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

by Lynda Obst

  By the time we got together in his makeshift production office near Warner Bros. (This is what a television office is supposed to look like, I said to myself), my three bubbles had burst and he’d had his first pitch picked up to series. He was basically living in this space now, in what he called “the tube.” I loved the phrase, and asked him to explain.

  “The first time I heard it,” he said, “my partner, Greg Plageman, and I were spending a month in New York, shooting the pilot. We ran into a showrunner friend of his. He saw the two of us coming back from a day on set, frozen solid, probably looking pretty pathetic. He was there on a project, but he wasn’t actively shooting anything.

  “ ‘Oh, you guys are in “the tube,”’ he said.

  “ ‘What do you mean by “the tube”?’ I asked.

  “ ‘A network TV show is like a tube,’ he said. ‘You go into it, and you don’t come out of it again until it’s canceled or you get fired.’ ”

  I loved the term and longed for the horrible feeling he’d described.

  Jonah continued, “And that’s still, to this point, the best description I’ve heard for a television show. It’s a tube—you really are in it. There’s no time for friends, there’s no time for family, there’s no time for anything.”

  He looked exhilarated and exhausted at the same time; I was amazed he had found time to talk.

  “How did you get to this point?” I asked. “What gravitational force led you into the tube when you could have just kept writing blockbusters?”

  “I know for myself,” he said, “the attraction is that working on these big spectacle films, which is great fun and some of the work that I’m proudest of … it’s a little like singing the national anthem in a baseball stadium. Right? You don’t know you’re out of tune until about eight seconds later. You never get the feedback. I cowrote The Dark Knight, the first draft, in fall of 2005. Didn’t see a frame of film until the first assembly in early 2008.”

  I shook my head, knowing Christopher Nolan was known as the fastest A-plus-list director in town.

  “We’re talking two and a half years later. For that scale of film, that was literally the fastest turnaround possible. Usually, you’d be stuck in development hell; average turnaround would be five years. I’ve got a project I’ve been working on for, at this point, eight, nine, ten years.

  “In television,” Jonah went on, “you have the opposite problem. Maybe you don’t have the time you would like to have to polish it as much as you want. But you can’t be precious, because it’s going to be on the air in three weeks. We rewrote a scene for the third episode of the show: We had the sets, the actors, we issued the pages and I saw it two and a half weeks later—as opposed to two and a half years later! For me, the fun of it is watching it with the audience.”

  “So it was the immediacy that hooked you?”

  “That’s a part of it,” Jonah continued. “The beginning of my career was Chris making Memento, a taut psychological thriller about a man struggling with memory loss as he seeks vengeance on his wife’s killer.

  “I don’t know how you’d make that film now … They don’t know how to market them, and in a sense that’s rational; the films that are now being made come at the expense of these dramatic films, which, frankly, were the entry point for me.”

  “It’s going back to your roots?” I asked.

  “In part. You know the tragedy of film is that there are some pretty classic films that exist only in someone’s desk drawer. And that is tragic. You know? Truly. With television, again, it’s the opposite problem. It’s ‘What do you got? You got a script somewhere? You got a page? Let’s have it! Because we need twenty-four of these things. We need one next week.’ And I love that.”

  I smiled as he continued. “Television is all about how much story do you have, because I want eighty episodes, a hundred episodes, and then the business model makes sense. So you have to have one hundred hours of story—and that’s a spectacular problem to have! The fun of writing for me is creating moments—some write for character; some write for story; I write for moments. I love story and character, but for me, writing is a delivery device for moments. You’ve got no time, you’ve got no money, and so it’s this insatiable appetite. It’s a black hole. It’s ‘Whaddaya got?’ Story, character, ideas? You know, what’s the idea you’ve been hanging on to for five years? Because we’re just going to throw it into the pot and try to make it work. I love the fact that television gives you the opportunity to create as many moments as you’ve got the imagination and capacity to create.”

  “So this is how you generate a hundred episodes?” I asked.

  “One of the nice things about a procedural is it’s not a one-off. It’s a world. You’ve created a self-propelled mechanism.”

  This was spectacular. I was getting a sense of the writers’ room, of what went on inside and how fast the ideas shot out—using every story and moment in your head in service of the premise of the show. Spitballing what you had and cross-pollinating it with the engine of the show.

  “It’s fascinating, Jonah,” I said, “because most people talk about television being a writer’s medium from a control point of view. But what I am hearing from you is that it’s a writer’s medium from an inventive point of view.”

  “Yeah!”

