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

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

  I called them all excited to go in and audition, and that’s when they told me it was a TV show. I figured it wouldn’t last. All these quality dramas, like Brooklyn Bridge, were getting canceled right out of the gate.

  Lori Openden: Noah Wyle had a wonderful audition. Every Thursday night he would go over to his mom’s house and watch the show with her.

  Noah Wyle: I auditioned for John Levey and then John Wells, and they brought me into the network. I was up against one other guy, an actor named Raphael Sbarge. I remember seeing Raphael in the corner doing Tai Chi, and I thought, “Oh, fuck. He’s going to be all Zenned out, and he’s going to get the job.” I started to spin myself into little concentric circles of paranoia.

  Michael Crichton walks in, and he looks at Raphael and he looks at me, and he sees I’m melting down, and he walks over and says, “It’s interesting, Noah, I was just reading a book about a woman who lived in Tibet four hundred years ago, and she was a potter. Nobody knows if this was something indigenous to the clay in the region where she worked or something to do with her kiln process, but the pottery she made is virtually indestructible, and a lot of it is still in practical use today. Good luck.” And he turned around and walked away.

  I thought, “What the fuck?” But what a great gift. He walked into the room and saw one actor centered and one actor uncentered and said, “I’m going to take this kid so far out of his head, I’m going to take him to Tibet four hundred years ago.”

  I went in for the audition, and I knew I’d nailed it. I got the job later that afternoon. I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop, and my agent called the coffee shop, and they called me to the phone.

  Lori Openden: Sherry Stringfield had spent a year on NYPD Blue, and she was really good in the early years of ER.

  John Wells: Sherry Stringfield was on the first year of NYPD Blue, and she was unhappy. I sort of knew her. She called and said she wanted to come in and play Lewis. I had to call Steven Bochco and ask him if he was going to let her out of her contract or not. There was this long pause, and then he said, “I hope you know what you’re getting into.”

  Lori Openden: Julianna Margulies had had a role on Homicide. She got hired for the pilot of ER, and she got killed off in the pilot. Once the show got picked up, we wanted her, and she had a choice between ER and Homicide. Good choice.

  John Wells: On ER, her character was supposed to die.

  Julianna Margulies: I died in the pilot, so there wasn’t a lot written about my character, Carol Hathaway. It’s an actor’s job to find his own backstory. She came into the pilot basically OD’d from pills. The research I did was on nurses.

  It turned out my father had a distant cousin who’d committed suicide, and she was a nurse. I came to understand that ER nurses have a tremendous amount of pain because they’re dumped with it all. Either they’re left with a dead patient or a live one. To stave off depression, they sometimes get addicted to pills. They have the keys to the medicine cabinets.

  Staying on ER was a decision sort of made for me because I wanted to be a part of a brand-new show. And I had George Clooney calling my answering machine saying, “You’d be silly to pass up this opportunity.” With Homicide, the show had been on for four years. I knew that I was coming with the idea to help someone else’s character wake up. With Carol Hathaway, I’d get to create who she would be. I was twenty-six years old. My God, what an opportunity.

  I had a message from George. He told me he’d been sitting with Warren and John Wells at the upfronts, and they said, “We don’t think Carol Hathaway is going to die.”

  “Okay, maybe you’re not dead.” That’s an actor’s favorite line to hear on the phone.

  Lori Openden: We still hadn’t found Dr. Benton. The producers wanted Michael Beach, but we kept saying no. He ended up on Third Watch. I was watching a pilot we’d done a few years before, a soapy kind of thing, and Eriq La Salle was in the pilot. I just happened to see him.

  Eriq La Salle: I was doing a Warner Bros. project in Portland. It was called Beyond Suspicion. It was a cop show. I was one of the detectives on the squad with maybe an average of ten lines per episode. My best friend is Michael Beach, and so Michael Beach called me and said, “Hey, man, I just read this amazing pilot. It’s called ER, and there’s a really good role for a brother in there … blah, blah, blah.” I was like, “Oh, great. I’m up in Portland, and I’ve got nothing to do.” I called my agent, and she sent it up to me.

