Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business

by Lynda Obst

  All of this is dependent, of course, on getting a series on the air. And that is dependent on figuring out what a series is, something I would learn on the job while watching a lot of television.

  TRYING TO LEARN THE GAME

  My team and I unpacked our boxes from location in Boston after wrapping The Invention of Lying in June of 2008, year of the Catastrophe. We moved into our new bungalow at Paramount TV, which we treated like our old bungalow at the Paramount motion picture studio. We decorated it with all our wonderful things, only to discover it was really half a bungalow. We were sharing it with another producer “pod.” Fortunately, it turned out that all of our bungalow-mates were happy with our antique Texas chandelier and furniture. But we discovered that we weren’t supposed to be redecorating our bungalow. Apparently, television offices are supposed to be hellholes in which everyone writes twenty-four hours a day.

  And so, early one morning as we were moving in, the personnel police arrived and took down our chandelier, movie posters and antique coatrack, much to my executive Rachel Abarbanell’s shock. Rachel has been with me for seven years and has evolved to become my trusty president of production, lifesaver and chief of everything.

  She had organized our move impeccably; she wanted me to be excited when I walked into the new office to begin this new facet of our careers. She called me at home in dismay. “Our Texas chandelier and movie posters are coming down!”

  Our bungalow-mates told the personnel police, “But we need a coatrack!” (It was usually eighty-seven degrees in the Valley.) It didn’t matter, because we weren’t supposed to have a decorated office.

  I discovered this when I visited other television offices. They turned out to be frantic production offices thrown together with interchangeable office-catalog furniture; everyone in them is too tired and busy to look up to notice a chandelier. In other offices, people are keeping their heads down in case their shows get canceled. Each office has cycled through five shows in six years, so they are not homey spots where you entertain movie stars and highly sought-after hoo-hahs. “But we’re still doing movies too,” we tried to explain to the personnel police. They didn’t want to hear that, since Paramount was paying us to do television.

  It was the most interesting possible time to be learning TV. I had made a miniseries called The ’60s for NBC years before, and it had been a blast—it was even nominated for an Emmy—but that was essentially making a long movie. It was not playing the television game by any stretch. Now there was so much to learn, it was unbelievable. Everything was “The Package”; “The Season”; “The Showrunner.” I had only a vague sense of what these all-important terms really meant.

  Who my agent was was critically important. I’d been repped by CAA (Creative Artists Agency) throughout my film career. Well, too bad for me; I had to switch to WME. This is not a business whose rules were made to be broken. How many pages were in a script? There should be 121 in a feature; 57 in an hour-long drama. Fascinating. A page a minute. How many acts? Three in a feature; five, I discovered, in a TV pilot. (For commercial breaks!) And what on earth was a cold open? Or a teaser? Just learning the language would take a few seasons. And figuring out what seasons were would take a few seasons.

  I arrived at my Studio City office and sat in my chair, twirled a bit and tried to figure out where to begin. Rick had tipped me off that movie producers tend to fare better in drama “one hours” than comedy “half hours,” so I figured that would be my departure point. I twirled in my chair, read the paper, read Kirkus book reviews, trolled the Internet, twirled some more and started calling writers. But something big was bothering me. A bit embarrassed, I called Rick.

  “Is Rick there? It’s his sister. Again.”

  “I am so, so sorry to bother you so soon,” I said, once he picked up, “and I promise I won’t call all the time; I’ll get the hang of it quickly. But I forgot to ask you one really important question. I promise this is it. What is the difference between a television show and a movie?”

  Rick laughed. “Good question, Lynnie. Better late than never. When I talk to feature writers and producers, I tell them that the main difference is that when you pitch a movie you’re pitching something that ultimately ends. In a television pitch, you’re really pitching characters and essentially what the show is about. You have to give the network a sense of where the show is going and how it will live on. This is broadcast television, so they have to imagine how it can go on for a hundred episodes. So think about that. I love you and I have a meeting.”

  I sat in my chair and pondered. One hundred episodes. What could that possibly mean?

