The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  Creatively, Matt Groening and Sam Simon saw things very differently. The mistrust of institutions and whimsical cynicism of Life in Hell would persist in The Simpsons, but Matt was not a TV writer and didn’t know how to structure his jokes and concepts into a pithy twenty-two minutes of television. Sam was a master TV writer and was openly disdainful of Matt’s attempts to include himself in the writing process. Creative differences could spill over into budget crises (scripts being rewritten late in the process are costly), as well as issues of power, control, and credit. Sam and his writers were the ones making the show, but of course The Simpsons would always be Matt Groening’s idea. The differences between the show’s two chief developers would devolve into an all-out “war,” especially as the show gained notoriety and the millions began rolling in.

  POLLY PLATT, production designer, Terms of Endearment: Matt did not get along with Sam. Nobody got along with [Sam]. He’s kind of an awful person. If he was at any meeting, it just seemed that everyone would turn on each other.

  GAVIN POLONE, former agent for Conan O’Brien, Simpsons writers; executive producer, Curb Your Enthusiasm: I remember Sam Simon yelling at me and telling me I was an [asshole]. I don’t remember anybody ever doing that before. He was angry with me because I would try to get [my clients] as much money as possible. But, you know, with Sam either you do what he wants you to do or you’re an [asshole].

  SAM SIMON (to Joe Morgenstern in the Los Angeles Times, 1990): I’ve never worked on a good show where there isn’t a certain amount of creative friction. I’ve seen brother turn against brother in a rewrite room.

  BRIAN ROBERTS: In the beginning it was all really happy. Everybody was ensconced in Marilyn Monroe’s old bungalow—that’s where Gracie Films was. And it was all very impressive: Jim had a wall full of Academy Awards and a million Emmys. And since the editorial side of the show took place six to eight months ahead of when the animation would come back [from Korea], for those six to eight months it was probably the happiest time on The Simpsons. I mean, Matt and Sam were getting along. You know, they were happy. We were recording really funny shows—just the sound tracks were hysterical.

  And then it seemed as if the little bubble that we’d been living in for eight months burst. It didn’t burst because of anything negative. It burst because all of a sudden Bart Simpson became the iconic graphic image of the early nineties and then the next thing you know the show ended up on the cover of Newsweek. And that’s when it all really started to go sideways.

  There was a party. I remember it specifically because somebody had created the world’s first Simpsons pinball machine. I think Sam and I had had a little too much to drink. We were outside of this party and Sam was really upset. He was beside himself because Matt was glory hogging the spotlight and taking credit for everything, and Sam didn’t get any of that attention.

  DARIA PARIS: I didn’t like Matt very much. I used to call him “Fat Fuck Groening,” because he caused Sam a lot of problems and because I was a Sam supporter in the war. Matt used to go out there and grab all this attention for himself, like he did it all. Well, he didn’t do it all, you know? And I suppose I felt that was very ungracious and unfair.

  COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS: Sam had been around Jim since Taxi, and he went on and did Cheers, and so in the TV world he was pretty high profile to begin with. Jim Brooks is Jim Brooks; everyone knows Jim Brooks as a director, and even on screen, from the movies. Matt was the face of The Simpsons. He was the “creator.” Matt had become a public figure, because he’s the person whose name was on the show. Matt Groening. He was The Simpsons. Everyone thought, He’s drawing all the cartoons, he’s directing all the episodes, and he’s writing all the shows. But Sam was this guy no one knew. He didn’t have a face.

  JAY KOGEN: Matt Groening got all the credit, or most of the credit. Jim Brooks got some of the credit. Was the credit awarded appropriately? No. But is credit awarded appropriately on any show? Apparently not. I keep reading books about Star Trek where Roddenberry was not the guy who was necessarily at the head of it, or the stuff about The Godfather, where it’s Coppola and it’s a bunch of other people. It turns out that what they say about TV and movies being a collaborative effort is really true. It’s a large collaboration. But those are hard stories to tell for the press. They like to make stars out of people, so they pick one guy and say, “This guy’s the guy who did it.” And that’s a pretty good story.

  An example from a 1990 article in The Boston Globe: “Groening’s skill as a writer is such that, in The Simpsons, as in Life in Hell, he can weave contrasting strands together … He has a sharp eye for detail and nuance; he likes little jokes within bigger jokes; his humor often carries the sting of truth. And, in his situations and characterizations, there are plenty of shocks of recognition.” In the same article, it was mentioned that Groening was “working with” James L. Brooks and Sam Simon. Groening seemed comfortable taking credit for a writing process which, according to those people who were in the room, he was not significantly involved in. From a 1991 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: “We work late into the night, rewriting scripts. By the time a show gets on the air, we’ve heard the same jokes hundreds of times, so we really have to like them … If we think that a line doesn’t quite work, we’ll change it.”

  There was a running joke at The Simpsons: Matt had been assigned a script in the early days of the show, which over the first seasons never materialized. As years went by, people would comment sarcastically that it was going to be turned in “any day now.”