  So as I read the pilot, I thought Michael Crichton and John Wells did something interesting. I don’t think Benton was ever described as an African American, and I tried not to think the role was too good for an African American to play.

  Warren: At the network, we liked Michael Beach for the part of Dr. Benton, but we hadn’t said yes to him yet. We hadn’t said no to him either. We didn’t know exactly who we were looking for, but we weren’t ready to sign off on Michael Beach.

  I was hoping they wouldn’t play that “we have final say on casting” card.

  Eriq La Salle: So I get to the end of the script, and I’m like, “Ah, that’s a really good script.” But I kept looking for the smaller roles, and fortunately the men were all written very strong: the Greene character, the Ross character, the Carter character. So as far as regulars went, all of them were strong. I thought, “This is a great script. That Benton character, that’s the best character in the piece. He’s the most dynamic.”

  So I called up my agent, and I said, “I’m sorry, which role is the ‘black’ role?” And she said, “The Benton role.” And I was like, “Get out of here!” So now I’m going crazy. I said, “You’ve got to get me in on this thing.” And she says, “Yeah, I’ve been working on it.” So at this stage, the network had gone through a few different levels. The actors that I normally went in with on projects had all gone through. All of my friends had gone through. Michael Beach was John Wells’s first choice, up until that point.

  Lori Openden: Eriq La Salle is a little off-putting when you meet him. He has a cold exterior, but that was right for the part. It was just timing and chance.

  Eriq La Salle: I had a couple of days to prepare. Maybe four or five years earlier, I did a ten o’clock medical show with Dick Wolf. It was called The Human Factor with John Mahoney for CBS. I still had the scrubs, so I came in wearing scrubs, and I said, “Look, I’m going for it.” It was really no thought process. I was just doing it. And people started making a big deal of that, but right away I was just like, “I know this guy. I know who he is. I’m just going for it.” So I came in, in scrubs, and actors were looking at me kind of weird, and when I walked in the room, I just remember people perking up.

  Warren: I can remember that audition as if it were yesterday. Eriq took the room. There was just a collective “Yes!” We had seen strong actors do their interpretation of that role. And they were very good, very solid, but Eriq La Salle nailed it.

  Eriq La Salle: Benton was never happy with just saying what a medical procedure was. Benton had to be able to say it in half the time that everyone else said it. He had to rattle this stuff off. So I knew when I was studying, I was like, “You’re about to create a lot of work for yourself, for a long time. Because once you establish this, that’s who he is. You can never go back.”

  Warren: Our thought in the room was “We’re a cast now. Thank God we held out.” It was a really triumphant feeling as the filmmakers went off to see if they could put this thing together and actually make it.

  John Wells: We still had a 160-page script, and we only had seventeen or eighteen days to do it. We were going to be doing lots of 12- and 13-page days. The normal pace is much lower than that.

  We found a hospital emergency room to dress. We pre-lit it and brought the Steadicam up and started shooting like crazy.

  Anthony Edwards: I didn’t understand the script when I first read it, but I knew it was real. We weren’t going to explain medicine to people. We were just going to do it. In an emergency room, it’s an emergency
for everybody, whether you have a splinter in your finger or a heart attack.

  I have no idea how we made that pilot. I never knew what door I was going in or out. Our job was to make it look easy. If it looked hard, you were doing it wrong.

  Noah Wyle: On the pilot episode, George pulled us all into his trailer. He said, “Okay, guys, this is going to be different this time around. I’ve done a lot of shows, and what’s killed all of them in one way or another is a lack of cohesion. This is the show that’s going to do it differently. We’re going to be nice to everybody. We’re going to know our lines. We’re going to be on time. We’re not going to have any division between cast and crew. This is going to be a family.” He just laid it all out there, and we were young enough and green enough to fall in lockstep behind him.

