by Lynda Obst
3. Profits.
SCENE SEVEN
THE DIASPORA
The Golden Age of Television
At the premiere of Showtime’s 2011 series Homeland, President Obama’s favorite show as well as everybody else’s I know, my eighty-seven-year-old father and my brother, Rick, had a conversation about the rapidly changing creative primacy of television and movies that hit the bull’s-eye.
The series, the first to be green-lit under Showtime’s new president, David Nevins, stars movie actress Claire Danes as a neurotic and brilliant CIA agent who has a very complicated relationship with a returning American POW, who she’s convinced has been turned by the Al Qaeda terrorists who captured him. It won the Golden Globes for Best Television Series—Drama, Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series—Drama for Damian Lewis and Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series—Drama for Claire Danes. Nine months later Homeland stunned the town by sweeping the 2012 Emmys in its first season. It again won for its lead actor (Lewis), actress (Danes), writing (Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon and Gideon Raff) and beat Mad Men, the odds-on favorite, to win Showtime’s first Outstanding Drama Series Emmy.
Our family had a special rooting interest, as Rick found and represented the original Israeli series on which Homeland was based and packaged it with his clients, 24 showrunners Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Gordon brought in WME director Michael Cuesta. WME then packaged their actress Claire Danes, and Rick sold the series to Showtime. It was his dearest project in his long career.
Rick is the calmest person in our family, a natural leader who is grounded and very sane. When he was young, my parents would brag about his baseball prowess by claiming he had hit ten home runs that week, and he would correct them by saying he’d hit only six. One of his many virtues is that he can outwait an Israeli and an insult. After the screening, Dad and Rick had a conversation that Rick remembers like this:
“At the end of the pilot, which lasted approximately fifty to fifty-two minutes, something like that, Dad turned to me and said, ‘That’s it?’
“And I said, ‘What do you mean?’
“He said, ‘That’s all? I want to see more!’
“I said, ‘Well, it’s over; that was just one episode.’
“Then he said, ‘Well, why don’t you show more?’
“ ‘We’re just showing the pilot, the first episode.’
“And he said, ‘You know something, you should make a movie of this; it’s too good for television.’
“I answered back, ‘You know, Dad, I don’t know if you realize it, but you just insulted me.’
“And then he couldn’t stop talking about it the whole way home in the car, how he was going to start watching it. I explained that if it was on too late for him at nine o’clock, we could record it on his DVR, but that was too complicated a conversation. But he really was engrossed in it. It was great. You hear him talking about it all the time now. He loves it.”
I asked Rick what this meant. We both knew that Dad only watched MSNBC, sports and the Sunday news programs, and he had a regular movie habit.
“His perception is, good things go in the movies, television is crap.”
That attitude has been changing, if slowly, in my Dad’s set. But among the knowing in pop culture and in the industry, it is a different universe than the one our dad was born into, or the one I entered when I went to my first Golden Globes awards and realized how Movie People looked at Television People in the Old Abnormal.
I vividly remember sitting there at our round table on the ballroom floor with a huge, dumb smile plastered on my face, with nominees Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and my great friend writer-director Nora Ephron in what seemed like the middle of the universe. We were there for Sleepless in Seattle. Everywhere I turned there was another boldface name getting buzzed on the mediocre champagne, laughing, bussing cheeks and working tables.
Suddenly, I looked up and noticed a parallel universe on a semicircular tier above us, with rows and rows of people talking and bussing cheeks and working tables just like we were and getting buzzed on the same bad champagne.
“Who are they?” I asked someone at my table.
“They are Television People,” I was told.
