The two writers went off and came back with a proposal for a series about a romance expert whose own romantic life comes crashing down to earth when her husband leaves her. Friends had been cunningly modeled on Cheers, and so Kauffman and Crane’s next show would seek to borrow some of Cheers’s fairy dust by casting none other than Kirstie Alley.
The combination of Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions’ savvy comedic instincts and the star wattage of Alley fairly guaranteed another smash hit for NBC, and Veronica’s Closet debuted in the fall of 1997 in the prime slot immediately following Seinfeld.
For David Crane, being a budding mogul meant not doing the thing he was best at in the world so he could play a role he did not particularly want to play. Crane was instructed to delegate the work of Friends to others while he devoted himself to getting Veronica’s Closet off the ground. Crane found that he was continually leaving rooms in which he wanted to stay in order to enter rooms he did not particularly want to be in.
“Why are you doing this?” his partner, Jeffrey Klarik, asked him. “You’re so happy. Why are you doing this?” Crane could not come up with a suitable answer, other than “I’m supposed to.”
Crane would pull off the same trick in both rooms, entering and listening quietly as a particular joke or story point was the subject of ardent debate. When the conversation reached a temporary lull, Crane would weave together the differing strands of ideas into one perfectly taut and pleasing rope of plot. Heads would nod at this remarkable feat of writerly ingenuity. Then he would leave, and the writers would collectively panic: Had anyone written all of that down?
It would have been a manageable difficulty if it had only been Crane who preferred his firstborn to his newborn, but Kauffman and Bright also found that they preferred Friends to Veronica’s Closet. Crane and Kauffman drove the writers just as hard in the Veronica’s Closet room as they did for Friends. And many of the writers had either already written for Friends or would go on to do so. As much of themselves as they poured into Veronica’s Closet, they never cracked the code of what the show was to be about or who it was for. The best team of writers in the world could not do that work for them, and so Veronica’s Closet floundered.
Friends had rapidly come to understand what it was best at, and Veronica’s Closet, stuffed full of potential, could not manage the same trick. It was, ultimately, less about what went wrong with Veronica’s Closet and more about what had gone right with Friends. It simply did not matter how many talented, hardworking, brilliant people you might gather together; creating great television was at least partially a matter of blind luck. Veronica’s Closet, writer Ellen Kreamer (who would soon go on to work on Friends) thought, suffered from never entirely being able to figure out just what it was.
Matters only got worse with the premiere of Jesse the following season. Friends veteran Ira Ungerleider created the show, starring Christina Applegate as a single mother juggling a new boyfriend, a newly returned ex-husband, and a cranky father whose bar she worked at. The general consensus was that if Crane and Kauffman were able to devote themselves to Veronica’s Closet with the same tenacity they gave to Friends, it could be a solid piece of television comedy. Kevin Bright believed Jesse lacked that potential, even with Kauffman and Crane’s involvement, and that it had been a mistake to empower an idea they had not originated, especially one that he saw as being worse than mediocre.
Veronica’s Closet lasted three seasons; Jesse only made it two. The promise of a future Bright/Kauffman/Crane empire had fizzled unceremoniously, and David Crane, for one, could not have been any more pleased about it. The truth was, the life of the television mogul was not for him. Crane understood that he was not meant to be a supervisor. Other showrunners could transform into superintendents, overseeing others’ writing, but the contracting of Crane’s world felt nothing short of wonderful. Nothing could distract him now from the business of writing Friends.
CHAPTER 11
THE FIFTH DENTIST
Long Days and Longer Nights Inside the Writers’ Room
Every writer knew the sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. David Crane would enter the room, toting a script full of notes scribbled in the margins. He would sit down in his chair and begin drumming his fingers on the table before announcing, “All right, we’ve got a lot of really good stuff here.” The assembled writers would silently groan, knowing that this was Crane-ian code for a full script rewrite. Everything was out, and it was time to start again.
“Good enough” was not a concept Crane, or Marta Kauffman, understood or accepted. One day during the first season, writer Jeff Astrof approached Crane with a proposal. “Look,” he told Crane, “right now we work one hundred percent of the allotted time and we have a show that’s one hundred. I believe that if we worked fifty percent of the time we’d have a show that’s seventy-five, so maybe we work seventy-five percent of the time and have a show that’s like a ninety.” Crane instantly rejected the proposal: “Absolutely not. The show has to be one hundred.” There might have been a faster way to get the work done. But this was Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s show, and their room.
After hiring their staff for the first season, Crane and Kauffman gathered the writers to deliver a pep talk, and a challenge. “Comedy is king,” Crane told the assembled writers. “This is a show where we want everything to be as funny as it can be.” For writers in their midtwenties, many of whom were on their first or second jobs in the industry, this was a thrilling proclamation. Writers like the team of Astrof and Mike Sikowitz had always felt deeply competitive about crafting the best possible joke and getting it into the script—Astrof’s concerns about the punishing schedule notwithstanding—and Crane was seemingly opening the doors wide to all competitors.
