Stealing the Show

by Joy Press

  Inside the spacious dining room, crew members futz with table settings and wires. The room is strung with colored party lights that look dazzling from where we are sitting. Soloway snaps a picture of it on her phone for her Instagram page and calls long-haired director of photography Jim Frohna over to see the lights refracting through the windows. “What could we do with this?” she asks. “Maybe we could use it for the dentist scene?” he says, thinking about a psychedelic moment later in the episode. Soloway’s face lights up, and she leans back in her chair, rumpling her close-cropped hair.

  Eating salad from a big porcelain bowl, Soloway watches intently as the cameras roll on a scene in which members of the Pfefferman clan arrive for the party. Shelly and her bearded boyfriend, Buzz (Richard Masur), arrive by motorcycle, clad in leather. They push through the front door, Shelly shouting, “Hullo! What did you kids do?” as she looks over the changes her adult children Josh (Jay Duplass) and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) have made to the house. Soloway never calls “cut,” but darts into the house set regularly to confer, changing the camera’s sight lines, suggesting tiny alterations in the dialogue, testing every syllable and movement for realness.

  Instead of Shelly and Buzz simply taking off their motorcycle garb, Soloway looks for ways to use the entrance as a moment of character definition for this elderly, conventional Jewish woman who is envious of her family members’ ongoing self-reinvention. “You need a place for us to put our leathers!” Shelly scolds gleefully, simultaneously making a joke and a fuss. Soloway also sparks a jarring but tender physical interaction between Josh and his mom’s boyfriend, suggesting that Josh “stop and make a meal” of Buzz taking off the chaps. “I really want you to do the undressing,” she says. “I want to see a real moment. Make a big deal of his chaps removal.”

  In the next take, while Shelly banters with her daughter, Josh kneels down like a courtly knight and unbuckles Buzz’s chaps, revealing bare elderly legs and a pair of khaki dad shorts. “You should see him in chaps in the bedroom,” Light ad-libs saucily at one point. Each time the actors come together, there is a palpable crackle of affection. Between takes, they gather in a corner of the room, chattering like the ersatz family they are. When the little children who play Maura’s grandkids arrive on set with their screen mom, Sarah (Amy Landecker), the boy walks up to each person in Video Village (including me) and gives us an affectionate hug. Waiting for their cue, Landecker tells the kids to make sure to notice how pretty Maura looks.

  The dialogue seems to change with every take, and I ask Faith if this improvisation is typical. She hands me the script. “Most of it’s there,” she says, shrugging. She’s right, but each time the actors say the words, they seem different, like evolving organisms. As Ali, Gaby Hoffmann, dressed in a bright-green sleeveless romper that elongates her tall, slim body, resembles a sprite, clapping and dancing and jigging. At one point, she does a little twirling dance with arms aloft that inspires Judith Light’s Shelly to riff on her daughter’s unshaven pits. This gets incorporated into an exchange in which Shelly warns, “You’re never never never going to get a man like that,” only to have Ali reply, “I don’t date men anymore.”

  Jeffrey Tambor had been dressed in a casual shirt and pants in the morning meeting, but now, an hour or so later, he quietly appears as Maura, in a demure beige dress, tan flats, and a flawless silvery blond wig, accompanied by Anjelica Huston, who plays Maura’s lover, Vicki. The clamor is realistic as they arrive at the dinner party, with side conversations and voices crisscrossing. Soloway gathers them briefly, to give each moment a focus. She asks Duplass to make note of the sleek new hairstyle Maura is sporting and requests that “Maura and Shelly have a moment in the center,” choreographing the actors’ movements so that the chaos suddenly has a smooth grace. Shelly’s fleeting attempt to take an iPad selfie with Maura for her new Twitter account barely registers, until Soloway suggests Shelly get in Maura’s face: “I want you to have a little more fun with the comedy of it.” Although the show is categorized as a comedy, Transparent’s iconoclasm lies in the way it slips and slides somewhere unclassifiable among drama and comedy, family soap opera, and political-affairs lecture. In fact, you might say that Soloway has created a trans genre perfectly suited to the fluidity of her subject.