These days, if you look upstairs at the Golden Globes, Movie People are sitting upstairs with Television People, and downstairs, Television People are sitting with Movie People; they have merged. Distinctions are moot. In 2011, Mila Kunis—the hot-as-can-be movie star of Ted, Friends with Benefits and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, among others about to be released—who broke in the seminal hit That ’70s Show,1 sat downstairs for her supporting-actress nomination as Natalie Portman’s nemesis in the ballet/horror film Black Swan; Michelle Williams of Dawson’s Creek fame sat nearby for her best-actress nomination for My Week with Marilyn. Upstairs, Jeremy Irons sat for his nomination for Showtime’s The Borgias, waving to his agent down below; nearby was Oscar perennial Kate Winslet, nominated for best actress in a miniseries for Mildred Pierce on HBO. She could chat with eventual winner for a comedy Laura Dern (Enlightened) or Jessica Lange for best actress in a series (American Horror Story); this goes on and on. In the same year, TV star Melissa McCarthy (Mike and Molly) was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress in Bridesmaids.
James Wolcott commented in Vanity Fair’s television issue in May 2012: “There’s always one pill present … who takes pride in disclaiming that he or she never watches television … pity these poor castaways. They must sit there with glassy, uncomprehending eyes while the rest of us tongue-flap about the latest installment of a favorite series down to the last crumb, like Proust scholars.”
I wondered when this began and why I was so slow to notice at first, so I went to talk with Gail Berman, who had run Paramount just as the convergence between movie talent and television talent was becoming clear. She had been hired away from her successful five-year stint as president of the Fox network, where she’d put everything from American Idol to 24 to House on the air. It was obvious that Gail would have seen all of this coming.
I found her sitting happily in her new office in the fancy Lantana complex in Santa Monica, where she’s partnered with Lloyd Braun in a “multiplatform content” company. Over her desk was a watercolor painting of Paramount, signed by an artist named “Meany.” We found this hilarious.
I asked her if she had noticed any television prejudice among movie people when she ran Paramount. The question was a bit disingenuous; I knew she had stumbled into a surprising amount of TV snobbery, given that there had been such a long line of notable studio heads recruited from television networks before her: Frank Price, who ran Columbia for years, came from CBS and Universal TV; Barry Diller had come to Paramount from ABC with Michael Eisner, who later ran Disney for decades; there was NBC’s legendary boy wonder Brandon Tartikoff, who’d been hired at Paramount in the nineties; and even Peter Chernin, who was Gail’s boss at the Fox network before he ran the studio.
I had been surprised by the attitude, because I’d assumed at the time that her success in TV was the very reason she had been hired.
“You know,” she said, slowing down for this answer, “I think feature people have a tendency to look at things myopically, as though television were some sort of foreign business that used other sorts of means of enticing people to work in it or that didn’t have a creative process. And it was hurtful, but also really fascinating and amusing on some level. I would talk to people and they would purposefully say, ‘I never watch TV.’ I would say, ‘You don’t? Geez, Louise, what do you do?’ It was amusing to me. If you’re not watching TV, you’re missing out on a lot of stuff going on! The twenty-four-hour news cycle? The incredible writing? It’s where everything is headed.”
• • •
One of the things Gail did during her tenure was hire J. J. Abrams to reinvigorate the Star Trek franchise. How televisionizing is that?
“Going to J.J. was a natural for me,” says Gail. “He was already in the
movie business, having done Mission: Impossible while I was there, and I just knew he would hit it out of the park. J.J. is a storyteller. That’s his intention: to do it across platforms, regardless of the medium.”
“When did you first start seeing feature writers in TV? When did all this blending start?”
“At Fox, I used to meet with various feature people who would come in and sit with their arms crossed and say, ‘I’m told I can make some money here,’ and we’d say, ‘Not here you can’t, time to go’—people like that who had a chip on their shoulder about TV. But this is all history.”
“But the writers’ strike was a huge part of the deluge, right?”
“It started before the writers’ strike,” Gail answered. “But there was still a taint around it at that time. Back between 2000 and 2005, we enticed Paul Attanasio (Donnie Brasco, Quiz Show) to come on board.”