  One thing I learn over and over in this business is that control, when it works, is never what you think it is.

  “It’s more ‘the writers are in control,’ because the writers are responsible for the narrative continuing to unfold. If moments don’t continue to unfold, then there’s no show.”

  “Whereas my writer friends want to be producers,” I said, “because they’re waiting for the moment they can cast their best friends.”

  Jonah laughed. “I have hired exactly zero people, from a list of a hundred friends. Look,” he went on, “the control is a pain in the ass. Look at my arrangement with Chris: He does all the hard stuff, and I get to go write. He gets to write too, but he has all this other stuff that he has to do. And so the second I started doing the TV show, we were five, six weeks into it, I called him up and I said, ‘Thank you for the last ten years of me not having to worry about this bullshit.’ ”

  I asked Jonah why he decided to do network instead of cable.

  He thought for a second, then answered, “My mom was a flight attendant for forty-plus years, and her superpower was to check into a hotel, anywhere in the world, and within five minutes find an episode of Law & Order on TV. The power and pleasure of that franchise was undeniable. You knew just what to expect, and yet every episode was different and compelling. That is shooting out a hundred episodes, a hundred times.

  “I decided I wanted to do a pretty old-fashioned network television show that was essentially a procedural, but that benefited from the influence of these amazing serialized shows that are on the air. I think everyone knows now that the audience expects some return on their investment. They expect that these characters they’re looking at will have an arc, a big one, above and beyond the individual episodes. And so I wanted to do a TV show a little more like the ones that I was actually watching when I was a kid. When you talk about shows like Hill Street Blues, you talk about shows that deliver when you have an hour to spare and you want to see a complete story, to be taken on a journey. That’s the challenge of network television, to be able to tell a complete story. And at the same time, it’s a laboratory for character.”

  I asked if he thought television was going to continue to attract writers of his caliber.

  “We are clearly in the golden age of television,” Jonah said. “You can look at shows like The Wire [the HBO series written by a former police reporter, set in Baltimore] or Breaking Bad [Vince Gilligan’s show about a chemistry teacher with lung cancer turned crystal meth dealer]. They are legitimately the best things anyone has ever put on TV. Something amazing happened, and you had all these storytellers migrate over to television. There is a hole in the feature business.” He star
ted to laugh. “Roughly the size of … television!”

  And I had slipped right through.

  ONWARD TO SONY, JEWISH SOLDIERETTES

  Armed with Jonah’s insights, I had a better grip on the question of what made one hundred episodes: a world that could be a self-propelled mechanism, filled with great characters and fed by moments—and sustained by a room of writers offering “whatever they got!”

  We made a deal at Sony. Rick said that in selecting the studio, he tried to find the one farthest from my house. He did a wonderful job, because it’s an hour’s drive from Silver Lake to Culver City, longer at rush hour (which is constant). But it was a brilliant choice, because, as opposed to Paramount TV, Sony does not have a primary relationship with a network, and therefore its mandate is to sell to everyone. It has a renowned creative history (Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, Damages, All in the Family, Married … with Children, among many others). Its independence makes it very attractive to writer-producers who aren’t limited to a single network buyer when creating their shows. They run the gamut of Net and cable as potential buyers, making the range of creative options for the artist as broad as possible, because each buyer has a different audience and sensibility. I was to engage in this broadest of possible creative mandates. The team was fantastic, supportive and smart, so the only one who could screw this up was me.

  I met a delightful writer from Texas, Jordan Budde, with whom I bonded immediately, and we decided to develop a show that takes place in the Hill Country outside Austin, where I had my home. He loved this area also (an affection we share with almost no buyers at any known networks or outlets, including, amazingly, CMT—Country Music Television). We created a family drama–cum-procedural about two battling sisters, then stacked up the odds against us: We made the main character a judge instead of a lawyer, in addition to making the setting rural. But NBC bit, and Sony was thrilled, so we wrote the absolute best version of a Texas judge procedural—a premise with two core strikes against it—that anyone could.

  That year Robert Greenblatt, who had been responsible for Showtime’s great programming successes from Weeds, about a mom who moonlights as a pot dealer, to The Big C, was named president of NBC/Universal, which had been in last place for eight years; nothing had been working on its schedule except The Voice, which was yet another American Idol clone, though by now the biggest.

