Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

  We decided to come up with a show nobody would buy, and that would get us out of this deal with Norman. The show is set in Washington, and we decided to make all the characters repellent.

  Marta Kauffman: The wife is a lesbian who slaps the maid. The daughter is bulimic. The son is suicidal.

  David Crane: We’re actually having a very good time because it’s dark and funny and we love it. It’s very superficial. Broad and shallow. Super superficial. We go in to pitch it, and it’s the first time we’ve heard Norman Lear laugh. We’re thinking, “Oh no.” We go to pitch it at CBS. Dream On has been on for a season, and the exec buys the show. We start casting, and we end up getting this brilliant cast. David Hyde Pierce. Peter MacNicol. John Forsythe. We need to cast the illegitimate daughter. Norman says, “I’ve got the daughter. Linda Hunt.”

  Brilliant actress, but not funny. You don’t put her in the middle of a four-camera comedy. She made it clear we could do jokes about her height. So we start writing them, and she’s very uncomfortable with them.

  Marta Kauffman: We loved it. Linda Hunt. We thought, “They’ll never do this.” Perfect.

  David Crane: We shoot the pilot, which is actually very funny but for Linda. It was dead at CBS. The network does not pick it up. Then we get the call. NBC wants it … if we replace Linda Hunt.

  Warren: I loved the writing in that script, deliciously dark. I had to try it.

  Even without the comic stylings of Linda Hunt, The Powers That Be lasted but one season on the network, its final episode airing in June 1993.

  David Crane: We pitched Friends to Fox and sold it to Fox, and then we pitched it to NBC. Then there was some finagling, and somehow we were doing it at NBC.

  Warren: Les Moonves, who was president of Warner Bros. TV at the time, said you have to make a pilot commitment, not a script. I loved the pitch. I said that was fine. Les understood the value of owning a successful comedy on NBC. What this meant financially was that if I got the script and wanted to get out of the commitment, it would cost me $250,000.

  David Crane: We did the pilot for Friends and another show at Fox called Reality Check. Sometimes scripts feel absolutely right, and sometimes you just want to kill yourself.

  Marta Kauffman: Every word is excruciating.

  David Crane: Our Fox pilot was like that. One thing we’re working on is this delicious, wonderful, fruitful thing, and at the same time we have this other show that’s not working. Every scene is torture. It’s not funny. It’s not good, and we know it.

  Marta Kauffman: We’d get notes from the network: “Make it more adult.” It was a high school show.

  David Crane: And we got the note “It’s funny; it’s not Fox funny.” I don’t know what that is.

  If you read the Friends pitch now, the show was incredibly true to the pitch. Basically, we just memorized it and said it. We used to go in and read our pitches, which doesn’t work.

  Marta Kauffman: We finish each other’s sentences anyway, so we never scripted who said what.

  David Crane: We left no air.

  Warren: David and Marta’s script was just as wonderful as the pitch. Smart and funny. I called Jimmy and told him I had a script he had to read.

  Marta Kauffman: When we finally started doing the show, the writers were so much younger than us that we felt like anthropologists.

  David Crane: We were thirty-three or thirty-four by then.

  Marta Kauffman: It was a fascinating casting experience. We saw a countless number of actors, but things happened as they were supposed to happen. One of the first actors on our list was Matthew Perry to play Chandler, but he was doing a show called LAX 2194, so he wasn’t available. We brought other people in.

  David Crane: We brought everybody in. We were so sure that would be the easiest part to cast. It’s got the most joke jokes. It’s sarcastic and kind of quippy, but no one could do it. No one.

  Marta Kauffman: The person who came closest was Craig Bierko, and we found out later that Matthew had coached him.

  Lori Openden: The producers wanted to go with Craig Bierko instead of Matthew Perry for Chandler. Bierko read the Friends script and passed.

  Warren: Thank God! There was something snidely whiplash about Craig Bierko. He seemed to have a lot of anger underneath, more of a guy you love to hate. The attractive leading man whom you love and who can do comedy is very rare.