Paul Attanasio was the trailblazer for successful feature writers crossing over. He was an ex–Washington Post reporter and was famously hired for expensive (often up to $250K a week!) production rewrites and polishes because of his ability to write smart and witty banter. He was the first big feature writer I remember crossing over, writing on House, and he soon brought many feature drama writers into the writers’ room along with him.
Gail knew all: “Paul came in very early on, and certainly working with him on House was—”
“So that was you!” I exclaimed, interrupting her.
“Yes,” Gail answered. “I did that while I was at Fox; it was a fantastic thing. He had done a show prior to that [with Gail’s partner, Lloyd Braun] at ABC, actually, called Gideon’s Crossing, so he was an example of somebody who was beginning to cross comfortably between both worlds. It certainly didn’t diminish him in the feature business, and he was sought after in the television business.”
“Is there now essentially a mash of the two businesses?” I asked her. “The end of the separation between the two businesses’ talent pools as we know them? Or is this a temporary occurrence because the movie business is currently such a disaster?”
“In my opinion, there’s nothing temporary about it,” Gail said. “It is the wave of the future. From an artist’s point of view, the point is being able to tell stories and get their message out. And as companies make fewer and fewer movies, that’s very hard to do. So the question is, can you tell your story in other places where things are happening? So instead of looking at it in a negative way, like, oh, the movie business is so horrible, woe is me … to be able to say, ‘Okay, I’m a storyteller, I’m an artist; I want to tell stories, and if I can’t do that over there, I might have an opportunity to do it over here.’ And that to me is how people should be looking at it.”
I left Gail’s office wondering, Is everyone going to do television now?
• • •
One Sunday afternoon, Rick and I were watching an Eagles-Giants game. During a commercial, I taped this conversation:
RICK: Who doesn’t do television now? Everybody does it. Anybody who says they won’t do it is out of the business. Right? You tell me, who says they won’t do it?
LYNDA: Will Smith?
RICK: Will Smith brought us a television show with a log line [Hawthorne, a nursing series on TNT]. We sold it, because they put Jada [Pinkett Smith, Will’s wife] in it, and once you put Jada in it, it becomes Will Smith’s company, Overbrook. Once it becomes Overbrook, twenty people come into your life. So maybe the biggest movie stars in the world—maybe they don’t have to do it. But by the way, Brad Pitt is doing a miniseries at HBO with Edward Norton. They’re doing Lewis and Clark as a miniseries.
LYNDA: I bet George will end up doing TV.
RICK: Well, he came out of TV.
LYNDA: Of course he came out of TV.
RICK: He did ten busted pilots before he did ER. I mean, George Clooney, didn’t he—
LYNDA: He did something. He did that live one-hour thing with [producer] Laura Ziskin after he was a movie star.
RICK: Right, exactly. Based on Fail Safe. He wouldn’t do a show for HBO?
LYNDA: If it was political? Please, of course he would.
RICK: He did an HBO series.
LYNDA: K Street! A series about lobbyists.
(We laugh.)
LYNDA: Of course, Angelina’s not going to do TV.
RICK: Right, but she doesn’t have to. She’s doing something at Lifetime, I think. I think she’s directing something.
LYNDA: You know, there probably isn’t anybody. Sandy [Bullock]? Nope, Sandy did. She did something with George Lopez. And I submitted a Texas show to her last year.
RICK: Who says “I don’t do TV” in this day and age? I don’t know. I mean, if HBO brings you something great, are you going to say, “No, I won’t do it”?
LYNDA: And now Scott Rudin has two HBO series. [Note: Scott’s deal was canceled; we’ll see about that.]
RICK: And David Fincher [Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo] is doing House of Lords on Netflix.
LYNDA: Yes, Netflix looks like it’s going to be the home for the A-list movie directors. There’s no one not doing TV.2
How did this happen? Do actors follow the writing? The opportunities? Women certainly follow the parts! Rick and I talked about how they cast Claire Danes in Homeland. “You show an actor material; they respond to the character, to the material, to the writing,” Rick said. “If you’re a thirty-five-year-old woman, where are you going to get a part like Laura Linney [The Big C on Showtime] and Claire are getting in television?”