Sikowitz soon realized that Kauffman and Crane felt confident about being able to supply the emotional backbone for the show, leading the process of designing the season-long arcs for each character, and were counting on their writing staff to jam their scripts full of as many killer jokes as possible. It was a remarkable feeling to be given the green light to simply be funny. The planning of emotional beats was a major part of the preparatory work for the season and would be done by the writers’ room as a whole, but it was understood that Kauffman and Crane were the ablest writers when it came to finding the nuances of feeling that would hook viewers.
The Friends writers’ room was simultaneously a party room and a prison cell, a wild daily gathering whose participants, like the dinner guests in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, could never leave. Participants were thrilled to be a part of the work of writing Friends. Each day was a marvel, and it was an honor to be granted the opportunity to work alongside such gifted, committed, fiercely original imaginations. But it was simply not possible to avoid occasionally sighing and wishing to go home.
Adam Chase was astounded by the regular fourteen-to-sixteen-hour days around the giant desk in the seventh-floor boardroom, which on occasion stretched to a full twenty-four-hour shift, like a doctor on call or a factory worker earning overtime pay. But for Chase, the drudgery was also a moveable feast, an ongoing party that he was lucky enough to be invited to on a daily basis. A good deal of the pleasure came from Crane and Kauffman’s willingness to let relative newcomers like Chase play as near-equals.
On many shows, there was one overhanging question lingering behind any discussion in the writers’ room: “What’s the pitch?” If you weren’t coming in with a distinct, carefully worked-out resolution to the problem you were chewing over, there simply was no time to devote to your musings. The showrunner would be annoyed at your having wasted their time, and the conversation would rapidly move on to more fertile territory.
This was never how Friends worked. Crane and Kauffman were only too pleased to have any one of their writers, however young or inexperienced, bring the discussion to a halt with a question or concern. Kauffman and Crane would listen and then open it up to t
he room. How do we solve this problem?
This was in part because Crane and Kauffman themselves were still relatively new to the ways of television. They had never been writers in someone else’s room, having gone directly from theater to freelancing to running Dream On. Crane, by his own estimation, lacked time-management skills, content to let his staff wander far afield before returning to the task at hand.
The remarkable thing about the Friends writers’ room, Chase believed, was its complete allergy to compromise. Not only would Kauffman and Crane never admit defeat and accept what they deemed a mediocre line or joke, neither would any of the members of their staff. (On one rare occasion, after an exceedingly poor run-through, Crane had asked NBC if they might skip that week’s episode. NBC said they would take a new episode in whatever shape it was in, and “The One Where Rachel Smokes” proceeded to air.)
Friends’ style was adapted from Seinfeld’s interlocked model, in which each episode had an A, B, and C plot (Carol is pregnant; Monica is cooking for her parents; Rachel has misplaced her engagement ring). This created the challenge of intertwining separate stories, but it also prompted an insatiable hunger for story lines. A single season of Friends would require seventy-two separate plots, each with its own introduction and resolution, each with its own array of jokes and emotional moments. And fully plotted stories would regularly be tossed out because they flopped in rehearsals or during a shoot. The sheer volume of polished material that the writers of Friends had to come up with placed inordinate pressure on the writers’ room to work in sync and to pick up each other’s slack.
On other shows, more emphasis would be placed on individual effort. Writers would go off on their own and craft scripts, and while the room might polish them, they would remain demonstrably the product of an individual’s effort. Friends was different. Writers would write the first drafts and ultimately be granted credit for the episode. But the true work was done in the room, together. Everyone was responsible for improving each line, each joke, each emotional beat of the show, and it would never be enough to simply do your own work.
Writers would have to endure the process of watching their scripts be slowly, steadily dismantled and rebuilt. To bristle at the process, or to attempt to defend a rejected joke, was counterproductive and would reflect poorly on the writer who attempted it. Writers soon learned that it was far better to jump in and help fix your own script than attempt to protect your original work. This was a team, and anyone who insisted on publicly totting up their batting average would soon find themselves riding the end of the bench. (Later in the show’s run, there were joke rubber stamps passed out to the staff that read, “I Pitched That!”)
The Friends writers’ room was, as some of its participants described it, a remarkable feat of alchemy, in which a dozen talented individuals transformed into a team that was far greater than the sum of its parts. Crane and Kauffman were responsible for hiring writers who each had their own preferred writing style and voice, and ensuring that they complemented each other. It was like an arranged marriage between a dozen different people, and should have been as impossible. Instead, there was a kind of magic present in the room, where writers competing to tell the best joke were also able to carve out their own voices.
Sitting at opposite ends of the conference-room table, Kauffman and Crane were curators of the staff’s efforts. Rather than looking for a fully formed idea that could be inserted directly into the script, they were happy to gather the shards of their writers’ inspiration. They would take one idea from here and one joke from there, and begin assembling workable material. And if they hadn’t found something they were pleased with, they would tell the writers to keep looking. Their writers’ lack of experience was a bonus, not a problem. More than anything, Crane and Kauffman did not want to hear from their writers that this was the way it had always been done on Who’s the Boss? They preferred the company of young writers who did not know about How It Was Done on Television.
