Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  Bright had been raised in the fading light of vaudeville and was passionate about its television inheritor, the variety show—the place where his childhood experience met his passion for the moving image. When he graduated, he went to work for producer Joseph Cates, whose brother Gilbert would eventually produce the annual Academy Awards telecast. Bright began by fetching coffee, and by the end of his six-year run with Cates, he was producing variety specials of his own. He produced five David Copperfield specials, the Miss Teenage America pageant, and a number of Johnny Cash specials in the late 1970s and 1980s. Bright had practically cornered the market on variety television produced in New York, but in doing so, he realized that the business was dying. There were fewer and fewer specials being made, and those that remained were being made in California.

  Bright decided to make the leap to Los Angeles, and to comedy. Bright’s history in variety had granted him an accidental specialty in maximizing minimalist budgets. HBO was looking to get away with making half-hour comedy programming in the low six figures, and Bright knew how to do it. He went on to produce comic specials for Paul Shaffer, Harry Shearer, and Merrill Markoe. Bright would also produce the first original-to-syndication sitcom, sold directly to local stations instead of to a network, Madame’s Place (1982), shooting seventy-five episodes of the adventures of a faded-movie-star puppet named Madame in just eighteen weeks.

  Bright had been brought in for Dream On by noted director John Landis (The Blues Brothers, Animal House). Landis was looking to branch out into television but needed an experienced hand to walk him through the work of packaging and producing for TV. Landis had been offered the opportunity to make use of Universal’s remarkable film archive and was in search of marketable ideas when he was introduced to Kauffman and Crane. Bright had not worked in six months when, all at once, he was hired for Dream On and for the pilot of In Living Color, a new comedy sketch series for Fox. It was Bright, a music buff, who convinced Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier to use the Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men” for the sketch featuring their flamboyantly gay film critics, “Men on Film.” Bright assumed that he would stay on with In Living Color, a network show, but when that opportunity fell through for him, he happily became a producer on Dream On.

  After a number of years of working together on Dream On, Kauffman, Bright, and Crane were sitting around their office one day when Kauffman wanted to share her enthusiasm over their professional arrangement, with she and Crane serving as writers and Bright producing. “This is so great,” she told Bright and Crane. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could just keep doing this?” “We could, if you want to,” Bright told her, and beginning in 1993, the three partners had an overall deal with Warner Bros. to produce new television series. That year had not been their year, but now it was 1994, and Kevin Bright was free to throw himself into finding a spot in the network lineup for the fall.

  * * *

  —

  Fox immediately began bombarding Kauffman and Crane with suggested changes to Reality Check, the show that brought viewers inside the mind of a teenager. The network desperately wanted the show to be raunchier than it was, more like a Fox-friendly Dream On. Couldn’t Harry (or Jamie) be older? Couldn’t he already be driving? Couldn’t he be having sex? Their protagonist did indeed become older, a high school junior, not a freshman, and the bulging script was trimmed down by losing some characters, including his father.

  Reality Check was another headache, just like Family Album had been. The network wanted something new, but then wanted that new thing to be as familiar as possible. Kauffman and Crane knew they had made their name with a high-concept series, but Crane in particular was drawn to the idea of an ultra-low-concept show. Sitting in their office on the Warner Bros. lot, Kauffman and Crane began to banter about their own group of friends from New York, a sextet that also included a lesbian couple. They borrowed personality traits from acquaintances and from actors they had worked with, melding together a hodgepodge of characteristics into loose outlines for their protagonists. In the evenings, Kauffman pulled aside two of the babysitters who helped care for her children to quiz them about life as a single twentysomething.

  The two writers drafted a seven-page pitch document to be shared with networks, detailing the characters, the setting, and some of the adventures they imagined unfolding. “It’s about searching for love and commitment and security . . . and a fear of love and commitment and security,” they wrote. “And it’s about friendship, because when you’re young and single in the city, your friends are your family.”

  “That’s basically it,” they closed the pitch document. “And even if we are going to play with the form a little bit, ultimately, it’s about six people who you can invest in. For us, it’s kind of like writing six Martin Tuppers.”

  There were bits of the creators themselves in their characters. Kauffman put more than a touch of herself into the character of Monica, whom she thought of as being someone who always needed to close the marker until it clicked. Monica was worn out by an endless schedule of dating. “She feels like if she has to eat another Caesar salad, she’s going to die,” Kauffman told a New York Times reporter chronicling that year’s pilot season.

  Traces of Crane could be found in the dry, acerbic wit of Chandler. Crane, who is gay, initially thought of making Chandler’s character gay as well, which would have notably changed the story arc of the series to come. Chandler wound up straight, but the kind of straight man Crane envisioned getting regularly mistaken for gay. (A college friend of Kauffman’s named Chandler would later jokingly accuse her of having ruined his life by giving a Friends character his name.) Kauffman also saw some of herself in the antic spirituality of Phoebe.

  The truth was, though, there simply was not enough time to put too much thought into these characters. “WRITE FASTER,” they urged themselves via a message scribbled on their blackboard as the deadline for the script neared. Then the message subtly changed: “WRITE BETTER.”

