Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  Her growing reputation helped McGuire to open her own shop in Pacific Palisades and start her own fashion line. She designed Lisa Kudrow’s wedding dress, another off-the-shoulder number made from ivory satin, and the lavender dress Courteney Cox wore to the Emmys in 1995. The red-carpet business dried up once designers began offering their gowns free of charge, so McGuire transitioned to making clothing for directors and directors’ spouses for awards shows. She also made Marta Kauffman’s wardrobe for fund-raisers and other events.

  McGuire was terribly dismayed when a Vogue profile of her in 1996 included unflattering references by the author to Kudrow, implying that her figure was dumpier and more in need of being covered up than the more sylphlike Cox and Aniston. Kudrow was stung by the mention, and her fellow actors rallied to her side in support. McGuire’s relationship with the performers she dressed was never quite the same afterward, even though she had not been the one to make the nasty remark about Kudrow.

  In season 2 and beyond, we knew Friends’ characters were growing up because we watched them dress more maturely, more sensibly, more like the adults they were becoming. Rachel in particular went from unemployed former future housewife to coffee-shop waitress to fashion-company employee. Fashion entered the lexicon of the show itself, with Rachel working at Bloomingdale’s, then Ralph Lauren. McGuire knew she had to feature some Ralph Lauren clothing—it was called for in the script—but preferred to limit their exposure on the show. It was important to her that Friends not become a show that was exclusively outfitted by any one designer. McGuire still wanted Rachel to be able to look alluring and sexy but preferred a wardrobe that a working woman in her twenties might enjoy having. Friends intended to make the experience of being young and driftless a universal one, and essential to that process was the desire to visually demonstrate the process of encroaching maturity.

  The Rachel eventually gave way to other hairstyles, another outfit in the closet of Friends’ discarded looks. Even as the show moved on, intent on keeping its style forever fresh, women continued showing up at salons asking to be remade as Rachel Green. Friends’ success had spilled off the television screen and into the world at large. The show was more than a hit; it was now a phenomenon. Instead of seeking to reflect the world back to its viewers, it had remade the world after its own image. Everywhere you went, there was Friends.

  CHAPTER 9

  WE WERE ON A BREAK

  The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 2

  The writers worked out a superlatively dirty joke for Ross and Rachel’s first time having sex in the second season’s “The One Where Ross and Rachel . . . You Know” that belied some of the showrunners’ repeated complaints about Friends’ being prevented from telling the kinds of jokes they were getting away with on Seinfeld. Ross invites Rachel to his job at the Museum of Prehistoric History (a stand-in for the Museum of Natural History), animal-skin blanket and juice boxes in hand, and shows her the (surprisingly dim) stars. (Kevin Bright was terribly disappointed with how the light-show sequence turned out, complaining so bitterly about the botched job that producer Todd Stevens momentarily worried he might lose his job over it.) As they begin taking off their clothes and rolling around on the floor, Rachel pauses and comforts Ross, telling him it’s no big deal. Ross pauses, momentarily confused, and then tells her, “Oh, no. You just rolled over the juice box.”

  Much like Seinfeld’s “The Contest,” an extended joke about jerking off that never used the word masturbate, Friends was getting away with a joke about premature ejaculation by a careful elision of giveaway words. It might be the moment, or it might merely be good acting, but Aniston and Schwimmer feel as if they are laughing for real here, swept up in their characters’ sense of relief at momentary sexual disaster averted. Later, David Crane was convinced that writer Greg Malins had come up with the joke, while Malins was sure it was Mike Sikowitz, and Sikowitz was positive it was Crane. This was symbolic of the writing process on the show, where no one could or would take credit for a classic joke.

  There were obvious markers to reach—first kiss, first time having sex—and Friends did them well and humorously, but Ross and Rachel’s relationship never really settled into a period of calm. Even in its earliest moments, there were intimations that the romantically inept Ross was going to be surprisingly controlling and forbidding. In “The One Where Joey Moves Out,” he hectors Rachel about having gotten a tattoo, before considering the possibilities and softening: “Is it sore, or can ya . . . do stuff?” The thought of her “meaningless animal sex,” as Rachel calls it, with her ex-boyfriend Paolo (admittedly, an infelicitous phrase to use with your current boyfriend) drives him to distraction.