  When the food cart arrives for lunch, Soloway goes over and surveys the array of cold cuts, shouting, “Meat on the set!” And then Tambor and Light perform the scene the way Jill has modeled it. Maura says quietly and flatly, “Do not put my picture on there. I do not want to be on strangers’ computers.” Shelly, the unstoppable Jewish mother, ignores Maura’s protests. “It has a filter. You look stunning!”

  It feels like a cat’s cradle of skirmishes and connections, each character allowed to shine in all his or her neurotic glory. Gaby Hoffmann compares Soloway’s style of showrunning to psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s concept of “the good enough parent.”

  “You create an environment where the child is safe and then you let it discover itself on its own,” Hoffmann offers. “And you don’t step in and show them how to do it unless they are about to kill themselves—that is what Jill does as a director. She loves to say directing is the easiest thing in the world, but it is incredibly difficult. She makes you feel like, Oh, this could be art. We are making art together.”

  Transparent snuck into pop culture through a side door and collided with the Zeitgeist. Just as Jenji Kohan had helped put Netflix on the map a year before with Orange Is the New Black, Transparent would instantly establish Amazon as a quality digital network and supporter of a more experimental type of TV. The online behemoth had become something of a dirty word in artsy circles, where it was often accused of trying to wipe out small bookstores and publishers. But with the single half hour of Transparent’s opening episode, the company created an irresistible pitch to culture snobs to shell out for an Amazon Prime subscription.

  Soloway had never intended to be a digital trailblazer; in truth, she pitched the idea of Transparent to everyone else in town. After many years of working on cable TV series such as Six Feet Under and United States of Tara, and of seeing her own projects go nowhere, Soloway was frustrated. She had some nibbles of interest from prestige cable execs but knew “it would’ve taken a few years, and it might never have ended up on the air. HBO just didn’t need it the way Amazon did.” And Amazon would give her the freedom to make a five-hour independent movie sliced into half-hour segments.

  The show’s full first season premiered in September 2014, just as rumors were beginning to seep into the tabloids about the transition of Olympic hero turned Kardashian patriarch Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn Jenner. Transparent wasn’t entirely breaking ground by featuring a major trans character—The L Word introduced a transgender character in 2006, and Orange Is the New Black had recently made transgender actress Laverne Cox a Time magazine cover girl—but it was the first mainstream show to put a trans character at its center, and with Jenner in the news, suddenly Transparent seemed like a crystallization of a momentous cultural shift.

  For Soloway, it was a shock. As she told IndieWire in 2015, “We thought we were making a smallish show for a smallish group of people that was going to resonate with queer people and maybe with Jewish people and feminists.” Instead, says the show’s executive producer Andrea Sperling, “We tapped into something that was brewing in our society.” She muses that the show may even have influenced Jenner’s public coming out, since she was in the midst of transitioning when Transparent premiered. “The time was right.”

  * * *

  Jill and Faith Soloway grew up in Chicago in the late sixties and seventies in a racially integrated community of brick town houses near the South Side, attending a mostly black school. Their mother, Elaine, worked as a teacher and helped put her British-born husband, Harry, through medical school. After Harry became a psychiatrist, the family moved across town to a Gold Coast condo and sent Jill to a private Jewish school. Even so, the Soloway household was secular, with televi
sion the closest thing to a family religion. Soloway’s parents each had their own sets, indicative of their somewhat separate lives. Every night after dinner, Soloway ate ice cream and watched such seventies fare as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Brady Bunch.

  Obsessed with fame, Soloway wrote fan fiction about movie stars and chased after rock bands with her girlfriends. She also spent hours performing and making videos with her sister. After graduating from college, she returned to Chicago, where she produced commercials and worked on a documentary. She began to fantasize about making a documentary of her own—about what it feels like to have been on The Brady Bunch, to be actress Eve Plumb. Instead, Jill and Faith ended up turning the idea into an over-the-top live stage show at the Annoyance Theatre, a Chicago fringe performance space. (Faith was already a fixture on the scene as musical director of Second City and co-creator of Annoyance Theatre’s long-running musical Co-Ed Prison Sluts.)

