Kauffman spent Thursdays working with the actors on set, making sure that they understood the writers’ intentions with a given scene and bringing material back to the writers to rework if the actors were still struggling with it. After the day’s run-through, Kauffman huddled with the director and gave them notes to pass along to the actors. The actors occasionally approached Kauffman directly, looking for guidance about what the writers were looking for.
Many parents worked on the Friends crew, Marta Kauffman among them, and Kauffman arranged for a room on the soundstage to be repurposed as a nursery. Parents could bring in their babies or toddlers along with a caregiver, providing a day-care-like environment that might partially offset the long hours that came with working on Friends. Kauffman particularly enjoyed the early evenings, when writers would often bring in their families, as well, and the sound of children running down the hallways would echo through the Friends offices. Writer Michael Curtis once spotted his five-year-old son playing Nintendo 64 in a back room with Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer, and told himself regretfully: “He’s never going to remember this.”
Fridays got a somewhat later start, with the cast and director arriving in the early afternoon for a camera refresh, where the crew ensured that every aspect of the forthcoming shoot was in its proper place. Everyone took a lengthy break for an early dinner while the audience was invited in for the shoot. Kauffman, accompanied by costume designer Debra McGuire, made it a regular habit to light Shabbat candles on the set.
The shoot for a three-camera show like Friends generally took place in precisely the same order as the script—another way in which the production of a sitcom came to resemble a play. Shooting a single twenty-two-minute episode might take eight hours, lasting until midnight or later, depending on the necessity for last-minute script changes. The shoots would regularly run two or three hours longer than they had in the Burrows era.
In other circumstances, the showrunners’ perfectionist tendencies might have been tempered by the fear that the audience would grow weary of the process and leave. Any further laughs coming from such a diminished audience would sound tinny and weak, even with a solid joke. But Friends—at least after its first season—never had to worry about such matters.
Friends was so popular that not only did it easily fill its studio audience, it had an entire second audience waiting in the wings on the Warner Bros. lot, content with watching on closed-circuit television. If anyone left, feeling like five hours was enough time to spend watching the Friends cast and crew put an episode together, replacement viewers could be drafted from the secondary audience. Friends fans were so devoted that they were willing to make a night of the probability of watching on closed-circuit TV, like a replacement juror sequestered alongside the rest of the jury.
The audience were arbiters of their success. If they received hearty laughs from the studio audience, the Friends staff was confident that the television audience would receive it with similar enthusiasm. The passionate devotion of their fans gave Friends a freedom other shows did not even know they lacked. On other soundstages, there might be a brisk writers’ colloquium if a particular joke was not landing with audiences. The writers might be tasked with coming up with a better way of phrasing a joke, or even replacing a joke entirely if it was felt to be particularly clunky. Friends’ showrunners, by comparison, had the luxury of stopping a taping midway through and rewriting an entire scene that wasn’t working.
The writers would gather in a circle near the stage and huddle together, with Crane leading the impromptu conversation. The mood would be tense. Something the writers had carefully constructed had broken apart in public and would now have to be fixed as hundreds of people watched.
The idea of not only writing an episode of television but doing it against an incredibly short deadline, and in front of an audience of strangers watching you do it, was terrifying for the writers forced to endure this trial by fire. A writers’ assistant would be present, typing rapidly on a laptop to capture the staccato back-and-forth of suggestions for how to improve a scene. It was, Adam Chase thought, as if they had all already leapt off the cliff together. Having done that, they might as well do their best to aim for the water. And all the while, the audience would be watching Crane and the writers, as if they were junior-varsity performers called in to substitute for the fan favorites.
The lines would also have to be run by the actors. Andrew Reich was initially flummoxed by Lisa Kudrow’s blank-faced response to one proposed change. As he began babbling about other suggestions, and panicking that Kudrow hated him, he realized she was just repeating the line to herself in her head. “Oh, yeah—that’s funny,” she told him. “Got it.”
Once everyone was satisfied with a replacement scene, the new lines would be printed out, and the pages would be held up for the actors to study. They might look at the new script for thirty seconds and then declare themselves ready. An hour after the shoot was over, they would likely lack even the foggiest memory of what lines they had delivered, but in that moment, they drew on their ability to flash-memorize anything put before them.
Jeff Strauss, part of the first-season writing staff, was struck by the differences between Friends’ natural tendencies and those of other television series. On other shows, Strauss knew, there was often a tendency to let talented performers carry weak material. The writers might know a particular joke or sequence was not up to par, but without the time to fix it, they would hope that their actors would be able to sell the scene nonetheless. Kauffman and Crane and Burrows were comfortable giving notes to their performers on the stage during a shoot, but it was noticeable to Strauss that their first instinct, when called in for triage on a malfunctioning scene, was to ask whether the writing might be improved, and if so, how it might be improved.
This was so thoroughly established as Friends’ modus operandi that Strauss noticed the actors internalizing this state of affairs. After one particular run-through that had not gone well, Lisa Kudrow approached Strauss with a request. “Don’t rewrite that,” she asked him. “Let us do that better. We can do that better.” Even early in the first season, the writers’ room was unofficially considered the creative hub of Friends and the place where major changes were likely to be made.