“Or,” I added, “Laura Dern is producing for herself with Enlightenment.” The paucity of quality parts for women in features made the question rhetorical.
I asked Rick if he had a hard time getting the top feature writers to do series these days.
“Oh, they’re eager and excited to do it now. They have been for more than five years. Eighteen years ago, Endeavor3 was founded on the premise that there was no such thing as a strict feature writer or a strict television writer. Everyone does both. We have people like Aaron Sorkin, who goes from medium to medium. He writes a play (A Few Good Men); he writes a television series (West Wing); he writes a movie (The Social Network). He’s a writer. And many of our successful television writers all came out of features, like Josh Schwartz; he was initially a feature writer, and then he did The O.C. and Gossip Girl and other shows. Writers write, and putting them in a box, which is what used to happen, is unhealthy.”
Now it’s fully transitive. Movies want TV writers for comedy rewrites and more; TV likes feature writers. Mitch Hurwitz of Arrested Development fame (now being restarted on Netflix) did a rewrite of a script that was meant to be my directorial debut—about girlfriends from college reconnecting over a weekend gone haywire—but sadly, after a momentary Bridesmaids bump, it went nowhere fast. Jonathan Nolan (called Jonah), with whom I was working on a big project for Paramount and who was also the writer of the Batman franchise, launched himself from tentpole city into television (Person of Interest on CBS), stunning everyone, especially me. He had just gotten his first pilot picked up, while I was awaiting the fate of my major tentpole in features. Drama writers are moving to television in droves. It’s like an oasis where they can write characters and not set pieces. Drama is a whole department in television, not a reason to be rejected. And since the onslaught of tentpole über alles, dramatic films have been mainly relegated to the indie side of the market.
From the vantage point of four years in television, it’s clear that the great writing in TV isn’t due to the influx of feature writers. The greatest shows from the start of this era were born from network stalwarts like David Chase, whose Sopranos changed the landscape forever, but who was a writer for years on Remington Steel. A journalist turned TV writer, David Simon, wrote The Wire. I wept like I did for Anna Karenina over seasons two and three of Damages, written by longtime television writers and former playwrights Glenn Kessler, Todd Kessler and Daniel Zelman. Mad Men’s illustrious creator
, Matt Weiner, still struggles to make his first feature, and Homeland’s Howard Gordon came from network hit 24. Breaking Bad was the brainchild of Vince Gilligan, who had grown up on The X-Files, a breakthrough Fox show. Television became great via its own writers pushing boundaries as outlets like HBO made it possible, creating a loop of reactions, from Fox courting the youth demographic outward to the hungrier and more ambitious networks. Those writers knew where to push and had the relationships and trust to transform the envelope as the media universe changed. TV became an oasis for starved feature writers, tired of writing set pieces or tiny tadpoles for free. They are starved for the opportunity to write juicy, flawed characters—mothers having affairs or dying of cancer, crack-dealing teachers, all the permanent no-nos of the movies.
Their feature credits and prestige lend credibility to these projects, which helps them get made. Big feature directors are also doing lots of television as they look for work between stalled movies. (My favorite network series, Revenge, had its pilot shot by director Phillip Noyce, of Clear and Present Danger, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Salt and Patriot Games fame.) The television business is in constant motion: The networks have to air something, and there are more and more cable and online outlets blooming every day. Everyone knows that a hit series is a gold mine.
An apocryphal Hollywood saying goes: “A hit movie gets you a great table at Morton’s; a hit series gets you a house in Malibu.”
Or, as Rick said this weekend when we chatted about why I should get into the television business, “It’s like what famous bank robber Willie Sutton said when they asked him why he robbed banks: ‘It’s where the money is!’ ”
Certainly the agencies and corporations have learned this, as television rakes in a huge proportion of the entertainment conglomerates’ revenues compared to film, a total reversal of the old norm. Now the writers, managers and producers are getting wise.