  Ross unspools an entire plan for their future, complete with two children (one boy and one girl) and a home in Scarsdale, so they can be far enough from their parents to breathe but close enough to call on them to babysit. “One minute, I’m holding Ben like a football,” Rachel complains, referring to Ross’s son, “the next thing I know, I’ve got two kids, I’m living in Scarsdale, complaining about the taxes!” Ross agrees to slow his roll, enjoying the relationship for what it is and not what he intends it to be, but their burgeoning romance is poisoned by Ross’s creeping jealousy.

  Needy and insecure, Ross is the high school geek who still cannot believe that a beautiful woman might give him the time of day and is transformed into a sexist stereotype by his insecurity. Ross is instantly jealous when he hears about someone who might offer Rachel a job: “Sounds like Mark something wants to have some sex.”

  “Don’t you trust her?” Monica asks her brother, attempting to slap some sense into him. “Then get over yourself. Grow up!”

  Monica’s intercession is unsuccessful, for Ross remains every bit as distrustful once Rachel starts her new job. He calls her at work, accusatory: “What’s Mark doing answering your phone?” Ross is called on the carpet for his flagrant misbehavior, and he acknowledges his weaknesses. Still reeling from the loss of his ex-wife, he is apprehensive someone will take Rachel away from him, just as Carol was taken. (Central Perk barista Gunther, eavesdropping on the conversation, mumbles his own incantation: “Let it be me, let it be me.”)

  By the middle of the third season, Ross has toppled over into outright hostility toward Rachel’s non-Ross-related pursuits. Ross is strangely resentful of Rachel’s career ambitions. He was once critical of her being “just a waitress,” but when she finds professional purpose, he calls it “just a job.”

  Ross is a good friend but a bad boyfriend, and after winning Rachel over, he begins to take her for granted. Ross’s low point comes when he invades Rachel’s office at a stressful moment during the workday in “The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break,” lighting candles for a lavish lunch spread as Rachel silently fumes. (“Excuse me,” she tells a caller, “I’m going to have to call you back. I’ve got Shemp in my office.”) “I don’t feel like I even have a girlfriend anymore,” Ross whines, and Rachel, drained, later suggests that they take “a break from us.”

  Ross famously misinterprets Rachel’s suggestion, first thinking she means they should get frozen yogurt and then believing he is a sexual free agent. Ross calls that evening and hears that Mark is at her apartment, and heads out to a party, where he is yanked onto the dance floor by lovely copy-shop employee Chloe (Angela Featherstone), whom Joey and Chandler have been semi-creepily enthusing about for much of the season.

  There is a clever, subtle callback here to the beginning of Ross and Rachel’s romance, with U2’s “With or Without You” playing when Chloe gets Ross to dance with her. “I like this song,” Ross mutters, and viewers may remember that Ross dedicated this very song to Rachel over the radio when seeking to apologize for his callous pros-and-cons behavior the previous season. Even in his moment of forgetting Rachel, some part of Ross is reminded of her.

  In truth, the writing staff had hit a wall and realized that coupling up Ross and Rachel might have been emoti
onally satisfying for the audience, but it was destroying their narrative momentum. Kauffman and Crane had known from the outset that they would have to split up Ross and Rachel. It was just a matter of when. Without the engine of Ross and Rachel’s longing, the show was in danger of becoming fatally bland.

  “We were on a break!” soon became one of Friends’ trustiest punch lines, revisited and resuscitated numerous times over the course of the show, but “The One with the Morning After” is actually among the rawest, most emotional episodes of the series. Rachel, her moment of pique having passed, was trying to call Ross while he was about to sleep with Chloe, and the next morning, she stops by his apartment as he attempts to hide her from sight. Ross feels guilty and plans to confess, but Chandler talks him out of it: “At least wait until the timing’s right. And that’s what deathbeds are for.”