Jennifer Aniston had a mantra that she would sometimes repeat after a particular scene hadn’t worked on the first attempt. “Give me a second to find the funny,” she would ask, and take a moment to recalibrate what she was doing. Sometimes, another actor would suggest an adjustment, and they would redo the scene with slight modifications. During the filming of “The One Where Ross Got High,” David Schwimmer cracked up his costars by improvising the line “It tastes like feet” as they gamely attempted to swallow Rachel’s misbegotten trifle. (Only Joey happily scarfs it down, running through a list of its ingredients as proof of its quality: “Custard? Good. Jam? Good. Meat? Good.”)
“Well, that one didn’t suck!” Kauffman and Chase would tell each other as another week’s episode went into the can. And after the shoot was over, Kevin Bright would take the reins. The raw material would be sent over to the editing bay, and Bright would oversee the process of transforming the scenes they had shot into a crisply edited episode. Friends episodes often ran a few minutes long, and a major part of Bright’s work was to trim away lesser jokes while leaving in both the best comic material and all the necessary emotional beats.
It would not always be easy to follow in James Burrows’s footsteps and direct an episode of Friends. Some directors, like Gary Halvorson, fit in smoothly, while others found themselves overwhelmed by the work of steering so enormous a ship. Even experienced television directors could be surprised by the amount of work involved in helming Friends, and Bright and the crew were present to smoothly fill in if the job became too much. Having directed the first-season finale, Bright stepped up to become a regular on the show, ultimately directing fifty-four episodes.
By his own estimation, Bright went too far in his attempt to erase the ghost of James Burrows. Where Burrows had been loose and reactive, Bright sought to capture the perfect shot in every scene. Bright initially neglected the needs of the actors, who rapidly grew frustrated with the excessive demands his style put on their time. A major part of Kevin Bright’s ongoing education in the work of the television director was an appreciation that the best shot was not solely in the auteur’s eye; it was also a matter of keeping his actors fresh and energetic. There was more to Burrows’s loose style than he might have at first acknowledged.
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A crucial element of many shoots was incorporating the guest performers who were to appear on Friends that week. The show’s fixation on guest stars was something of a paradox. Early on, it had discovered that the audience really only wanted to see its six stars banter with each other. And yet, Friends was invested from the very start in familiar actors’ playing supporting roles on the show. This was Friends goosing its own motor, using star power to provide a jolt to the ratings, but it was often the least compelling part of the episodes in which they appeared and a drag on the series as a whole.
Elliott Gould showed up in the second episode as Monica and Ross’s father, and in the seasons that followed, everyone from Charlton Heston to Susan Sarandon to Reese Witherspoon was recruited to appear on the show. Friends featured some of the biggest stars of the 1990s and early 2000s, from Julia Roberts to George Clooney to Alec Baldwin to Winona Ryder to Brad Pitt to Ben Stiller to Gary Oldman. Kevin Bright suspected that many stars were excited about appearing on Friends because of their children. A role on Friends would be something that stars’ children could watch them in and even brag to their friends about.
Some were comedians given the chance to shine in a small role, like Kids in the Hall veteran Kevin McDonald, who played an herbalist Ross visits to clear up a mysterious growth on his butt, or American Pie star Jennifer Coolidge, who played an expat friend of Phoebe and Monica’s who returns with a mysterious, Madonna-esque British accent. Others were familiar television faces, like Full House’s John Stamos as Chandler’s sperm-donor recruit, or Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis as a girlfriend of Joey’s with whom Phoebe and Rachel fall in love. The show incorporated boldface names from a previous generation, like Heston (playing himself, complete with gun and holster, in “The One with Joey’s Dirty Day”) and That Girl star Marlo Thomas as Rachel’s mother. On other occasions, there was the dim bulb of recognition going off somewhere in the back of our minds: Isn’t that Punky Brewster herself, Soleil Moon Frye, as the woman who likes to punch Joey a little too hard?
Perhaps the most memorable supporting role was granted to Tom Selleck, who played Richard, an ophthalmologist and family friend whom Monica falls for early in the second season. Richard is witty and self-contained and charming, and his character is a distinct rebuke to the callow boyfriends that streamed through the show before his arrival. Selleck, familiar to audiences from Magnum, P.I., is a paragon of coolheaded masculinity, and his presence on Friends is a rolling joke, causing Joey and Chandler to seek to prove their own (admittedly questionable) manliness. In “The One Where Old Yeller Dies,” Chandler begins growing a weedy mustache, and Joey rolls cigars between his fingers, each striving in his own puppy-love fashion to imitate Richard. But the age gap between Monica and Richard lingers. Richard hangs out with Chandler and Joey, attending a Rangers game with them, but is dismayed to discover they think of him less as an older brother and more as a cool dad.
