by Robin Romm
You are not allowed to mention that hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted every year on this process. If you think that corporate capitalism is not the best systemic structure to put in charge of storytelling in America, you really need to keep that to yourself.
In the worst of these environments, the show runners behave like tin-pot dictators. They change their minds relentlessly. They rewrite everybody and act like they’re the ones being put out by the terrible writers who work for them. If you go into your show runner’s office and say, “I hate the way you rewrote this scene. Can we go back to what I had?”—well, you would never do that. You could seriously get fired for doing that. The show runner is allowed to do whatever he wants all the time and any brushback whatsoever is off the table. Your job is to tell him he’s brilliant while he destroys your work.
Over the years I’ve been through it all, but so many writers have. One show runner made me sit in the room and watch him while he rewrote my script. One guy could never remember what he had told anybody to write; he was also a screamer. It was, as one might imagine, an exhausting combination. (He turned out to be a cokehead.)
One guy I worked for would rewrite my outlines, and then put my name on them when he handed them into the network. Then I’d end up on phone calls with people who would say things like, “Well, Theresa, this outline doesn’t quite work for me.” And I’d think, Well, it doesn’t work for me either. The other thing that doesn’t work for me is having someone putting my name on something I didn’t write. Having your name on things you didn’t actually write is the sea that everyone in television swims in. Unless you’re the show runner, your writing is treated like raw material for anyone and everyone to mess with.
One time I got fired from a show because the show runner put poop jokes into one of my scripts, and it offended the star of the show. No one ever told the star that I hadn’t written any of the offensive material. I just got fired.
The misogyny is beyond anything that people believe when I tell these stories. On my first job in television, when I was in my twenties, I would sit, dazed, while a roomful of men sat around and told fist-up-the-ass jokes, roaring with laughter. In another room, the guys would sit around and pitch stories, and then write everything down in great detail on little white cards. Whenever a scene with female characters showed up they would write a card that said, “girl scene here.” Then they would look at me and say, “You’re a woman, you write this.” When I said, “You know where I come from, we write both women and men,” it was considered provocative.
One time, I was in a room where one of the guys was pitching a beat in a story. He said musingly, “Two people walk into a bar. No wait. Two people and a woman walk into a bar.”
One time, after a number of seriously offensive jokes were told in succession, I said, “Come on, you guys, am I going to have to leave the room?” Instead of apologizing, one of my male peers said to me, “If you think that’s rough, you haven’t been in enough writers’ rooms.”
“Don’t tell me where I’ve been, asshole,” I replied.
Okay, I didn’t really say that, I just thought it. But the rest of those stories are true.
Why would any writer with curiosity and brains and a simple will to tell a decent story put up with bullshit like this?
Well, they do pay you a lot of money. Writers of all other genres—fiction, theater, poetry, nonfiction, independent film—generally don’t make much money at all. By contrast, television writers are quite well paid, although many of them don’t think so because if you spend too much time in Hollywood, you inevitably end up comparing yourself to people who make even more than you do.
Back in the day, writers like Clifford Odets, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner went out to Hollywood to make money, and the system treated them like this as well. And they complained, drank too much, fell into despair, and went back to their “real” writing.
I don’t know why I put “real” in quotes; they actually were leaving this nonsense and going back to doing real writing. And that sort of thing is still going on: We all howl about it and write novels and plays and movies like Barton Fink, excoriate Hollywood, and then go back for more money.
I personally had given up on all that nuttiness by the time I got that phone call from my agent, so many moons ago. Truth be told, I was in a healthier headspace back then. I was living where I wanted to be living, doing what I wanted to be doing, and hanging out with the people I wanted to be hanging out with. I didn’t have any fierce need to run my own television show. At least, I wasn’t chasing it.
Why didn’t I stay there? When I think back to that day when I was just walking to rehearsal for a play that paid me next to nothing in a lousy space in Midtown, before my agent called to tell me Mr. Spielberg was infatuated, mostly what I remember is that I was happy.
But I don’t know one person on planet Earth who would have turned down that offer. Everyone wants their own show. I recently found out that one of my favorite novelists wasn’t writing novels anymore because he was trying to get his own show on Showtime. Apparently he needs the money, but trust me, it’s not merely about the money. The thought of having your own TV show is a big promise to a hungry little ego.
My friend Lisa cops to the hungry little ego. “Twelve to fifteen million people hearing my words and seeing characters who they love, and I love expressing my values and my empathy and my humor, I fucking love that. I really like being one of the people who has the privilege of pouring stuff out into the world and hoping it lands and sticks and resonates with whoever’s watching and listening. Full of myself a little? Yeah, I think you have to be, to think that your work is worth the many millions of dollars to film it, and the attention of the audience.”
Her position, I think, really is swell. I also think that Lisa’s hungry little ego is a sort of pleasant and respectful version of the breed. Most egos don’t behave as well as hers does. Add to that fact this: The apprenticeship of television writing is all about having your own ego kicked in the head so many times it develops a revenge fantasy. Television is a training ground for fucking up people’s characters just enough to make them truly dangerous when they are finally given power over other creative souls.