  Karey Burke: We kind of talked Craig Bierko out of being in Friends. Ultimately, he made his own decision, sort of. He took another pilot where he could be the lead and the only star.

  David Crane: We offered the part to him. We didn’t have anything better. He’s a really good actor and a lovely guy, but wrong for Chandler.

  Marta Kauffman: We took Matthew in second position.

  David Crane: He was doing a show about baggage handlers in the future, but not that far in the future. And somebody said, “Has anybody seen this thing?”

  Marta Kauffman: We originally offered Rachel to Courteney Cox, but she said she wanted to do Monica, not Rachel.

  David Crane: Courteney had just come off a terrible Bronson Pinchot show where she played the wife.

  Marta Kauffman: There was something about Courteney that was adorable.

  Lori Openden: Nancy McKeon from The Facts of Life also read for Courteney’s part. She gave a terrific performance. Warren let Marta and David make the call. They went off for a walk and came back and said Courteney.

  Warren: When I auditioned for my first job at NBC in comedy development, I had to watch episodes of The Facts of Life and evaluate them before the series had ever gone on the air. Then later, when I had current comedy reporting to me, I had the opportunity to watch Nancy McKeon grow up on that set and on that series. She was wonderful, and America loved her. It was a tough call because she gave a great reading for Monica.

  Jamie Tarses: It was a very split room when Nancy McKeon and Courteney auditioned. Many of the executives at Warner Bros. wanted Nancy.

  Marta Kauffman: Because we were casting an ensemble, there was something appealing about not Nancy McKeon.

  David Crane: When we originally wrote the role, we had Janeane Garofalo’s voice in our head. Darker and edgier and snarkier, and Courteney brought a whole bunch of other colors to it. We decided that week after week, that would be a lovelier place to go to.

  Marta Kauffman: And more maternal.

  David Crane: We brought in two actors for Joey, and everyone preferred Matt LeBlanc. We were told he was an actor who’d get better every week.

  Matt LeBlanc: I got the script, and it was Jimmy Burrows’s new project and the producers from Dream On. I think I had seen a couple of episodes of Dream On, not enough to know the show. I knew it had clips from old movies in it, and I thought that was a cool idea, but I never really watched it enough to get into it. I knew it was funny. That was all I really needed to know; the guys are funny. I’d done two series for Fox. Friends was my fourth series.

  I was practicing lines with an actor friend of mine, and he said, “This show is all about a group of friends, so we should go out tonight and get drunk, as though we were friends. We should just keep that in mind.” So we went out, and I fell down and skinned my nose really badly. I went to the audition with this huge scab on my face, and Marta said, “What happened to your face?”

  I said, “Aw, it’s a long story.” She thought it was funny and laughed, and that kind of set the tone for the room. Who knew? I would never suggest, “You know what you do before an audition? You go out and face-plant on the sidewalk, and then go in all bloody.”

  David Crane: Joey was never stupid when we pitched the show. He wasn’t stupid until we were shooting the pilot and somebody said, “Matt plays dumb really well.”

  Marta Kauffman: And he had so much heart. Down deep, you just wanted to take care of him. You knew that at some point, he’d fall in love.

  Matt LeBlanc: I had some sitcom experience. I knew my way around a joke a little bit. The time on Married with Childre
n and with Joe Bologna, I learned a lot. I watched how they did things. I learned the process—where the joke is, how to set up a joke. I learned a lot. So it went well. I got laughs.

  Then I got a callback and had a studio test. I think Courteney was in the room when I came to read. It was between me and this guy—his last name was Yeager, I think. He was dressed in a denim jacket, jeans, cowboy boots. I think he had a cowboy hat with him, but he didn’t have it on. I looked at him and thought, “One of us is way off the mark. God, I hope it’s you.”

  David Crane: An exec at NBC called to say she’d offered the part of Rachel to Jami Gertz. We didn’t have a Rachel, and Jami Gertz is a really talented actress, but not Rachel. So we held our breath for twenty-four hours until she passed.