  Premiering in the summer of 1990, The Real Live Brady Bunch featured future stars Jane Lynch and Andy Richter as Carol and Mike Brady. Once a week, clad in thrift-shop flares and hideously patterned shirts, the cast reenacted episodes of the original series verbatim—to such acclaim that the show eventually had successful runs in New York and Los Angeles.

  Suddenly, Hollywood producers were interested in the sisters Soloway. They cowrote a pilot called Jewess Jones for HBO, about a superheroine whose frizzy hair alerted her to danger and whose special skill was knowing how much food to order in a restaurant—but nothing came of it. Faith soon moved to Boston to pursue life as a folk singer, and Jill drifted into a bohemian existence in rural California, writing unproduced pilots and becoming a single mom. In need of money, she got a staff job on The Steve Harvey Show, followed by writing jobs on a number of short-lived sitcoms. She continued to perform and write for her own sanity, placing a short story called “Courteney Cox’s Asshole” in the literary journal Zyzzyva. A hilariously meta riff on fame, it imagined the personal assistant to the Friends star dealing with rumors that her boss bleached her anus.

  Soloway’s agent included the story in a submission to Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, and it impressed him enough that he hired Soloway to write for the second season of the show. In a tribute to her in Time magazine, Ball recalled that within that very short story, “Jill managed to convey the very real pain of a soul yearning to be authentic in a completely inauthentic world, as well as that soul’s eventual success in achieving desired authenticity.”

  On Six Feet Under, Soloway explored ideas and themes that would recur later in her work: the very first episode she wrote for the HBO series included a moonlit hippie party, a woman acting on her sexual impulses at work, a teenage boy deflowered by an older woman, and a female rabbi whose consultation with Nate Fisher leads him to suggest, “Maybe God’s a woman.” In her last Six Feet Under episode, she wrote a scene in which matriarch Ruth Fisher drunkenly proposes to a table full of friends that they create “a land of no men” (except when they are needed for child care).

  Soloway says that her experience in the Six Feet Under writers’ room was absolutely formative, with Ball serving as a great mentor. “He taught a very receptive style, where he didn’t really have an agenda. He let things flow and let the conversation of the room guide the story,” so that the writers felt that they were tapping directly into the Fisher family members’ psyches. There was also a compulsion to share personal hijinks and traumas, providing building blocks for emotionally realistic characters. The Six Feet Under writers’ room mantra was “Feed the machine!” she says. “You’d start telling a story—’Hey, this crazy thing happened to me this weekend’—and everyone would be like, ‘Feed the machine! Feed the machine!’ ” she chants, pounding on the table.

  After Six Feet Under, Soloway briefly worked as a consulting producer on Grey’s Anatomy, but she found that Shondaland was not a good fit. “I guess I just always really wanted to be in charge,” she says, sighing deeply. “So, any time I was in a consultant position, I felt like I couldn’t do my thing, and got frustrated.” Rhimes soon let her go. The situation at her next gig, United States of Tara, was entirely different: Diablo Cody had been given creative control of this Showtime dramedy about a woman with multiple personality disorder but didn’t feel comfortable wielding the power. “I needed to take control and steer the ship,” Cody says now, “but I couldn’t do it, so I just watched people fighting over the wheel.”

  Soloway took over showrunning duties in season two and vowed to help Cody make the show her own. “Jill completely changed the dynamic of the writers’ room,” says Cody. “She has this really amazing maternal feminine energy. It suddenly became a really warm, creative place.” Among Soloway’s new hires was playwright Sheila Callaghan, who had written a play called That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play, a dissection of media misogyny. “At the center of Tara is a girl with multiple personalities who was sexually abused as a child, so basically Jill was looking for somebody with a feminist sensibility who could write rape funny. I like to say she googled ‘rape,’ ‘playwrights,’ and ‘feminist’ and she got me.”