  Our job at the Paramount studio was to feed Paramount’s two main networks, CBS and the CW, both run by Les Moonves. Paramount TV was their main supplier, and that allowed us to simply concentrate on the clear sensibilities of those two network buyers.4 This seemed easy. On the other hand, I had no idea whatsoever how to generate a hundred episodes of anything.

  CBS has been the number-one network continuously since 2005, with the exception of 2008, when it lost to Fox. Moonves has achieved that dominance by building a slate of successful procedural franchises, comedies and reality shows over his tenure since 1995, first fighting to break the back of NBC’s vaunted Thursday-night comedy block in the nineties (Friends, Seinfeld, Mad About You, Will and Grace, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Frasier, etc.), and then heading off the threat of Fox’s powerhouse American Idol—the national star-making competition that spawned so many clones—with the solidity of his schedule. Featuring perennial favorites like CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, Mike and Molly, How I Met Your Mother and Two and a Half Men, his track record in picking hits is remarkable.

  He is a patriarch surrounded by brilliant women he empowers, such as Nina Tassler, his longtime number two at CBS. His scheduling and programming prowess has worked longer than should be possible in a fracturing network universe. Not only has cable siphoned off some of the huge network audience, but now even online streaming engines like Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Facebook and YouTube are getting into original programming and further fragmenting what was, when I was growing up, a three-network universe. But CBS holds on to more than 11.75 million viewers nightly in prime time against all odds, thanks to this programming and scheduling wizard at its helm.

  CBS largely means dramatic procedurals, mostly police and legal series, in which the main story is “closed”—i.e., completed in one episode—like their phenomenally successful franchises CSI and NCIS, which can reboot in every city, and have, or likely will (CSI: NY, CSI: Miami, ad infinitum). I thought and thought and came up with an idea. An old CBS procedural, Cagney and Lacey, served as my template, and I updated it with an article I found in the LA Weekly about the two women running L.A.’s downtown police department, called the Central Division. Downtown L.A., renovated to include the Staples Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall and fancy new co-ops all mixed with L.A.’s skid row, was an incendiary blend, requiring sociology as well as cop instincts. The terrific ladies had both. I did the fun and compulsory ride-along with cops that producers do. Cleverly, we called it Central Division. Under the supervision of the execs at Paramount TV and my agents at WME, we found a showrunner who had worked on CSI whom CBS was excited to work with, and introduced her to the fabulous married-with-children cops.

  It looked like we had the right showrunner, and a show that was right up CBS’s alley. CBS bought the pitch. It turned out that there were three sets of notes—mine, the studio’s (Paramount TV) and the network’s. Guess which one the writer cared about least? I’d never done a procedural before, nor did I know where the act breaks were supposed to go. But we worked on the script all pilot season and delivered an exceedingly mediocre product. But it was so close to what CBS was looking for that we managed to make it “on the bubble.” I had to ask an agent at WME what this meant. It turns out that it means you were neither rejected nor selected. It means you’re almost picked! You’re not dead. You are one of those pilots that could
go either way.

  At Moonves’s other network, the CW, that season, in my never-ending effort to make a career out of How to Lose a Guy, I pitched it as a series, which was a natural, since Paramount Pictures already owned it. We got Jenny Bicks of Sex and the City and Men in Trees, who was, I thought, a perfect writer for the project. We worked really hard with the CW team. But just as we were about to submit the pilot script to the network executives, we got brand-new ideas to add, such as, “I just heard [Katy Perry’s] ‘I Kissed a Girl’ on the radio! Can we come up with a lesbian subplot?” New ideas at this late stage were a bad sign. Maybe they feared the script wasn’t edgy enough and needed to be roughed up a bit. We added some same-sex undertones and got on the bubble with that project as well.

  Now I was on the bubble with two of my scripts. All I had to do was try to get some casting with Central Division. I desperately went through WME’s available female stars, trying to make a “package”: a producer, a showrunner and a star all from the same agency, the home run of the business. (For the agency, at least!)