(Monica would later pursue Richard’s son Timothy [Michael Vartan], a fellow ophthalmologist, further burnishing her credentials as a woman with a preference for inappropriate men. Monica once offhandedly remarks that if she and Timothy ever married, she could tell their children that she slept with their grandfather.)
In most cases, the writers would start with a character and then begin a discussion about who might play the role. Sometimes, they would know just whom they had in mind for a role. They knew they wanted Aniston’s then-husband Brad Pitt as the Rachel Green–hating Thanksgiving guest for the eighth season’s “The One with the Rumor,” and they were intent on recruiting Kathleen Turner for the role of Chandler’s father.
Producer Todd Stevens would often be charged with managing guest stars’ tight schedules or handling their demands. Heston’s scene was wrapped in only one hour. Marlo Thomas showed up on set with an entourage of assistants and a list of needs but was professional as soon as the cameras rolled. Some potential guest stars never made it to casting. There was talk of recruiting Owen Wilson to play a role, but after the writers read an interview in which Wilson said his biggest fault was giving writers a hard time, everyone collectively agreed that life was too short to deal with Owen Wilson’s demands on the twentieth episode of the season.
The success of Friends transformed the set into a walled garden, beautiful but forbidding. Actors who had been on the show in its more playful early years noticed an increased distance from its stars in later seasons. The stars now read lines together in their dressing rooms. Guest stars were not included in these rehearsals, and while everyone was cordial and polite, there was little chance to get to know their costars or socialize with them. The set had been transformed into a refuge, a second home where its stars could be protected from the hunger of stardom.
The character actors were often amusing in small roles, but many of the above-the-line stars temporarily imported for Friends left an unpleasant aftertaste. Most gave solid performances, but their appearances implied that Friends was less a television show than a receptacle designed to maximize Nielsen ratings. Their presence felt like a contradiction in terms for a show that believed in the alchemical properties of its own stars. What were they here for, after all? Friends felt less confident in its own abilities when they showed up, and while past sitcoms had also occasionally leaned on star power to drum up excitement, the never-ending parade of guest stars made Friends sometimes feel like a marketing scheme and not a television show.
David Crane felt that Sean Penn had been particularly ill served by the show. What was the purpose of bringing in an Oscar-winning actor and then having him play a milquetoast boyfriend of Phoebe’s? It was a role that anyone could have played, and Penn was not able to add much to the part, through no fault of his own. Similarly, Alec Baldwin would later demonstrate how brilliant a comedian he could be on another NBC sitcom, 30 Rock, but was mostly wasted as another overly polite boyfriend of Phoebe’s, who puts off her friends with his relentless optimism. The writers also sometimes boxed themselves into a corner with arcs they began but were never entirely sure how to conclude. Writer Andrew Reich thought Michael Rapaport’s exit from the show, at the end of an arc as Phoebe’s police-officer boyfriend, was particularly undignified; after shooting a bird from bed, he disappeared, never to return.
Actors did not always like how they were cast, either. During the third season of Friends, Swingers star Jon Favreau, who had auditioned for the role of Chandler, was cast as Pete, a regular customer of Monica’s who enters into a halting romance with her. Pete was intended to be an Internet 1.0 dot-com billionaire, and the writers had in mind a sweet but geeky overgrown kid whom Monica slowly warms to.
Favreau never particularly liked the character and was not inclined to play up the nerd-chic aspects of Pete that Crane and the writers had in mind. Eventually, Favreau’s reluctance pushed Crane to adjust Pete’s character arc. Favreau wanted Pete to be cooler than they had intended, and they agreed
that Pete would discover a latent desire to be an ultimate fighting champion. The plotline was never one of Friends’ most coherent (although Monica’s uncovering the payment for a ring that turns out to be an ultimate fighting ring was a clever touch), but it kept Favreau pleased.
The most successful guest performances were by those performers who were able to slot themselves into the show’s hothouse atmosphere and could capably play to type—or against it. Pitt was superb in the eighth season’s “The One with the Rumor” as a high school classmate with a longstanding grudge against Rachel, leaning into the audience’s knowledge of his relationship with Aniston to make something rich and joyous of his hatred. Sarandon is similarly sharp as an older soap opera actress who takes Joey under her wing, and then romances him, in “The One with Joey’s New Brain.”
It was easy to forget, too, how even movie stars could be rattled by the hunger of the live audience. Movie audiences were imaginary strangers, watching in a far-off theater at some future date; television audiences were sitting in front of you, thrilled and judgmental.
When Charlie Sheen appeared in the second season’s “The One with the Chicken Pox,” playing Phoebe’s sailor boyfriend, director Michael Lembeck told Sheen that they would surprise the audience with his appearance. He should plan to wait for a roar of delighted applause on his arrival and pause for laughter after each line, so as not to step on any of his laughs.
Lembeck sat back and watched Sheen’s entrance, and was puzzled when, after he delivered his first line, his gaze began to drift toward the camera aisle. Lembeck called cut, telling the audience that something had gone wrong with the cameras and they would need a minute to reset.
Generation Friends Page 20