  The two writers, then in their midthirties, kept it simple. They would pitch the series as being about six intertwined characters, in and out of one another’s apartments and one another’s lives as they went about the ordinary business of their daily existence. Crucially, they wanted a story with three female protagonists who were given equal time and equal heft. They were not just girlfriends, or sisters, or funny sidekicks. Kauffman would later insist that no script ever contain the word bitch (or, for that matter, the phrase shut up). Kauffman and Crane even came up with a tagline they would present to the networks they pitched to: “It’s that time of life when your friends are your family.”

  Crane was more than satisfied with their minimal work. If they had the six characters they were looking for and the setting was roughly acceptable, it was good enough to pitch. To be a television writer was to endlessly spin out new characters, new situations, new juicy story lines. These were just the latest iteration from two hamsters trapped on the Hollywood treadmill. In all likelihood, they thought, this show would disappear without a trace, just like so many of their past pilot scripts. Fox surprised them by expressing interest in green-lighting a script, but Warner Bros. was still interested in cutting a deal elsewhere (at the time, Fox was still an upstart with little of the cachet of the other three networks) and scheduled Kauffman and Crane for a meeting with NBC in December 1993.

  * * *

  —

  Warren Littlefield always judged writers by their ability to hold a room. Could they seize control of the dead Burbank air and commandeer it with the power and vigor of their stories? Could they make script characters come to life? To do so was, of course, little guarantee of future success, but Littlefield intuitively felt that being able to convince jaded network executives was a promising down payment toward winning over a skeptical national audience.

  Kauffman and Crane had worked with NBC once before, on the short-lived 1992 political farce The Powers That Be. The network h
ad been won over by their witty scripts, but Kauffman and Crane had not been the showrunners (Norman Lear of All in the Family fame was also involved in the show, as an executive producer), and Littlefield had felt that the show had never lived up to its potential.

  As Littlefield and his colleagues sipped water, Kauffman and Crane brought the room to life with their amusing, heartfelt pitch about six Manhattan twentysomethings in search of themselves. They acted out the characters and the scenarios for a show they were calling Insomnia Café, allowing the room of network executives to momentarily imagine a crew of friends, swigging coffee and bantering, that felt more like a substitute family.

  It was a simple pitch—Cheers in a coffee shop—but it was more than that. It felt deeply personal, a transmutation of lived experience into a story that would register with the widest possible swath of viewers. A bell was going off in Littlefield’s head, confirming that the nebulous thing he had been in search of since becoming president of NBC had been located. This, finally, was what he wanted.

  Kauffman and Crane’s series was being produced by Warner Bros., and WB Television’s president, Les Moonves, was representing the show’s interests in negotiations. Moonves neglected to tell NBC that Fox had already expressed interest in the show, or even that it had been pitched to other networks at all. Moonves, soon to become the president of CBS’s entertainment division, told Littlefield that picking up the show would come with certain conditions. Acquiring Kauffman and Crane’s series would require a pilot commitment. NBC would have to bypass the script stage, where the network could acquire a single script from the writers and decide whether to proceed to filming a pilot. Filming a poor pilot that did not make it to air would be the equivalent of a $250,000 penalty. NBC would hardly sink under the weight of such a cost, but too many failed pilots could blow a substantial hole in the network’s development budget.

  For Littlefield, it felt like a reasonable request coming from Moonves and the Warner Bros. team, and there wouldn’t be any penalty unless the series wound up a disappointment. Littlefield was confident that the new show would fill one of the slots on their new, youth-oriented Thursday-night lineup, and so the up-front costs of developing the show were simply the price of doing business. Moonves was being aggressive, but NBC wanted to be in business with Warner Bros. on this show and did not want it to end up elsewhere.

  NBC made the pilot commitment for Insomnia Café and took the show off the market. But Kauffman and Crane remained unsatisfied with the show’s title. Their outline for the show was renamed Bleecker Street, after the Manhattan street Kauffman had lived on, and the first draft of the pilot script was labeled NBC Pilot Which Still Needs a Title.

  Littlefield only had one notable tweak he wanted to suggest. He was concerned, he noted to Kauffman and Crane, about how much time their characters were spending in their neighborhood coffee shop. How much action could reasonably take place in a café? Littlefield wanted the characters’ apartments to take on more prominence. And if the characters were meant to live in the same apartment building, as the pilot script indicated, Littlefield suggested that the apartment of roommates Joey and Chandler be placed directly across the hall from Rachel and Monica’s apartment, allowing some of the action to take place in the hallway between their doors.

  Crane thought the note was a solid one. “You could call it Across the Hall,” Littlefield helpfully suggested. “Or just have it be across the hall,” Crane responded, nonplussed by the mediocre title. They still couldn’t settle on a decent title for the show. After a temporary interlude where they adopted Littlefield’s suggestion, Warner Bros. sponsored an internal name-that-show contest. The big winner was Crane’s partner Jeffrey Klarik, who suggested Friends Like Us.