  Warren: Jennifer Aniston had been in our weak attempt to do Ferris Bueller as a series. (We did not have the services of John Hughes.) She played Ferris’s sister, Jeannie, and we liked what we saw. We cast her in a few more pilots, but none were very good. One night while gassing up my car on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, I ran into Jennifer, and she asked me, “Will it ever happen for me?” God, I wanted it to. I didn’t care what it would take—this was the role for her.

  Marta Kauffman: Rachel was the part that was hardest to cast. Jennifer came in, and she was in a show that was on the air—Muddling Through.

  David Crane: We had a meeting with the guy who created Muddling Through and asked him if he’d let her go. What chutzpah.

  Lori Openden: Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry were technically not available. We had second position; we were taking a gamble that the show in first position wasn’t going forward.

  We auditioned other actors for Jennifer’s part, but nobody else was good enough. It was a pretty big risk. Her show was a comedy for CBS. They’d shot eight episodes and had them on the shelf for six months. They still had the rights to air it.

  Jamie Tarses: Then we had Jennifer Aniston crying to Les Moonves to let her out of the CBS show she was on.

  Preston Beckman: I put Danielle Steel movies on opposite the Jennifer Aniston show on CBS. I killed it.

  Warren: I remember watching Muddling Through, Jennifer’s show. It was bad. I thought to myself, “They won’t pick up this horrible show just to fuck us, will they?”

  Lori Openden: When Lisa auditioned for Friends as Phoebe, she owned it. There was no debate on her.

  Lisa Kudrow: I thought Mad About You was the best-written show I’d ever seen, and I always liked talking to writers, because I always wanted to understand how they got their ideas. Jeffrey Klarik was one of the writers who was always really friendly and complimentary, and I didn’t know his boyfriend was David Crane. David saw me, because he paid attention to everything Jeffrey did. And I think that’s how I got called in for an audition for Friends.

  I read for David and Marta, and then I had to go back and read for Jimmy Burrows. That scared me a lot, because of Frasier. He’s kind of who fired me.

  So I was nervous to go in, thinking I’m about to read for the guy who doesn’t get me and doesn’t think I’m funny. My audition was a monologue, so there was no reacting off of anybody. Jimmy said, “No notes … Okay, thank you, Lisa.” And I thought, “All right, so that’s it.” “No notes” either means “it was so great I don’t have anything to say” or “why do they keep putting this girl in front of me?”

  Marta Kauffman: Phoebe was easy to cast.

  David Crane: We knew her from Mad About You.

  Lisa Kudrow: I’d gotten good at auditioning, because I was taking a class where the guy was fantastic. His name was Ian Tucker, and he told us, “It’s a business. All you guys want to do is act, and you finally get an audition, and all anyone is asking you to do is focus and act for two minutes, because that’s about how long an audition is, and none of you can do it. You jump into their laps and wonder if they are paying attention. Do they like it? What are they thinking? Forget it. Just perform.” So I got good at doing just that.

  He told us, “They are dying for you to blow them away. They’re on your side. What do you think, they want to go through hundreds of people and settle? No. Just do what you do. Either you’re right for the part or you’re not—let them decide. They’re eating lunch while you audition because they’re hungry. It’s not because they don’t like you.”

  Warren: Speaking as someone who’s spent a professional lifetime watching talented people collapse at auditions, that advice is as valuable as it comes.

  Lisa Kudrow: Those other actresses were falling apart. A lot of them really couldn’t cope with the auditioning process, and I could. That’s why I got the job, because I’m good at auditioning.

  At one point I even said, “You know, I’m more like Rachel.” And they told me, “No. You’re this quirky girl.” And then once I knew that I was going to the network—and that’s when you work out the deal—that’s when I was like, “Thank God it’s on NBC. Pilots work and don’t work, but we have to protect Mad About You, please.” That was the only thing I cared about, so that I could still do that show. I thought since it was on the same network, maybe it wouldn’t be a problem.

