by John Ortved
I got so pissed off that I quit.
As I was walking across the parking lot to go turn in my notice—somebody had heard that I’d quit—Sam met me in the parking lot and basically said, “Now that you’ve quit, we’d like to give you a shot at an episode.” Obviously I said yes. I needed the money, too. Because I’d been around and knew the process, my one request was that I be involved in every step of the process. He agreed. They were all very cool about it. Jay [Kogen] was really helpful and gave me a lot of guidance on how the writers wanted things done.
So I worked with them all the way through it, and then the best part was, because I was still wrapping up my PA duties, my last responsibility as a PA was to distribute the script, as I normally did with other scripts. So my last run was distributing my own episode, which was great.
I was psyched! I couldn’t believe the episode had my name on it. And also it had Aerosmith, whom I had really fought to have involved. It blew my mind.
One producer remembers the writers coming back to Cohen with changes for his script, and Cohen being resistant, which seems a little far-fetched (especially considering that, according to another former producer, Jay Kogen had actually rewritten the majority of the script’s first draft).
ROB COHEN: I definitely did not sit there and go, “No no no no no. Forget it.” That’d be crazy. I know there was one thing I disagreed with, and they yielded.
Cohen’s situation was unique. Most of the early writers found their way to The Simpsons after working at the Harvard Lampoon and from other comedy shows like Saturday Night Live, The Late Show with David Letterman, and The Tonight Show. Regardless of a writer’s TV pedigree, some of The Simpsons’ best material came from their real lives.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY: It was lots of people telling their personal stories and figuring out how to put those into the show. And then lots of what you call “room jokes,” people being really funny, making everybody laugh even though it would never go into the script.
JAY KOGEN: Mike Reiss’s father had made him a clown bed. The headboard was a clown face and the footboard was big clown shoes. It was supposed to be adorable for his kid, but it turned out to be horrific and scary. We put that in the show.
In “Blood Feud,” Season 2’s final episode, Mr. Burns discovers he has a rare medical condition and needs to hit up his employees for a blood transfusion (Bart is a match). It apparently came right out of a situation with Gracie Films’s own gazillionaire boss.
BRIAN ROBERTS: Sam’s way to get back at everybody was to write them into the show. Jim and Richard Sakai didn’t start out as the models for Burns and Smithers, but as the animosity grew around the office, things that came out of Burns’s and Smithers’s mouths were based on Sakai and Jim’s relationship. The most famous of all the stories was that Jim had some sort of anemia, a temporary blood condition. And he sent out a memo to all the staff at Gracie, asking for blood.
In the memo, Brooks phrased his request for blood in a manner that made it seem like it should be a privilege for staff members to give him their blood. “That’s how we read it,” remembers one early staffer. “Like, ‘You could really be helping a very important person out!’” While in The Simpsons Smithers had made an emotional appeal over a loudspeaker at the plant, Brooks’s memo was anything but emotional or pleading in its tone, causing Sam Simon to edit the episode’s script to reflect Burns’s high-handedness.
Sam’s refusal to buckle under to Brooks and Sakai would ultimately lead to his undoing at Gracie, but his assemblage of the first Simpsons writers room would be the most important creative decision made on The Simpsons. Yet as Brooks, Simon, and Groening were about to discover, with a cartoon, there was only so much the writers could do.
SEVEN
The First Episodes
In which the world holds its breath with an eye on Korea … a bear drinks the blood of a Happy Little Elf … the critics give nine thumbs-up … and dysfunction beats the hell out of the Huxtables.
Once the episodes were written, and rewritten, they had to be drawn up by the animators at Klasky-Csupo, shown to the producers, and redrawn. The process of interpreting the first scripts, of giving The Simpsons its signature look and feel, was arduous, fraught with complications. Should there be a consistent floor plan to the house? Who are Bart’s friends? The answers to these, and a million similar questions, had to be drawn and redrawn until everyone was satisfied.
MATT GROENING (from The Simpsons Season 1 DVD, director’s commentary): The deal with animation is you basically are creating your own universe and your own rules. Disney has its own rules. Warner Bros. had its own rules … And we were establishing our rules on The Simpsons. And I think part of the problem … with [the] early episodes is that we hadn’t really nailed down what our rules were.
Groening wanted to move away from Disney’s world of animation where characters’ appendages seem to be on “cushiony springs” (when Disney characters move, it often looks as if they’re dancing). He also wanted to differentiate his world from that of Chuck Jones, where characters’ bodies move in a much more extreme way—Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote often move like elastic bands, extending beyond themselves and then snapping back.
WESLEY ARCHER, director, The Simpsons (1987–97): The first season was really spent trying to figure out the production and how to organize it and how to get people to draw in that Matt Groening style. A lot of animation artists were unable to draw that way.