  I went after Ashley Judd. When it fell through, I went after Ashley Judd again. But honestly, who was I kidding? I knew Ashley. I’d made a romantic comedy with her and Hugh Jackman called Someone Like You, about a heartbroken woman who was trying to figure out why she was dumped. If she were to do TV (I was one season too early), she would never wear a cop’s uniform! She needed wardrobe. I went after Ashley Judd again the next season, with a show that never even made the bubble but had much better wardrobe.

  However, as I was flailing and thinking I was failing, unbeknown to me, I was also sort of succeeding. I had pitched a reinvention of The Golden Girls to a hilarious showrunner, Suzanne Martin (Frasier). She is a beautiful blond bombshell of a gal with whom I clicked the moment she walked into our bungalow.

  I had cooked up a fantasy straight from my life: What if three “besties” of a certain age—so unappreciated in La La Land, where gorgeous thirtysomethings couldn’t get dates because guys their age were cruising for twentysomethings—suddenly made an emergency landing in a plane in Cleveland. On the layover, all the men there appreciated them in ways that they hadn’t been appreciated in years, and suddenly they felt sexy again! They decided to stay in Cleveland and move in together, and they learned the joys and deprivations of life in the middle of the country—sort of like me in Texas, but more on the nose.

  Suzanne immediately responded to it—and also wanted to update The Golden Girls—so she made up a fabulous pilot story on the spot, and we called it Hot in Cleveland. We pitched it to Paramount TV and then CBS. At the CBS comedy division, as we pitched our hearts out, they looked at us like we were from Pluto.

  “Older women? Seriously?!”

  I had no idea what you were allowed to do, what they were looking for, what was in, what was out. All I kept hearing was that the sitcom was dead, besides of course Two and a Half Men, which you apparently can’t kill with a stick, a drug-induced implosion, a lawsuit or a bludgeon. (And then we knew that apparently anything can be saved by Ashton Kutcher.)

  Most important, this was just before the 2009 debut of Modern Family, the award-winning ABC comedy about three related families that redefine what “family” means in the new millennium. This breakthrough show reinvented the comedy wheel with the single-camera half-hour model, spawning a subgenre of successful new sitcoms. “Single camera” means it’s shot off the stage with one camera, like a feature, or like a drama is shot for TV, without either a laugh track or a live audience, as we do on Hot in Cleveland. At this point, in 2009–10, dozens of sitcoms had been flopping since Friends, and nothing seemed to click.

  CBS knows what is right for CBS—better than any other network knows what is right for it. Our little show was meant for another home, which was just being born. It helped create another network.

  HOW MY (EVENTUAL) CO–EXECUTIVE PRODUCER PITCHED ON THE FLY, SOLD IT IN A PARKING LOT AND HELPED CREATE A NEW NETWORK

  (The parking-lot pitch is still alive somewhere)

  Todd Milliner is an infectiously adorable TV producer whom I’d never met until we became co–exec producers on Hot in Cleveland. He and his partner, Sean Hayes—whom I’d seen thousands of times on television playing Jack in Will & Grace, but also had never met—went on to sell Suzanne’s pitch by accident. We were having dinner before a taping one night in Studio City when he told me the story of how he and Sean parking-lot-pitched Hot in Cleveland and helped launch the previously unknown cable station TV Land. It is now going on its fourth year.

  “Sean and I were meeting with TV Land, which had only done syndicated shows and reality shows. They were meeting with us for a potential nonscripted series—we don’t generally do that—and after the meeting, we were on the way to the parking lot, and we said, ‘Well … there’s this one idea …’

  “Suzanne Martin had come in and told us very generally what the idea was, and we fell in love with it. So we told them about it on the fly, and before we got to the parking lot, they bought it. We never even pitched it!

  “We got back and called Suzanne’s agent, because Suzanne was editing a movie that she’d made. Her agent, Richard Weitz, called her and said, ‘Sean sold your show to TV Land.’

  “She said, ‘Great! What’s TV Land?’

  “I said, ‘That’s exactly what I said.’ ”

  “Nobody had ever heard of this network,” I said, “and yet it became a hit, and sold to syndication in its first year! How could this happen?” I asked Sean.