  Eriq La Salle: We had to make people understand that there are no insignificant actors. It’s a unit, and if you are caught not concentrating, you can compromise everything. We got everybody to buy into it. The principals anchored it, but one little cable could have made a huge difference. It was such synchronicity, just seeing how people were operating things, and cameras and dressing crew members up as doctors, just to make sure that we could just hide this thing. We could move this over here so that by the time the camera ended up on the actor, they were able to speak. It was an ensemble effort that you were proud to be a part of.

  Noah Wyle: We were absolutely merciless on each other in terms of the quality of the performances we were giving when we screened the episodes just for us every Wednesday afternoon before they aired on Thursday. We would be brutally honest, and it galvanized us into a really tight ensemble.

  Eriq La Salle: When you’re doing a show of that magnitude, that pilot, that kind of pace, you don’t have a lot of time. As a director, when I cast actors, I cast actors based on two simple principles: Do I believe in your talent? And will you screw me up at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon with a big debate? Will we have to talk about everything or can we just go, when the crew is tired and everyone is ready to go? I think Rod Holcomb [the director] had arrived at that point where “we’ve got to move, we got to get the best work we can and move on, and these six actors are the ones that are getting me there.” We didn’t hold up production. That pilot moved because everyone showed up knowing that we had a lot of stuff to do. A lot.

  My first day of work, I was in every single scene, because they had already started shooting, and they kept pushing the Benton.

  Noah Wyle: I assumed the attractive thing about my part was that everybody else started at such a high level of proficiency—they all had to be established, credible doctors—while my guy was the new guy. He was dropping trays of piss on himself, and he was going to botch up a stitch or two, so he was comic relief for the first few episodes.

  Eriq La Salle: I think it was literally my second day of shooting when I had to show Noah around. It was a three-page scene where I am saying 80 percent of the dialogue. “In this room we have this, and here we have this machine …” I had to hit it hard because I’m testing to see how smart he is. I want him intimidated. I want to see if he’s going to crack, and you can’t do that by spoon-feeding him. But if I can overwhelm him, then I know what kind of guy I have. If I can’t overwhelm him, then I know what kind of guy I have.

  That commitment created extra work for me, because every single speech after that became “How fast can I say it and how clear can I say it?” With strong conviction and clarity. It was an extra hour or two of studying each night, but it was worth it.

  Warren: Dr. Benton’s precision and confidence were reassuring and utterly believable. I remember watching the dailies of the pilot with David Nevins. At one point, I turned to him and said, “I’d go to Dr. Benton. I know he’d take care of me.”

  Noah Wyle: I’m particularly proud of the relationship my character had with Eriq’s character. I don’t think there’d ever been a relationship like that on TV with that power dynamic. He was the authority figure. We managed to work through the drill instructor/private, teacher/student, and we ended up colleagues and friends.

  John Wells: The camera caught the camaraderie and the sense that they were in the trenches together. There’s a lot of kismet that happens in these things. The cast just jelled.

  David Nevins: I had an epiphany. I remember watching the third day of dailies, and there was a scene with Sherry Stringfield and Miguel Ferrer, who is a guest actor. All of the dialogue on the page was Miguel Ferrer. The way it was shot, you realized the whole scene was about her being there as Ferrer was processing the fact that he was going to die. I remember thinking, “Oh, it’s not about that guy. It’s about this person.” The camera told you where to look. It was a doctor show that wasn’t about the patients. It was about the doctors.

  Noah Wyle: We reinvented the sense of pace. Employing the Steadicam on those long walks and talks. The multi–story line—you’d start a story on its third beat instead of the first. This idea that the ER was just a transition place, people were coming through constantly, and you only got a glimpse of the stories as the show went along.

  John Wells: We turned the pilot around in a hurry because we got started late. We showed it to Les Moonves. He said, “You know, I thought I’d hate this thing, but I actually really like it.”