  * * *

  —

  NBC was mostly hands-off after ordering Kauffman and Crane’s pilot, with their notes running to such minor matters as the beige-toned color of the couch in the coffeehouse. (They preferred a less repellent shade.) The one major suggestion the network had for Crane and Kauffman was the addition of an older secondary character. NBC was concerned that if all the main characters were in their twenties, it would distinctly limit the series’ breakout appeal. An older character—even one that made only occasional appearances—could convince hesitant older viewers to check in with Friends Like Us. Perhaps, the network thought, there might be an older acquaintance they ran into at the coffeehouse who could give them advice about their lives?

  It was a poor idea, and while it would not sink the show, it would undoubtedly weaken its spell. Kauffman and Crane reluctantly agreed, and began trying to wedge the character, whom they referred to as “Pat the Cop,” after an older police officer who used to hang out in the movie theater where Dream On writers Jeff Greenstein and Jeff Strauss used to work in Somerville, Massachusetts, during college, into their next script. The writers made a good-faith attempt, even casting the role, but hated the resulting script so much that they pleaded with NBC to drop the idea. If only NBC would kill Pat the Cop, they promised, they would give their six protagonists parents in notable supporting roles, and find older guest stars to attract a more mature audience. NBC gave its permission, and Pat the Cop was no longer.

  The show would live or die on the strength of its six main characters. But who would play the roles?

  CHAPTER 2

  SIX OF ONE

  Casting the Show

  Barbara Miller, the head of casting for Warner Bros. Television, handed over a script. “Read this,” she told Ellie Kanner, “work on some lists, and you’ll meet with David Crane, Marta Kauffman, and Kevin Bright. Be ready!” Kanner, then only twenty-nine, had recently been promoted to casting director, having cast shows like Step by Step and Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and this script would be one of the first she would help to cast at Warner Bros. After reading the script, Kanner was puzzled. Why wasn’t everyone else at Warner Bros. as excited about this pilot as she was?

  It was a casting director’s job to be familiar with most of the young performers in the industry and able to mentally pore over the possibilities and identify strong candidates. Kanner took out her notepad and began making lists of all the funny young performers she knew, breaking them into subcategories for each of the roles in the script: sad-sack divorcé Ross; his luckless-in-love sister, Monica; quirky Phoebe; neurotic Chandler; Chandler’s actor roommate, Joey; and Monica’s high school friend Rachel. Kanner’s assistant Lorna Johnson began calling agencies and checking actors’ availabilities. And as Kanner and Johnson were winnowing their list, they were also being sent further candidates by the agencies. Kanner wound up receiving upward of one thousand headshots for each role.

  It was February 1994, and Kanner knew she only had about eight weeks to scrutinize her lists, audition the performers she’d selected, narrow it down to about one hundred actors that the producers would see, and help them make their final selections. Actors would be called in for a first audition, where they would read briefly from the script. Kanner would sort through the performances and select a smaller swath of actors who would audition for the showrunners as well. The next step would be to pick a handful of finalists for each role—professionally successful but personally devastated Ross, guitar-playing New Age princess Phoebe, tough-talking “downtown woman” Monica, self-impressed heartthrob Joey, runaway bride Rachel, and sarcastic, witty, perpetually single Chandler—who would be given the opportunity to audition for not only Kanner and the showrunners but Warner Bros. executives as well.

  The early casting would be overseen by Kauffman and Bright. Crane had a self-diagnosed tendency to love every actor he saw and had voluntarily removed himself from the first part of the process. He wanted to hire every actor who came in and felt guilty when they couldn’t. Crane would be invaluable in the later stages of casting, but it was primarily Kauffman and Bright’s task to cull the initial list.

  The producers expressed a desire to be open about
race and ethnicity as well. They knew that the Ross and Monica characters were to be siblings, and had decided that they would be played by white performers, but were open to anyone for the other four roles. Kanner’s initial lists included numerous African-American and Asian-American performers. The flexibility was a step forward, to be sure, but some of Friends’ later struggles regarding diversity were etched in stone here. Without an explicit desire to cast actors who looked more like New York, the producers were likely going to end up, as if by default, with an all-white cast. As later critics would note, comedy was a less integrated genre than drama. Dramatic series had room for a greater variety of characters, and their settings—hospitals, precinct houses, courtrooms—allowed for characters from different walks of life to interact. Comedy expected its audiences to embrace its characters and was far more tentative about asking them to identify with characters who were not white and middle-class. Television executives were more fearful of asking audiences to laugh along with characters of color, concerned that such shows would be ignored by the majority-white audience.

  Kauffman and Crane had their own casting ideas, as well. They had auditioned David Schwimmer on a previous pilot of theirs, called Couples, and had loved his work. They had pushed strongly to cast him, but the network had insisted on selecting the other finalist, Jonathan Silverman, instead. Kevin Bright had watched the process, noting the careful language that the network had used, and believed it was a matter of finding Schwimmer too Jewish for network television. The situation was ludicrous, of course; here they were, three Jewish showrunners being forced to select one Jewish actor instead of another one. But Bright suspected that Silverman was seen as a handsome Jew, one who could pass as a leading man, and Schwimmer was not.