And the truth is, everyone in the industry knows it.
“I can’t say I enjoy writing for television,” another friend told me. “It’s unhealthy in general. The system is a killer. You sit in a room with other writers eight hours a day, then the show runner comes in and makes all the decisions. And that’s the part before you get notes, do rewrites, more notes, more rewrites, then get totally rewritten anyway.” But she started as a playwright and couldn’t get her plays done. When she’s not writing for a television show, she doesn’t have decent health insurance.
In the face of this, we all sit around and tell apocryphal stories about shows where the network left you alone, where the show runner had a good heart and a light hand. There’s always a mythic show out there, where they treat the writing staff with respect and shoot the scene the way you wrote it, and it came out great, and the lowly but talented and decent staff writer is vindicated.
The heart remains hopeful. Every show actually seems like just a great job at the beginning. Everybody likes each other. The network notes haven’t gotten too crazy; the boys haven’t started acting like jerks yet. The excitement is heady. Money! Health care! Telling stories for a living! It’s truly all you know, and all you want to know.
Freud writes eloquently about the ego’s need to return time and again to the same pattern of behavior, repetition compulsion, a drive so strong it overrides the pleasure principle and sends us back into traumatic situations that we know are traumatic. That mysterious thing called the Self seems to want to go through the same pain over and over and over again, mystifying itself with the belief that next time, I’ll master it, I’ll control it, I’ll get it right. Mircea Eliade writes of the Myth of Eternal Return. The Buddhists call it samsara. I felt the reality of these definitions strong
ly once when I was stuck in a traffic jam on Sunset Boulevard going to a meeting. Holy shit, I thought. How did I get here again?
Although, endlessly indulging in repetition compulsion might also be tagged as perseverance. Or ambition. Women are told they have to be better, smarter, tougher, and more resilient than their male counterparts because, well, that’s just the way the world is. Men tell us this. I cannot count the number of men—including my new agent and my new manager, who are great and on my side—who blithely announce that this is just the way things are. So maybe we’ve just been programmed this way.
Who knows. One time I asked my daughter Cleo why she was doing something that was getting her in trouble over and over again. She was about four years old. With tears streaming down her face, she said to me, “I’m a stubborn girl.” My husband had to stop himself from laughing. “I wonder where she got that?” he said.
I am a stubborn girl.
I am also a talented and hardworking girl, and the truth is I do play well with others. But in corporate culture, “play well with others” has come to mean absolutely agreeing to everything that gets thrown at you. It is a given: You have to say yes to your boss all the time. And that means all the time, and cheerfully—that, I’m not as good at. And the men who I’ve seen attain success in this world are salesmen, charmers; they know how to manage up.
That’s another phrase I learned: manage up. Basically that means making your bosses love you, whether or not you are doing a good job.
Here is another phrase that I learned: comfort level. When I was fired from the show I created, my soon-to-be-ex–agent told me that the president of NBC had a “comfort level” issue with me.
Comfort level, I came to learn, is Hollywood code for men who don’t want to work with women. So women, who are suspect because there is this comfort level issue have to work extra hard to play well with others and manage up, in addition to sucking everything up and understanding that things are going to be handed to the guys, and then they’re going to tell a lot of sexist jokes and tell you to your face that you’re supposed to be writing the girl scenes because they’re too busy writing about shooting people and blowing things up and other utter bullshit.
Ooops, did I say that? This is another thing that “play well with others” means: Keep your mouth shut.
In television, we have to be very stubborn girls indeed.
I loved running a television show. I was really good at it. I liked that I had to write so much, I liked working with the actors and the directors, I liked production meetings, I liked going all over to location shoots, I loved editing. I loved my postproduction supervisor and my line producer; both of them taught me life lessons about graceful professionalism, taking care of your collaborators. I ran a clean set, so the people who worked there were happy. I was a good general.
I also have to admit that it was fun rewriting my whole writing staff on Smash. “Fun” might be too strong. Because I hated having it done to me so much, it was not something I took on lightly; I actually tried not to rewrite everything egregiously just because I could. But for that first season at least, it was my show and I had the last word and I understood the thrill of that, and the responsibility. So I did my job, and I stand by it.
But no matter how hard I tried—and trust me, I’m not a lunatic, and I did try—the boys didn’t want me running that show. One of the other executive producers kept saying, “But who is in charge?” He had never worked on a television show before so I assumed this was just informational, and I would tell him, point-blank: I am the show runner. That means I am in charge. This struck him as more than slightly insane. I had to keep explaining to him how television shows work: You stand with the show runner. You don’t keep attacking the show runner; it will bring the show down. It was a truth he did not want to understand.
There was also an architectural problem in the power structure above me. How to “manage up” was never very clear. Mr. Spielberg is an enormous force and a great storyteller. He and the head of the network both believed that they were in charge. There was a strange dysplasia. They seemed to think that I was some kind of factotum, or typewriter even. No matter how polite I was, it rocked everyone to the core when the typewriter talked back.