  Soloway had just given birth to her second child, and when she found out Callaghan also had a baby, she created a nursery in the garage of the writers’ bungalow. “She really wanted to establish a workplace that was female-friendly, not just for her own interests but generally, as a statement,” says Callaghan. That female-friendliness extended to the working spaces: “Jill ran our room like a womb. Lots of maternal energy.” Soloway also encouraged Cody to follow some of her more unorthodox instincts—the two women wrote an episode about a Christian hell house—that didn’t always please the network.

  When asked whom Soloway conflicted with, Cody chuckles. “Everybody! We had the best season ever, and we scared the shit out of everybody in charge . . . so they fired her.”

  By 2011, Soloway was between jobs, with two children to feed. Her Chicago friend Jane Lynch set her up to meet with Ryan Murphy about a job on his smash hit Glee, but it fell through; Murphy had apparently heard through the grapevine that Soloway was “difficult”—the second-ugliest word for a woman in Hollywood next to “unrelatable.” She started to develop a series for HBO with Zooey Deschanel starring as sixties groupie Pamela Des Barres, but Deschanel took a job on New Girl. Even more frustrating, she watched as twenty-five-year-old Lena Dunham swan-dived into her pool, first with the low-budget movie Tiny Furniture and then with Girls. After spending decades being told by executives that her characters were too unlikable or neurotic, Soloway was stunned to watch Dunham make those things an unapologetic virtue.

  “The reason HBO picked up that show instead of mine was because they can see her voice,” Soloway said in a speech at the Directors Guild of America. She recalled telling her husband, music supervisor Bruce Gilbert, “No one can see my voice. All I am is that girl who used to write on Six Feet Under.” Rather than continue to play handmaiden to someone else’s vision, Soloway finally showcased her own. The 2013 indie film Afternoon Delight, which she wrote and directed, was a broken buddy movie, a collision between different versions of femininity. In it, a dissatisfied LA mom (Kathryn Hahn) takes a teenage prostitute (Juno Temple) under her wing, hiring her to be the live-in nanny. The narrative offers no pat answers, and the film’s tone is so uneasy that Soloway dubbed it “funcomfortable.” Afternoon Delight went on to win Soloway the directing award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

  * * *

  While Soloway was creating the alternative family of Afternoon Delight, she was also processing some family drama of her own. Her seventy-five-year-old father called to let her know he was coming out as trans: Harry Soloway would henceforth be known as Carrie Soloway. Her children would now call Carrie “Moppa,” a name halfway between “Mama” and “Poppa.”

  This news obviously had strong potential as the basis for a script, but Jill let the news percolate for a long while. It made her retroactively question everything in her life, from her father’s distant
and depressive behavior to her own sexuality. Faith had come out as a lesbian in her twenties; Jill was married with children but had long identified with queer culture and disdained girlie accoutrements. As she began to create Transparent, Jill Soloway also re-created herself.

  She and Faith kicked around the idea of making a documentary about being the children of a trans parent, but the idea soon morphed into drama. After spotting actress Gaby Hoffmann in a brief role on the TV series Louie, Soloway knew she wanted to involve her in the project. They met up at Sundance, and Hoffmann says she was entranced by Soloway. “We sat down, and five minutes later we were both crying—well, I’m not sure that’s what actually happened, but that is what it felt like. There was no chitchat; we were just in deep.” She told Hoffmann about Carrie’s coming out and that she wanted to make a TV show about a family coming to grips with this experience. Hoffmann was excited but dubious. “In my mind, I was like, If anyone ever lets you do this . . .’ ” she mutters.

  Over the next few months, Hoffmann says Soloway would send her “little scenes here and there, and we started playing around with it.” They began to shoot some material with Jim Frohna, the director of photography who had done Afternoon Delight, even as Soloway also worked on a different idea for a movie with Hoffmann. Soloway’s agent pitched the script for what would become Transparent all over town, and HBO agreed to develop it—but Soloway had been down that road before. Development might result in a series several years down the line, or it might end in tears. This project was too urgent and personal to chance it. So, instead, she sold it to Amazon’s fledgling streaming network, which would let her shoot the pilot immediately, with minimal interference. And if the pilot wasn’t a success for Amazon, it would let her sell it elsewhere.