  Rachel finds out and is furious with Ross for his presumption and his cruelty. She trains the intensity of her gaze on Ross’s inadequacies, and her boyfriend withers under the laser beam of her contempt. “A mistake?” she echoes, parroting his sad excuse for his behavior. “What were you trying to put it in, her purse?” Their friends are trapped in Monica’s bedroom as Ross and Rachel vainly attempt to work it out, eavesdropping on the death throes of their romance.

  Ross and Rachel’s friends serve as a surrogate audience to their dispute, their hopes and fears channeling the audience’s own. “They’re going to get through this, aren’t they?” wonders Phoebe.

  “Yeah, come on, it’s Ross and Rachel,” answers Chandler. “They’ve got to.”

  “What if they don’t?” asks Monica.

  There is an unstated understanding that even this will be overcome, the show’s triumphant romance upheld at all costs, but this is a decoy. Ross and Rachel will not work things out, and their break will become permanent. “This can’t be it,” Ross tells Rachel, to which she replies, “Then how come it is?” The camera pulls out on their standing still in Rachel’s living room, frozen in the realization that there is nothing left to say.

  CHAPTER 10

  HOW MANY CAMERAS ARE ACTUALLY ON YOU?

  Contract Negotiations

  David Schwimmer, as the first breakout star from the show, was also the first to be approached about reupping his contract for the third season in 1996. NBC executives expected some challenges but figured Schwimmer would be more than happy to reap a financial windfall from the most successful television series of its time. What they did not bank on was David Schwimmer.

  Schwimmer’s mother, Arlene Coleman-Schwimmer, was a successful divorce lawyer, and young David had grown up in a house where discussions of fair allocations of assets were dinner-table talk. Moreover, after attending Northwestern University, Schwimmer had founded the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago. The Lookingglass was an artistic collective in which resources were shared, and the notion of one actor’s being paid more than another was anathema. At Lookingglass, no one made enough to support themselves—the actors were all holding down second jobs to get by—but each actor was paid the same. Good theater came out of a sense of community, and Friends was not only a hit television show; it was a theatrical ensemble, in which six performers would have to work together, week in and week out, on new plays. Schwimmer was pushing for his costars to think of themselves as “a union of the six of [them].”

  Schwimmer knew that each of his costars had signed a different contract (although they all ran the same five years). He also knew that he was neither the highest-paid actor on the show nor the lowest-paid one. “OK, I’m being advised to go in for more money,” he later told Warren Littlefield about his thought process at the time. “But for me, it goes against everything I truly believe in, in terms of ensemble. The six of us are all leads on the show. We are all here for the same amount of hours. The story lines are always balanced.”

  Schwimmer was emboldened by Warner Bros.’ audacity in publicly bragging about the windfall profits that were due to them for Friends’ syndication rights. The studio was sharing its belief that in two years’ time, when Friends was eligible for syndication, it would receive around $4 million per episode for approximately ninety episodes—an enormous windfall. Merely the first two seasons alone would garner $192 million in syndication payments. How could it make sense for Warner Bros. and the show’s creators to reap hundreds of millions of dollars from Friends’ success while its stars were left with so little in comparison?

  Now Schwimmer was being offered the financial comfort that was many actors’ dream, and he hesitated, thinking of his costars. How could he sit at the rehearsal table, working with his friends and colleagues, knowing that he had gotten a lucrative payday and they had not? So Schwimmer approached his costars and did the unthinkable: He asked them to talk about their salaries.

  “Here’s the deal,” he told them. “I’m being advised to ask for more money, but I think, instead of that, we should all go in together. There’s this expectation that I’m going in to ask for a pay raise. I think we should use this opportunity to talk openly about the six of us being paid the same.” He suggested they threaten to walk off the set if their demands were not met.

