  “Right.”

  “Of course.”

  “Got it.”

  His writers agreed.

  Of course they agreed. They were his writers. He hadn’t “created” them exactly, they were writers before he met them, but now they were working to portray his characters on his show and so they naturally deferred to his judgment. How much more responsive they were, how much more eager to understand than a roomful of questioning, carping students, always trying to trip you up!

  “Do you think Jack and Laurie might ever go bowling?” Hal Hagedorn asked, and the way he said it cracked everyone up.

  Hal was clearly the prize of the group. Witty and wise, with a well-tanned, muscular body and curly blond hair, he seemed more like a California surfer-turned-actor than a writer, yet his credits included scripts for some of television’s classiest series, like “Family” and “Fame,” as well as action stuff like “Remington Steele,” sitcoms such as “One Day at a Time” and “Three’s Company,” and the big hit melodramas “Dynasty” and “Dallas.” He said he preferred to work on other people’s shows and live the good life out on the beach in Venice rather than take the responsibility and undergo the grind of a show of his own. His laid-back life-style and philosophy kept him young, for in spite of his many credits and his actual age of thirty-nine, he could have passed for a young grad student like Jack, and his ideas and dialogue were right on the mark.

  It was only his experience and string of credits, though, that made him seem a more ideal writer for the show than Estelle Blau, a bubbly twenty-six-year-old housewife who had written seventeen paperback romance novels and was now attacking TV with the same energy and enthusiasm. She had just sold an original after-school special about teenagers on dialysis, as well as an episode of “Falcon Crest.”

  “Bowling!” she exclaimed in response to Hal’s idea, jumping up and clapping her hands. “Oh, for sure—I know some lanes over on Melrose we could go and research it, and get a few games ourselves!”

  “What the hell,” said R. V. Hensel, “let’s have some fun with this thing.”

  R.V. (now known to all of them affectionately as Arvy) was an owlish fellow in his middle fifties whose potbelly bulged through the buttons of old-fashioned Hawaiian-style sports shirts of the kind once worn by Harry S Truman. When Archer Mellis wangled one additional script commitment out of the network even before the pilot went on, it meant they could hire an additional writer (Perry himself was of course doing the opening show), and Perry, Ned, and Kenton had all wanted to take a chance on Buddy Byler, a brilliant UCLA Film School dropout who had broken into TV with an after-school special on teenage break dancers. To Perry’s shocked surprise, Archer had vetoed that vote for youth, saying they should keep Byler in the wings if the show took off, and insisted on going with quality, as proven by the aging Hensel’s having won an Obie back East twenty years before! The poor guy must rub it every night for luck.

  “Bowling might really work,” Perry mused, about to expound on how a hip young couple might see this lower-class pastime as kind of campy fun and then really get into it, joining a local league, but his creative stream of thought was interrupted by a sudden knock at his door and the sweating head of Kenton popping in to say, “Archer wants us—now.”

  Perry leaped up.

  “May Allah be with you,” Hal Hagedorn said.

  The others, with sincere concern, chimed in their prayers of support.

  Their own fete, after all, was now tied in with the fate of the show and its creator.

  “What could be wrong?” Perry asked, hurrying to keep in stride with Ned and Kenton as they grimly made their way to Archer’s office.

  Whenever they were summoned like this it meant trouble. It must have been especially serious for Kenton to be called off the set, while directing the first of the hour episodes. It was not the first one that would be aired—that was Perry’s, but he had been so busy he hadn’t even finished his own script before the first draft of Hal Hagedorn’s episode about Laurie taking karate lessons came in. It was so beautifully polished and expertly done that it was practically ready to shoot, so Ned and Kenton decided to go with it right away instead of waiting for Perry. The creator suffered a twinge of envy that this newcomer to the show had taken to it so perfectly, but it meant they had found a real successor to assume the writing leadership when Perry returned to Vermont. That, too, stirred mixed feelings in Perry: a grudging sort of gratitude.

  “It must be the barbarians at the network,” Ned growled. “They probably find Kenton’s dailies too subtle. Not crass enough.”

  “At least if they make us reshoot anything we’re not under the gun with time pressure,” the perspiring young director said. “Thank God we don’t go on the air till the fall.”

  “That’s right,” Ned said. “Once we’re on the air week to week there’s no stopping the express train without a crash.”

  “Why don’t we not think about it,” Perry said, with rising anxiety, “till we hear what it is.”

  When they walked into Archer Mellis’s office they found the young executive standing on his head. He was wearing a Los Angeles Lakers warm-up suit.

  “You’re going on the air in three weeks,” he announced from his inverted position.

  “That’s crazy!” Ned Gurney shouted. “That’s the first week in August.”

  “They don’t start new shows till the fall, do they?” Perry inquired.

  “They can’t start this one,” Kenton said. “We won’t be finished shooting.”

  “They’re just putting on the pilot,” Archer said, remaining unperturbed and upside down.

  “In the name of all reason, why?” demanded Ned.

  “It tested well at Preview House.”

  Preview House was a theater on Hollywood Boulevard where random audiences of people with nothing better to do were rounded up and subjected to screenings of TV pilots and other assorted film material not yet seen or heard of by the public. The reaction was thus supposed to be pure. Viewers registered their like or dislike or indifference to particular scenes and actors by pressing buttons located at their seats, and by filling out a detailed questionnaire upon leaving the theater.

  “Is that any reason to put it on the air before the season even begins?” Ned inquired, getting down on the floor and trying to look Archer in the eyes.

  Archer let his legs fall behind him and sprang up to a standing position.

  “Since it’s not typical prime-time material they want to give it a chance to score well against soft opposition. They’re putting it on against a National League game between two cellar dwellers, and an amateur magic show contest among senior citizens at Sun City, Arizona.”


  “Baseball and magic sound like pretty potent stuff to me, no matter how bad it is,” Kenton moaned, “especially against an unknown pilot of a never-seen series.”

  Archer went to his closet, flung it open, and grabbed a metal bar that was installed above his head in the door frame. He began doing chin-ups.

  “Think victory,” he said. “If you beat the opposition you’ll have proven yourself in combat. Your fans at the network will strengthen their hand.”

  “Television!” Ned Gurney roared, throwing up his hands in frustration.

  “That’s the business we’re in,” said Archer, chinning himself with precise rhythm. “Remember?”

  It was D day.

  The three weeks seemed to have passed in three seconds. It was the several hours before the show that seemed to drag like eons.

  Perry and Jane, along with Kenton and his wife, had been invited to Ned’s to have one of Kim’s curry dinners and watch the show together. The triumvirate and their women. The ones who had made it happen.

  If this were a Broadway production, they would know they had a hit on their hands. The major reviews were already in, since the network arranges advance screenings for TV critics whose judgments must appear the day of the show’s airing to be of any use to the audience. Perry had run in excitedly that morning to show Ned the New York Times, whose critic had called “The First Year” an “unexpected pleasure … uncommonly intelligent.” Ned pointed out that “uncommonly intelligent” might be a turn-off to the mass audience, and was happier with the Associated Press review that called the show “a real heartwarmer,” and Variety’s label of it as “this season’s socko sleeper,” but, as he ruefully explained, you could take all those reviews and with a buck fifty buy yourself an enchilada.

  What counted was not the critics but the public, not the words of praise but the numbers of sets in use and percentage of viewers as tabulated by the Nielsens. That’s why Ned wanted his colleagues to view it on an ordinary TV set on a regular-sized screen right in his own living room, just the way all those other millions of Americans would tonight, for they were the ones whose reaction would determine the fate of the show.