Was it gender based? It sure felt like it. The power structure included ten men and one woman, and, in spite of all their second-guessing and wrangling, the show was terrific until they fired the woman in charge. I was explicitly told, during my firing, that the show was “too important to the network,” and so they were taking it out of my hands. The person they gave it to had virtually no credentials and no experience in the theater. His television credits were nowhere near as comprehensive as mine. The show died under his watch. Two years later, another network gave him another show to run. Meanwhile, I was still being told that I was unemployable because everyone knew that I was a lunatic.
The whole thing was dreadful. And I do want to do it again. Is this like childbirth? You think, Oh god, it’s so great having a kid, I don’t remember the pain. No, it’s actually not like that. The memory of the pain is pretty vivid.
Woody Allen has famously admitted the heart wants what it wants. But what does that mean? Is that just a way of excusing inappropriate desire?
I tell myself that it’s not just enraged ego; I have stories to tell. My heart wants to tell stories. Women should be telling stories. And the earth will not survive without women claiming their voices and their partnership for its people. It may not survive even so. So my heart says, get up, get back in the game, this isn’t just about you. Stand up, you stubborn girl. If I have an ambition, it is to change the world. So yes, I am ambitious. And while I do believe in playing well with others, I ultimately don’t know how to keep my mouth shut. What storyteller does?
I wish this were not the story I have to tell today. I have other stories. I am anxious to get on with them.
On Impractical Urges
AYANA MATHIS
I.
It is October 2012. I am in Paris. In May 2011 I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In July of that same year I sold my first novel. A few months later, I sold the first European rights to a small French publisher. In celebration of these events, my then girlfriend and I rented a little apartment in the Passage du Grand Cerf, one of those stunning nineteenth-century covered shopping arcades, with a glass and wrought iron roof arching over the marble-tiled walkway below. The Passage is more beautiful than we’d anticipated. At night a grainy yellow light shows from the fixtures above the locked boutiques, a sexy ambient light that illumines our walk to the apartment door, our steps clicking on the marble floors and echoing through the deserted passage.
I have one professional obligation. A popular magazine has decided to review my novel—we are three months from its publication—and they would like a quote to include in their article. They will call me at 2 PM on a Thursday on the rented apartment’s telephone. Thursday dawns brilliant and blue. I get up early and have a pastry and coffee at a café on Rue Montorgueil. I walk to the Tuileries and then to the Place des Vosges.
At 1:30 PM,I rush across town to the apartment and sprint up the stairs. I was told the call from the magazine would be brief. I pick at my fingernails and hope they’ll call on time because the gorgeous afternoon is going on without me, and the forecast calls for rain the next day. It is two o’clock, and then five past and then nearly ten past and, really, I am getting a little huffy and have begun to search for the number to call my publicist’s office when the phone rings.
“Hello,” I say briskly. There is a delay in the connection, and then a voice says, clear as day, clear as though it were sitting next to me, “Is this Ayana?”
“Yes,” I say.
“This is Oprah Winfrey.” There is a long pause.
“No,” I reply. “It isn’t.”
“It is. It’s Oprah Winfrey.”
My head buzzes and my heart feels as though it has grown dangerously large in my chest. Its beati
ng might crack my ribs. I look around for a bottle of water, but there isn’t one. I think I might like to smoke a cigarette, but I can’t do that either because I am on a landline sitting on this couch in this apartment in Paris talking to Oprah Winfrey, and a cigarette would not be appropriate because, somehow, she might see me. I take a deep breath and start over. “Hello,” I say.
A great many things are said during our conversation, about my novel and literature in general. Oprah quotes Toni Morrison from memory. My goodness, I think, she really does read all of those books. On we go talking, and I might even sound a little bit natural because I am a good mimic and I can mimic “natural.” It’s all going very well until my girlfriend returns to the apartment and something in my tone (perhaps I didn’t sound as “natural” as I thought I did) makes her pause. She stands in front of me with her head cocked, listening. After a minute or so, she jabs at me with her index finger and starts waving her hands around and mouthing, exaggeratedly like a silent film actress, “Is that Oprah Winfrey? Is that Oprah Winfrey?”
Oprah says I shouldn’t tell anyone about being the Book Club pick because it’s all a huge secret until it’s announced. She also tells me that instead of publishing the book in January as planned, she’s going to have them move it up so it can be available for the holidays. Then she’s gone, and I am out on the street standing near a little playground bent at the waist with my hands on my knees to steady myself. My girlfriend is lying on the asphalt kind of laughing/crying. The French passersby are not particularly amused.
When you are a writer, people will always ask, “When did you know you wanted to be a writer?” I have an answer for that question: I starting writing when I was a kid. When I was nine, I filled a marble notebook with short stories about a little girl named Blue. When I got a little older, I wrote poetry and wanted to be a poet. I like this answer because it is true and also because it is neat and satisfying. I had an aspiration, and with some luck and hard work, it was realized, a sure sign of an intact American Dream, an assurance that merit does indeed determine success. Any other answer raises the specter of randomness, or worse, the uncomfortable truth that there are a great many people who work very hard for all kinds of things and never, ever get them.