The energy devoted to the specificity of the characters’ design would be instrumental in creating a visual world that was both original and fit with the sharp, cynical scripts that were coming out of Sam Simon’s writing room. Groening has noted that his characters are not the only ones on television with large, round eyeballs (googly eyes), and yet he argues that his are the only ones that look inherently alienated. He points to the cuteness of characters from Garfield and Sesame Street, contrasting them those with The Simpsons. He cites the small size of the pupils on his characters as the source of their alienation, as well as his dictum that the eyes on The Simpsons must look in the same direction (they can’t go cross-eyed), giving them a vaguely human, realistic feel.1
MARGOT PIPKIN, animation producer, Simpsons: We had to redesign the characters from the bumpers and make them look much more rounded and much more easy to animate and turn and move, ’cause you look back at those original shorts—they look a lot more like Matt’s style, with what he calls the potato-chip lip.
KENT BUTTERWORTH, director of first Simpsons episode: In those days, we had to shoot it all on film with an animation camera, and this was a big deal—very expensive. Gabor had never done that volume of work and had not worked with overseas studios, and he was concerned about his ability to deliver. There was a lot of discussion of how “cartoony” the show should be—how much “stretch and squash.” A lot of it was “Let’s try this” and “Let’s try that.”
DOMINIC POLCINO, animator/director, The Simpsons (1990–2001): The artists who worked on the show from first through fifth seasons, we felt like we were pioneers. We would get a script that had, like, “Homer drunk” or “Bart dances a jig” or “Itchy sucks Scratchy’s intestines out through a straw,” and we would go to town, because we were doing it for the first time.
Everything that came along in the first seasons was a brand-new toy to play with. And we felt like we were making television history in a way—like Chuck Jones when he first did Bugs Bunny.
GARY PANTER, friend of Matt Groening’s; cartoonist: The challenge with any show is trying to get your vision through other animators. When you hire a production company, they already have their own style and people want to make their own statement, and then you’re in the position of having to be tough or insistent or persuasive or whatever it takes to get people to make it look the way you want it to look.
Once the animators had finished drawing an episode, it was still in skeletal form, an expanded storyboard. This outline, once approved by the producers at Gracie�
�along with extensive stage directions, camera instructions, and the voice record accompany—still had to be sent to South Korea, where hundreds of artists would fill in the animation (by hand, at slave wages) over a period of several months. For the first episodes, sent to Korea in the summer of 1989, this was an extremely stressful period at Gracie, Fox, and Klasky-Csupo; once the first episode came back, it would be the first time anyone would see a Simpsons episode in its completed form. What arrived back in the fall of 1989 was far from what anyone—Jim Brooks, the writers, the animators, Barry Diller—expected.
BRIAN ROBERTS, editor, The Simpsons (1989–92): I think the network was really apprehensive because of the gigantic lead time between when the shows were recorded and when you actually got to see anything. Imagine taking some great pictures and then not getting them back for six months. They made this gigantic investment and I think they were obviously very nervous.
When the first episode came back, fifty people jammed into the screening room to watch the show. It was packed. Everybody was really excited—Jim, Sam, Matt, Mandel. It was literally as if Lindbergh had just landed and everyone was running to the airport.
It truly was an amazing moment. Everybody, even the people who didn’t have anything to do with the show, ended up in this conference room, and we played the first episode. It was fucking awful. It was unwatchable; the animation was terrible. It was the Bart and the babysitter episode, with Penny Marshall playing the babysitter.
MICHAEL MENDEL, postproduction supervisor, The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons (1989–92, 1994–99): The first show came back from Korea and it was a complete disaster. It was unairable. We had to recast some voices. The director just went off and did a bunch of stuff on his own.
At one point in the episode, the Simpson kids are watching a cartoon called “The Happy Little Elves Meet the Curious Bear Cubs.” To the horror of everyone watching, Butterworth and his animators had decided to have one of the bear cubs tear the head off one of the elves and begin drinking its blood.
BRIAN ROBERTS: So the episode ends and there’s dead silence in the room and Jim stands up and says, “Do you think we can we can thin out the ranks a little bit?” And fifty people—you’ve never seen a stampede for the door as quick as that—the room emptied out so quick it created a vacuum. And unfortunately, I was one of the people who had to stay since I was the editor. So it was me, Matt, Sam, Jim, maybe a couple of the writers and there was this sense of, What the fuck are we going to do? This is fucked. We are fucked. It’s all fucked up. And now what? So we tried to keep it quiet and everybody figured, We’ll just bury it later in the season.