  “We had a lot of convergence,” Sean answered. “First of all, Betty White had just started to peak with SNL drafting her to host and her hit Super Bowl commercial. We got weirdly lucky with that. She was a guest star on the first episode. We didn’t think she was part of the ensemble. And then these other ladies we had met with—Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick—we didn’t do any other casting sessions; we saw no one else. These were the ladies. We knew we wanted real actors who were looking for a way to start their next chapter too, just like the show. Thematically, it all fit for them.”

  I added, “The casting was great for TV Land’s syndication hook too.”

  Todd agreed. “Jane Leeves is in syndication with Frasier, and Wendy Malick is in syndication with Just Shoot Me! And Valerie Bertinelli is classic in One Day at a Time.”

  “It happened so quickly,” I said to Todd. “I couldn’t believe how quickly the show took off, and how much TV Land got behind it. Did it shock anybody there when it happened so quickly?”

  Todd laughed, remembering the day I was talking about.

  “Oh, yeah. When we got the numbers for the first episode, I was walking out in the street and literally almost got hit by a car. We thought we’d be lucky, but that car almost killed me! And the numbers [4.8 million viewers—making network history as TV Land’s highest-rated and most-watched telecast ever] almost gave me a heart attack!” (By comparison, HBO’s Game of Thrones season one finale had 4.2 million viewers.)

  “We made headlines in the trades and on Deadline. No one could believe the numbers. They were solid cable hit numbers.”

  I added: “And no one had any idea where in the world TV Land was on the dial! There is no dial anymore. Doesn’t it prove in some way that if an audience wants to find a show, it doesn’t matter where it is, because they will find it?”

  He said, “Especially with DVRs. If only I could explain them to my dad.”

  “Me too,” I said, and smiled.

  There were a lot of great things about Paramount and CBS, but it was virtually impossible to get a show on the network because its schedule was so successful that it had no room. Also, I was barely qualified to take a shot, as I hadn’t figured how to make a successful police, medical or legal procedural that could generate one hundred episodes. And, worse, I couldn’t work in cable there.

  Cable wasn’t a priority for Les Moonves’s empire at that time,5 so if I could create something that was good, I’d need more outlets to pitch to. I had sci-fi id
eas that would never fit into the CW’s or CBS’s wheelhouse, and ideas inspired by my time in Texas that may not fit anywhere but were gut shots, so I wanted to give them a try. It was time to move on.

  While I (or, really, my agent) went looking for a new home where I might partake of the golden age of cable, I heard on the street that my favorite movie writer, Jonah Nolan, had pitched a series to CBS that they loved, and it had gotten picked up. Jonah? In TV? That proved it! Everyone! And what would come of my potential tentpole?

  I wasn’t surprised CBS had bitten on an idea of his; he was one of the most exciting collaborators I’d ever had. But why was Jonah moving to the small screen when he was king of the tentpole as the cowriter of the Dark Knight franchise? He was not exactly suffering movie business despair! He could do anything in features that he wanted to. I had to go see him. I knew the reasons behind his choice would shed light on what Wolcott was calling the golden age of television. Not only that—he had taken one swing at bat and had made the hardest schedule of all to crack, CBS’s.

  The thing about Jonah is that everything he touches turns to gold. His short story was the basis of his brother Christopher Nolan’s award-winning film Memento. Jonah’s first franchise film was The Dark Knight, and his first TV show made the CBS schedule Thursday night at ten. Perhaps I could learn something from Jonah that might prepare me for next season. He would have had to master the procedural trick for Person of Interest, his new show, and figured out how to get a hundred episodes out of the premise of his show. I would listen carefully to what he had to say about what drove him from features to television and what television taught him about story.

  JONAH IN THE TUBE

  Jonah is the American Nolan, while Christopher, the spectacular director and his brother and collaborator, grew up in England. Jonah grew up in Chicago, went to Georgetown University and looks like a college football hero, bordering on Tom Brady. Hunky, funny, curious and self-deprecating, Jonah can seem too good to be true—but he’s true blue.