The result was an atmosphere that was simultaneously competitive and cooperative. Mike Sikowitz would have times when he drove home to West Hollywood after a long day on the Burbank lot with a feeling of intense disappointment over not having managed to get a single solid joke into the script that day. “What’s wrong with me?” he would think. “I used to be funny.” On the days where Sikowitz successfully logged some killer jokes, he would make the same drive home feeling like he was the king of the world. Being in the Friends writers’ room, Sikowitz thought, was like an emotional stock market. Some days you made a killing, and others you lost your shirt.
It was fun to be in a room of raconteurs, entertainers, and one-liner machines bantering, debating, and performing for each other. But there also was no specified end to the workday, no moment when the writers would punch out and head home. Ordering dinner at the office was a matter of course. All-nighters were a fairly standard occurrence. On David Lagana’s first day on the job as a writers’ assistant, he showed up for work at nine thirty A.M. and left for home at six forty-five the next morning. The last day of the workweek was widely known as Fraturday, as it often did not end until Saturday morning. “I think I just saw your beard grow,” Alexa Junge told Mike Sikowitz during one late night.
The writers would entertain themselves with antics like tossing a small toy football back and forth for hours without letting it drop (which would inspire the episode “The One with the Ball”) or offering cash inducements to eat an entire jar of garlic pickles. They would play video games to blow off steam or watch the latest installment of The Osbournes. And then there were Taste Test Wednesdays, when Scott Silveri or one of the other showrunners would send an assistant to the grocery store to purchase, say, every brand of plain potato chip. The writers would try each variety and vote on their favorites, and then the singular best potato chip would be declared, to the merriment of the assembled judges.
On days when it became clear that it would be another late night, the writers would put on their preferred jam, Chuck Mangione’s jazz-fusion hit “Feels So Good,” on their boombox and listen to it as the sun went down. Sometimes, their dinner order would arrive at the same time, and the writers would burst into Mangione-inspired song: “The food is here, the food is here.” It was no surprise, given what passed for entertainment there, that the room transformed everyone, as Ellen Kreamer thought, into a slightly fatter, greasier-looking version of themselves. Even years later, Kreamer would find that the sound of a crinkling takeout bag would be enough to bring her momentary joy.
One late night, writer Shana Goldberg-Meehan, who joined the show in the fourth season, entered the room, took note of the roiling discontent, and told fellow writers Kreamer and Robert Carlock that they had thirty seconds to go “apeshit crazy” before they got back to work. Kreamer and Carlock jumped on tables and tore the room apart for precisely thirty seconds. It was also the late nights when the conversation in the room, fueled by boredom and exhaustion, often turned to its bawdiest and most puerile, for which there would be notable long-term consequences.
On the rare evenings when he was able to leave the office early (early for Friends, about ten thirty P.M.), Adam Chase would get home, smoke some weed, and turn on the eleven P.M. rerun of Law & Order. Working on Friends was so intense that Chase needed some time to decompress at the end of the day, but he found that his mind was still coming up with jokes—only now they were for Jerry Orbach’s Detective Lennie Briscoe.
Chase was later introduced to René Balcer, a Law & Order producer, who suggested Chase try his hand at some punch-ups for their jokes. In one, Briscoe was talking to a medical examiner standing next to a body with a javelin sticking out of its chest. “What made you go into this line of work?” Briscoe asked. The best the Law & Order crew could come up with was “To meet charming detectives like you.” Chase, whose comic sensibility had been forged in the fires of Friends, knew he had a better answer: “Free javelins.”
Jeff Astr
of would look out through the room’s wall of windows during the endless days working over scripts in the first season, and watch sets being built for the Michael Jordan–starring Looney Tunes film Space Jam (1996). He was surprised to find himself staring at the construction workers and thinking to himself, “Now, that’s a cool job.” There was a profession in which one’s progress could be assessed on a daily basis, in which there were no notes or comments from one’s superiors. At the end of one’s labors, there was a physical object that had not existed prior to the start of one’s work. The idea of a working life without a constant stream of notes and suggestions and rewrites was deeply tempting to Astrof.
Astrof would joke that, on those regular early-morning drives home, he would encounter himself returning to the office, ripping a hole in the space-time continuum. Crane would regularly endure the deeply unpleasant experience of driving home from the Valley to Brentwood during the A.M. rush hour, making what would normally be an easy reverse commute into a harrowing drive. Crane would find himself drifting off to sleep at red lights and resorted to calling his partner, Jeffrey Klarik, on his car phone and demanding that he chat with him in order to keep him awake on the drive home. Writers would learn what it looked like to see the sun come up over the Warner Bros. lot.
Generation Friends Page 16