  When Friends was being cast, none of the show’s performers, with the exception of Courteney Cox, had prior hits, and even Cox was not truly a bona fide star yet. But after two seasons, the six stars of Friends held similarly lofty places in the Hollywood firmament, with each the subject of unending professional, romantic, and personal speculation. And yet, given the realities of television acting and the pay scale, they were being paid notably different salaries for what amounted to the same work. Each actor had signed a five-year contract, locking them in at what was now a criminally low rate (beginning at $22,500 per episode) for performers who were regularly splashed across magazine front covers and whose show dominated the weekly Nielsen ratings, coming in eighth place for the 1994–95 season and third in 1995–96. (By comparison, the supporting cast of Seinfeld were receiving $150,000 per episode, soon to be quadrupled to $600,000.)

  In making the argument, Schwimmer had the benefit of the show’s own structure and balance on his side. Friends was a show with six equal costars. Lines and plots were parceled out equally to each of the performers, so how could it make sense for them to be paid differing amounts for the same work? Coleman-Schwimmer treated her son’s costars like so many jilted spouses, insisting they know the value of their labor and suggesting that they negotiate in unison. They agreed to ask for $100,000 per episode, which would more than double the highest previous salary for any actor on the show.

  Warner Bros. had a history of stonewalling what it perceived to be excessive contract demands. In addition, the failure of cinematic vehicles like The Pallbearer and Ed rendered the stars’ supposed feature-film bankability substantially more precarious than it might previously have been assumed to be.

  Friends was still in the early flush of its success, and there was little doubt that everyone wanted the show to return for a fourth season. It was fairly common practice for networks to offer early contract extensions to simultaneously reward their stars and keep a show’s key players locked in. NBC countered with an offer of $80,000 per episode for the following seasons. Even though Schwimmer (and his mother) had guided the negotiation process, the show’s stars felt the need to deny that any one actor was leading the charge. This was undoubtedly out of a desire to avoid singling anyone out as responsible for their demands but also spoke to their preference for equality in all things.

  Matthew Perry later told Entertainment Weekly that Schwimmer had never threatened to leave the show without a raise: “It was the year to renegotiate and we thought it was best for the dynamic of the show if we did it together. We didn’t want one person making a fortune and someone else making nothing. Public perception of us changed a little because of it, I think, and that’s not good.”

  The enormous numbers under discussion transformed the Friends cast into anothe
r example in the ongoing national fascination with, and panic over, excess pay. The negotiation was going on just two years after Major League Baseball had canceled its World Series for the first time ever, with players on strike for a more generous labor deal and owners fearful about overpaying stars in free agency. It was also a moment in which the media was fretfully reporting about movie stars like Jim Carrey cracking the $20-million-per-film barrier. Americans loved a success story, and also loved to complain about out-of-touch elites and their excessive salaries.

  It would have been possible for Schwimmer, or Jennifer Aniston, to do better if they negotiated alone, but the results spoke for themselves. After a five-hour late-night session, the union of six walked away with a new four-year deal that began with a collective salary bump to $75,000 per episode starting with the third season. The new contract included a salary increase for each forthcoming season, with $85,000 for the fourth season, $100,000 for the fifth, and $125,000 for the sixth. The numbers were substantial, but the joint deal also meant that each Friends star was now being paid as well as the lowest-paid cast member would have been.

  The deal also gave Warner Bros. and NBC an additional guaranteed year of Friends, with the initial five-year contract now replaced by one that included a sixth season as well. The show was clearly going to continue beyond its first five years, and so purchasing a sixth season—even at a cost of $18 million for just above-the-line acting talent—was well worth it. An additional year of syndication rights alone would be worth, by Warner Bros.’ calculations, $100 million.

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile, the creators of Friends were being offered their own opportunities for enrichment—and they were intent on grabbing them. This, they were told, was the next step. If you had a hit television show, the logical play—the only play—was to produce another show, and another, and another, until you ran a mini-empire of smash hits. After three seasons of Friends, the show appeared to be a well-oiled machine that would only require occasional maintenance to keep running indefinitely. Crane and Kauffman’s representatives pushed them to branch out and start up a new series for NBC. The network was hungry for more original material from them, hoping to offset the likely impending disappearance of Seinfeld and Mad About You with some new smash hits.