GABOR CSUPO, animation executive producer, The Simpsons (1987–92): It was a very, very raw first assembly of the scenes, and some of the scenes were still missing, or had the wrong colors, or the wrong angles. So it was a disaster. Jim sort of got into it, started to laugh for the first five minutes, and then all of a sudden his face started to turn green and yellow, almost matching the Simpsons characters. He got really disappointed because none of the jokes worked, and then all of a sudden he started to scream and yell, saying, “What is this?” He just went off and he even started to demand extra camera angles, which was the funniest thing ever—he never did animation in his life. He asked for coverage like when you’re shooting a live-action movie. “So where are the other camera angles?” My producer and I were just looking at each other.
I was just so angry and embarrassed at the same time that they forced us to show this raw footage before we could even correct it. Jim was screaming and yelling that “this is not funny!” And I said, “Well, it may be not funny because you didn’t write it funny.” And then everybody looks at me, obviously thinking, Oh, my God! You dared to say that to Jim! But I felt I had nothing to lose.
Matt Groening, on the Season 1 DVD commentary, remembers Jim Brooks’s pronouncement, sitting there in the screening room, having seen the first episode, “This is shit.”2 Brooks, on the same commentary, recalled Gabor Csupo’s response being “Maybe this shit isn’t funny,” a line Brooks pointedly repeated to Csupo while they posed together for a photograph after the show had received its first Emmy. Brooks admitted that the comment was “small of me” but laughed it off, saying that he and Csupo now “hang out all the time together.”3
This last bit is actually not true, or what those of us outside of Hollywood might call a “lie.” By the time the first season DVD came out, in 2001, The Simpsons had long ago fired Gabor Csupo and taken much of the staff to their new animators, Film Roman. Jim and Gabor did not “hang out all the time together.”
WESLEY ARCHER: I was working late that night and Gabor Csupo came back and he was really upset at Gracie Films.
KENT BUTTERWORTH: Brooks decided to shelve this episode and get back to it later. Meanwhile, he would let Fox know that the delivery of the series would be delayed in order to get the quality they needed. Needless to say, my employment on The Simpsons was over.
DON BARROZO, Simpsons animation editor (1987–present): [Gabor] didn’t really have a fully formed idea of what this was supposed to look like, either. Nobody did.
HARRIS KATLEMAN, former CEO, 20th Century Fox Television: It was out of sync. The color was off. Everything was awful. And I remember we were sitting in my office and Barry was there and John Dolgen and Jim Brooks. And Diller looked and me, and he said, “What have you done?” I said, “Look, we’ll get it fixed.” Then he looked at me and he said, “What do you mean? How you gonna fix that?” I said, “Out of sync you can fix.”
BRIAN ROBERTS: I think we were all put under twenty-four-hour guard so that no word of this would be leaked, and it’s ironic because everybody was there.
Jim Brooks recalled thinking the show was in serious jeopardy because “you couldn’t call the emperor anything but naked at that moment.”4 For his part, Groening could not sleep that week, thinking that the first episode had spelled the end for him and animation. 5 The next episodes, directed by David Silverman and Wesley Archer, would be the deal breakers.
DON BARROZO: The word was they were either just gonna pull the plug right now or just wait until the David Silverman show came back, which was show two. And so everybody just sat tight for a few weeks. And then that show came back and the screening for that one went much better. We could see it was gonna work.
HARRIS KATLEMAN: You had to have brass balls to tough this out because management was really after me, and after Jim and Matt, because everybody felt that this thing was a train wreck.
BRIAN ROBERTS: Fortunately, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” came in next. If you take those two shows and actually run them side by side, you just see a tremendous improvement in the animation, a tremendous improvement in the quality of the characters, and I personally credit Silverman with really refining and making it palatable.
The show was pushed back from its original debut date, and instead The Simpsons would premiere with “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” as a Christmas special.
BARRY DILLER, former chairman and CEO, Fox: I remember when we screened the first finished episode for a number of Fox executives. We all went down to their bungalows over at The Simpsons, and not a single person in the room was laughing, except for me and Jim Brooks. No one had done an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, and it was just like, What is this? But we put it on, and it became more and more successful every week.
HARRIS KATLEMAN: When The Simpsons went on the air, the attitude was, We got a home run here. The first broadcast numbers—we were all shocked, including myself. We couldn’t believe the numbers we got.
The numbers were good indeed. The Christmas episode scored 6.2 Nielsen rating points6 (each point represented a percentage of America’s 92.1 million TV-watching homes), the second highest in Fox’s history. The numbers improved as the show caught on; the first regular episode was second, nationally, in its Sunday, 8:30 time slot. By May 1, The Simpsons was number one in its time slot and a Top 20 television show.7 This was when
Fox Broadcasting could reach only four-fifths of the country. If you added the other 20 percent, The Simpsons was coming close to being one of top-rated sitcoms on TV, period.
BRIAN ROBERTS: I’m telling ya, man, it was like we went from zero to a thousand almost overnight.