  BRIAN ROBERTS: This was my ham-fisted attempt at trying to make Sam feel better. I said, “Listen, you know America loves a success story. Here’s a cartoonist making cartoons out of his fucking garage. Polly Platt picks up a cartoon, gives it to Jim Brooks. The next thing you know it’s a hit series. It’s legendary, right?

  “Listen, if I was at the news desk at Entertainment Tonight, I’d go, ‘What would make a better story? Slick Industry Insider and Brilliant Writer Come Up with Funny Show, or, Starving Artist Hits the Lottery and Is Now King of Television.’ I’d go with the other story every day of the week. It’s just more interesting.”

  It started to become extremely dysfunctional at about that time.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: You heard things, but it wasn’t discussed that much.

  JAY KOGEN: It was clear that there was animosity back and forth. It was a tough position for Sam to be in, because Matt was getting all the accolades. I would think that if you were pouring your life’s blood into something and getting none of the credit, it would be irritating. If you look at the original Simpsons cartoons, those are closer to Matt’s drawings, but Sam reshaped them and redrew them. He had experience in sitcoms. He had also worked in animation, and was also a very talented cartoonist himself. He’s really smart and handled storyboards and all that stuff. He knew what he was doing all the way down the line. And then the story that broke was, “Independent Cartoonist Changes TV.”

  DARIA PARIS: It’s a very weird thing because even though it was Matt’s idea, it’s basically Jim and Sam’s show.

  BRIAN ROBERTS: After it went sideways, the rift between Matt and Sam got greater and greater and there were lots of incidents. You know, like Matt snubbed Sam at the Emmys. Sam didn’t get to sit at The Simpsons table. Matt somehow—as the story went that I pieced together—went behind Sam’s back and started rearranging where people were sitting, so that he could sit next to Jim, and Sam ended up sitting somewhere else.

  And it all started to get really petty, to the point where they weren’t talking to each other.

  Unfortunately, it was me who was in the middle. When we’d do a screening it was Matt, Sam, and I. And they were like two five-year-olds not speaking. We’d be watching an episode and Sam would say, “Do this.” And Matt would say, “Will you tell Sam Simon I think that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” Sam would say, “Would you tell Matt Groening that he doesn’t know his ass from third grade.” We were all sit
ting shoulder to shoulder! It was extremely uncomfortable for me.

  DARIA PARIS: At the time, we all had offices on the same floor of this one building. We were at one end, there was a short hallway, and then there was Matt’s office. So there was a lot of tension, I mean there was a lot of tension, a lot of yelling here and there. Sam can be volatile.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: Matt didn’t want The Simpsons to be a cartoon where Homer can run off a ledge like Wile E. Coyote and keep running. He wanted respect for the laws of gravity, the physical properties of the basic elements. And I would run up against that sometimes.

  I remember with the monorail episode, there was a moment where, at the end of the episode, Leonard Nimoy says, “My work here is done.” And Barney says, “You didn’t do anything!” And he says, “Didn’t I?” And then I wanted him to beam out. I remember there being a discussion with Matt, like, “I don’t think we can do this, ’cause this can’t happen in the physical world.” I think Mike Reiss and Al Jean had to pitch it to Matt or tell Matt, but Matt was okay with it, because I think it was consistent with the Star Trek reality. For whatever reason, we got it, and I was happy about that.

  He wanted to make sure that we didn’t wreck this beautiful machine that he had built.

  DARIA PARIS: There were times in the room when Matt would come up with the stupidest ideas. And he had this one: we were going to do an episode where Marge finally lets her hair down, and Matt’s idea was that once she let it down the audience finds out she has rabbit ears, which was ridiculous. And Sam said no.

  So things like that would come up and they definitely differed on the vision of the show. It’s silly, you know, and Matt would get a little stubborn about it.

  JAY KOGEN: In another episode, Bart’s going to jump over Springfield canyon. Before he does it, Homer takes his skateboard away from him. He hops on the skateboard and starts going down the ramp and then over the canyon. And he says, “I’m king of the world!” (which was before Titanic, by the way; we like to take credit that Titanic stole that from us). And then Homer falls down the canyon. He hits his head on the rocks and he gets bloody and falls down to the bottom and then is hauled up by emergency people. He’s put into an ambulance. The ambulance takes off, hits a tree, the gurney he’s in falls out of the ambulance and goes right back down the canyon.

  Matt didn’t want that to happen. We explained, “No. He’s getting really hurt. He goes to the hospital. He smashes his head. He gets bloody. It’s not like a Warner Bros. cartoon.”

  He was against it. And at one point we found out that he had canceled the animation for it, without telling anybody, because he didn’t like it. Sam Simon had to reorder the animation at the last minute to get it done. Eventually I think Matt came around and said it was one of his favorite pieces. But at the time he just felt really strongly that it was not appropriate—it was too cartoony for his cartoon.

  While only Sam and Matt will ever know what was ultimately at the root of their split, the lion’s share of the credit going to Matt is a likely culprit. And though their enmity produced the Cain and Abel story of the Simpsons genesis, their rivalry did produce something valuable. For effective art, even in television, you need tension, and it was the creative forces of Sam Simon, Matt Groening, and Jim Brooks, pushing and pulling the show in three different directions, that produced a half-hour comedy that can stand up to anything on television.