  David Crane: When we got our time slot, we were following Mad About You. It was weird, so that’s when we said, “What if Phoebe and Ursula were sisters.” We called Danny Jacobson, and he said, “Okay.” I’m not sure I would have.

  Harold Brook: With Friends, the last actor to sign was David Schwimmer. Everybody loved Schwimmer, and his agent knew it. We were $2,500 apart [per episode]. We both dug in our heels. Lori Openden came to me and begged. I hated it, but we gave it to them.

  Marta Kauffman: Schwimmer had auditioned the year before for a pilot we were making, and he just stuck in our heads. That was an offer. No audition.

  David Schwimmer: I had auditioned for a pilot called Couples that Marta and David had written, and it was one of the few that I had tested for. It had come down to me and two other actors, one of whom was one of my oldest and dearest high school friends, Johnny Silverman. So, Johnny got the part. They made the pilot, I think, and then it never went anywhere. I got this other show called Monty with Henry Winkler.

  I adored Henry and working with him, but I did not have an enjoyable experience as an actor on the show. I didn’t feel like I had a voice on Monty. I didn’t feel like the writers were interested in my opinion or my ideas or what I could bring to the table. I felt fairly stifled creatively and not a part of the process. I was just expected to be quiet and say the lines.

  I was acting, writing, and directing ensemble theater for years. I was already twenty-seven when I was doing Monty. I had such a negative experience on that show. We actually shot twelve episodes. I felt like, “I can’t believe I signed a contract for five years.” I wanted to kill myself.

  As soon as we were canceled—I think they only aired six episodes and then they stopped—I thought, “For the first time in my life, I have money in the bank because of Monty.” And I said, “Good. I’m going to go back to Chicago and doing theater. I am never going to do TV again.”

  Eric McCormack: I went out for Schwimmer’s role on Friends. Years later I told Burrows the story, and he said, “Honey, you were wasting your time. They wrote the part for Schwimmer.”

  I was already a full-on Seinfeld freak, so I was very upset when I didn’t get past the studio level with the Friends part.

  David Schwimmer: I told my agents not to send me anything. I moved back to Chicago, and I was in Chicago doing a play with my company. We were doing The Master and Margarita—this book that we had adapted—and we had just opened Steppenwolf’s new studio space with this play. I was playing Pontius Pilate with a very short Roman haircut, which is why Ross eventually had this haircut.

  I got the call from my agent [Leslie Siebert at the Gersh Agency], and she said, “Look, I know you told me not to send you anything, but there’s a show I really think you should take a look at. It’s by Marta and David, who—if you remember—had done that show Couples.” And I go, “Oh
yes. I remembered loving the writing.” And she said the magic words to me: “It’s an ensemble show. There’s no star. There are six people, all similar age.” And I say, “Okay, I’ll read it, but I’m not going to do it.”

  Then I got a phone call from Robby Benson in Chicago, who is friends with Marta and David. I was a huge fan of Robby Benson, and I had never met him. Out of the blue, I get this phone call from Robby Benson. He said, “Look. I really think you should consider doing this. At least go and meet Marta and David and talk about it.” And then Jim Burrows called. Jim is my idol. I just think the world of him.

  The combination of a few things—to have those two people call, and then to understand, which I didn’t realize at first, that Marta and David had written Ross with my voice in mind from the Couples audition. It was hugely flattering, and I thought, “Well, it’s quite disrespectful with all this talent asking to meet and just consider it. I’d be an idiot not to go.”

  Lisa Kudrow: I’d be at Mad About You, and other guest stars would say, “I’m reading for Joey, will you help me with it?” And I was like, “Yeah, I’ll help you learn your lines, but I don’t know what they need or who they want.” And I just thought, “Wow. Everyone wants to do this show. I wonder why?”

  The drama people really wanted to do ER, and the comedy people really wanted Friends. The whole thing is such a crapshoot, and just because the script is good doesn’t mean much.

  Marta Kauffman: The first day we went to a run-through and the six of them were together for the first time, onstage in the coffee shop, I remember the atmosphere being electric. A chill ran down my spine. I knew we had something special.