  Anthony Edwards: I think Les said, “Not since Charlie’s Angels …” We thought, “Really? Charlie’s Angels?” We were better than that.

  Warren: With the delivery of the finished pilot from Warner Bros., the trouble began at NBC. Don Ohlmeyer had strenuous objections to the style and content of the show. He thought there was too much blood and far too much technical dialogue. My leading memory of the screening at our NBC offices in Burbank is Don Ohlmeyer storming out of the screening room halfway through the show.

  He came back in at the end but was still pissed off. Don asked in a loud and angry voice, “Why do we want to be in business with people who don’t listen to us?” The room was very quiet until Lori Openden spoke up and said, “I loved it.”

  Noah Wyle: We followed all the talk about the pilot screening and Don Ohlmeyer’s reaction. Too much blood, too fast, all that. I do remember the pilot script being highly technical.

  Anthony Edwards: The mythology was that Ohlmeyer was saying, “Nobody will watch ER. There are too many characters, and it doesn’t make any sense.”

  David Nevins: When the rough cut of the pilot came in, it wasn’t well received. I remember Ohlmeyer said, “These feature people don’t respect our medium.” It had seemed like the greatest thing in the world to me. It was a medical show that felt like an action show.

  John Miller: I remember the electricity in the screening room for the ER pilot. It had the same feeling to me as the screening for L.A. Law. The research came in overwhelmingly positive—even though people died in the show and were screwing around. It violated too many tenets to get a false positive.

  John Wells: We waited a long time for Don’s notes. Rod Holcomb got upset and left. Michael Crichton was pissed. We tried to make adjustments that wouldn’t damage the piece, but we wanted to get on the air. We were pretty sure we were right, but you’re never absolutely sure. We could well have been wrong. We didn’t know. I didn’t know.

  Warren: For Don it became personal. I told him he couldn’t attend the notes session. His presence would just be counterproductive.

  Our notes, Don’s included, were largely fear based. We were in uncharted waters with ER and knew it. I flashed back to my early days on Hill Street Blues. Lots of the same feelings, and that one turned out pretty well.

  John Wells: Don told me later he was really pissed that nobody had addressed his notes.

  David Nevins: Les Moonves called me at home, and he said, “You’ve got to get your ass down here and watch this test.” They were testing the ER pilot on the Warner Bros. lot. The dials were stuck at the top of the screen. I’d been the supporter at NBC, so if I went in the next day and said the test looked really good, nobody would belie
ve it. So I called the head of testing at NBC, Eric Cardinal, and asked him to come down.

  I wondered if it was real or if the audience was Warner Bros. employees. You turn a knob to the right if you like it, to the left if you don’t. Probably seventy-five people there, and I was afraid it was a stunt.

  The dials were stuck at the top, dipped down during a break, and then back up to the top. Two days later we had our own testing to confirm it. The highest-testing pilot ever. Five characters who tested really high.

  When testing is in the top 10 percent or the bottom 10 percent, that’s when you pay attention.

  Noah Wyle: A funny thing happened on the way to my film career. Six episodes in, and we’re on the cover of Newsweek.

  John Wells: There’s an alchemy to TV, like anything else. NBC just pounded the hell out of ER all summer long. We got put in after Seinfeld when that show was at its most powerful. We were helped quite a bit by the critical community over the summer because they all said Chicago Hope would win the time slot. We were underdogs. That made it a story.

  John Miller: CBS put Chicago Hope against it. Another hospital drama, set in Chicago in the same time period. I knew from the get-go that ER would take it. We pushed all summer for ER.

  Preston Beckman: CBS announced that Chicago Hope would be on Thursday at 10:00 like they owned it.

  David Nevins: ER was going head-to-head with Chicago Hope. Around August somebody got the current report for CBS, and the second episode of Chicago Hope featured the transfer of a baboon heart into a little baby. They’re going to kick our ass, and what do we have? We have dozens and dozens of stories, no A-story, and they’ve got a baboon’s heart in a little baby.