  BARRY DILLER, former chairman and CEO, Fox: I was totally aware of [Matt and Sam’s] problems and often mediated them on behalf of everyone. For a while it was not a happy place. But I think it ultimately made the show better.

  MICHAEL MENDEL, postproduction supervisor, The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons (1989–92, 1994–99): A lot of the foundation for the show and the reason why I think it’s successful was laid down during those tumultuous times.

  The question of authorship and The Simpsons comes up again and again in this book, and there’s no easy answer. The shorts were Matt’s and Gabor Csupo’s and Gyorgyi Peluce’s and David Silverman’s. The series built on these, with authorship going to Sam and Jim in the writing room, but also to Jay Kogen, Wallace Wolodarsky, Al Jean, Mike Reiss, and the others. Matt Groening too. When it comes to a work as collaborative and postmodern as The Simpsons, it may not be possible to distribute credit to one, a few, or many individuals. The literary critic Roland Barthes argued that this conception of authorship is practically irrelevant, that words are already so loaded with meaning and cultural context that he who puts them on the page barely matters. In the essay “Death of the Author,” he says that “writing is the destruction of every voice, over every point of origin … It is language that speaks, not the author … A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures.”4 The Simpsons’ “author” is all the works that contributed to the language, signs, and symbols that make up the show, including the infrastructure in which it was created. Seen this way, Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, MAD magazine, Saturday Night Live, Fox, and Bill Cosby all had a hand in making The Simpsons, as did all the crappy sitcoms it was responding to, as well as the conservative culture that produced them.

  The overarching point is that Sam Simon deserves more credit than he gets, but authorship is more involved than who had what idea, who wrote what joke, and who drew which character. As a wise magazine editor once explained to me, “idea is spelled with a small ‘i.’”

  Sam Simon, who we will meet again in later chapters, is inextricable from The Simpsons’ success, and its history. But before the war, before he was even brought on to run the show, the idea to give the Simpsons their own half-hour show had to pass muster at Fox. This was the Simpsons’ first battle, which placed them against the suits and the suits against each other.

  FIVE

  Welcome to Springfield

  In which Matt Groening nearly becomes Mickey’s bitch … Barry Diller threatens torture … a nineteenth-century governor of Wisconsin inspires Bart’s creation … and everyone at Fox supports The Simpsons unequivocally.

  MATT GROENING (to the New York Daily News, April 8, 1999): The executives like to think they have something to do with the success of their shows, and with The Simpsons … they can’t say that; the shows are done with complete independence. And I think that grates on their nerves.

  Though critics liked The Tracey Ullman Show, the series wasn’t a big hit. But, then again, neither was much else on the network. While the execs might not agree on how the idea for The Simpsons as its own series came to Diller, or how enthusiastic he was about it, one thing is certain: The Simpsons, as a series, was far from a sure thing.

  BARRY DILLER, former chairman and CEO, Fox: I know it was originally Matt’s drawings, and I’m sure Sam Simon made his contribution, but the show never would have happened, or have been successful, without Jim Brooks.

  At the time, Matt was taking many meetings with studio execs who were interested in having him to do a cartoon show. But until he was approached by Jim Brooks and Fox in the mid-eighties, these meetings never went anywhere. “Just saying ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle’ was enough to get them nervous …” he told The New York Times.

  HARRIS KATLEMAN, former CEO, 20th Century Fox Television: One day, sitting talking to Jim Brooks and Matt Groening, we decided we’d take seven one-minute episodes of The Simpsons and put them together and see how it looked [there would be forty-eight bumpers in total]. I purposely didn’t share this with any of my colleagues in the company because of a comment that Barry Diller had made to me about The Flintstones being the last successful animation show and how prime time would never buy another one.

  So we developed the seven minutes, and we tested it, and it tested through the roof. The testing was incredible.

  Yet Barry Diller was highly skeptical of those results.

  ROB KENNEALLY, former vice president of series, Fox Broadcasting: So myself, Garth Ancier, and a guy named Kevin Wendell actually put a bunch of these shorts together and screened them for Diller, and he didn’t particularly
care for them and he ultimately sort of pushed us back, ’cause in animation, there’s a lot of lead time, and it’s awfully expensive, and Jim Brooks wasn’t going to do anything like a pilot.

  HARRIS KATLEMAN: I was running Fox Television [which financed, produced, and sold TV shows to all the networks], and we had more shows on the air than any other studio. We had L.A. Law, In Living Color, M*A*S*H, and Trapper John. My division was highly successful, and I had to walk a very careful line because Fox Broadcasting wanted me to give them all our shows. And I told them, “I have a fiduciary relationship with Steven Bochco and David Kelley and all these people to explore all the studios. I just can’t do an exclusive deal with Fox Broadcasting ’cause that wouldn’t be ethical.”

  Still, they were struggling and I did everything I could to help them. I gave them In Living Color, even though HBO wanted it. And with The Simpsons, I said to Barry, “This show’s a home run.” And then Barry went to Rupert ’cause they had to commit to me for $13 million ’cause each episode cost $1 million.