  The entire creative community was thrilled about the move. It indicated to many the growing convergence of sensibilities between networks and cable—as far as was possible, given FCC (Federal Communications Commission) rules on broadcast television. Writers for the broadcast networks are governed by the FCC, and are constantly battling their rules and frustrated by their language constraints. No four-letter words, no inhaling in the Clintonian sense (exhaling is okay); nothing that could be considered obscene was allowed on broadcast television. The ten o’clock slot is the most coveted one because the rules are somewhat relaxed at that time, but it still can’t compete with the anything-goes freedom of pay television. But the networks have been getting edgier thanks to the growing influence of the successful cable programming with which they have to compete at Emmy Season (to their great and constant frustration). Greenblatt would shake things up at the network, it was assumed, and Smash, a Showtime project he was bringing with him to NBC, with Spielberg at the helm, was already rumored to be exactly that.

  We turned in a script that I, as well as Sony and the execs I had pitched it to, adored. I was in Texas when the decision was being made, trying not to call Rick too often or look at every place I went as a potential location. The studio was calling—should I try for Ashley Judd again? At these moments everyone does a full-court press on the network and the agency for casting. But with one phone call it was dead: This show about a Texas judge abandoned by her gay husband wasn’t what the sophisticated Broadway buff now running NBC was looking for.

  I sent off a sci-fi piece to AMC with a great writer from Breaking Bad, and it won this thing they call a “bake-off” (really, like Betty Crocker). But that year they didn’t reward the winner with a pilot deal, they just continued developing us for another year and started a renegotiation of their deal with Sony. That was very disappointing, to say the least. With a showrunner from Friends I went out with a scripted take on the Miss America beauty pageant. This was the year after all the period pieces had been picked up, and by the time we were ready to pitch, Playboy, about bunnies and their mates in the sixties, was tanking on NBC, and Pan Am, about stewardesses in the sixties, was looking iffy on ABC. I couldn’t help but think we went out with the pitch too late. I needed to get the timing right the next season. I would have to attack the networks like a field marshal. We put a calendar up on the wall. I had to think backward.

  CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and the CW all ran on a strict yearly schedule. They have upfront in May, when they expose their new shows to advertisers and announce their schedules to the aforementioned advertisers, producer-writers and agents (and each other). They buy pitches and scripts from June to early October. They have all their pilots written between September and December or the beginning of January. They pick up all of their shows in January (the madness of all these pilots casting at once cannot be overstated). Then they shoot in February and March, to go to postproduction in April. Then they decide what’s going on the air at the end of April or in early May. Then the whole process starts all over again. I had been late with Miss America the previous year at Sony, and I had to internalize the calendar to make sure that didn’t happen again. But there were nuances to the calendar that I still had to master. And for these I would need, well, a master.

  THE BUYING SEASONS

  I zeroed back in on Gail Berman. Lord knows I couldn’t bother Rick again. I had to ask Gail about the seasons, since the year before they had smashed me in the head, even though I thought I had a good running start.

  “I’m back,” I said. “I need some advice. The seasons.”

  “Yes?” She leaned in.

  “They come at you very quickly,” I complained.

  She looked at me sympathetically. “There used to be a break. At least, everyone tells me there used to be a break, but I don’t really remember there being one.”

  She didn’t seem as stressed out about this as I was.

  I said, “Every time I think I’m ready, it’s like, ‘Oh, no, the buying window already passed.’ ‘Okay, well, you’re late on the network.’ ‘Wait a second. I just got my ideas together, and comedy is closing? And then cable is open? Now hold on …’ Like when—”

  She interrupted my pathetic babbling. “I always say the same thing: I’d like to be finished selling by Labor Day. And every year the deadline gets pushed earlier. It’s weird.”

  Oh, God, I thought. I’m already late. And nobody at my agency wanted to tell me. I pressed on. “Is that what I should remember? Be finished by Labor Day?”

  “That’s what I always tell everybody,” she reiterated. “That’s the rule in my head. It doesn’t always work at this company, but the goal is to be done by then.”

  Kissing good-bye all future hopes of visiting my New York friends in the Hamptons, I said, “So you can’t go away for the summer?”

  “Not if you want to sell; you have to be finished selling by Labor Day. Most people look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about? You can sell through October.’ But I always thought you had your best shot by getting in early, before they had everything else set up. Even your more out-there ideas might get set up if you do it early. So Labor Day is always a good deadline.”

  The bad news absorbed, I asked, “When you can still wear white?”

  Gail laughed out loud. She loved this, since we obey no clothing laws in California and this bonded us as secret East Coasters.

  “Right!” she said. “While you’re wearing white, you can sell. Once you have to take the white off, you’re done!”

  Then she explained why, and I knew I would never make this mistake again.

  “
It is seasonal because material gets old quickly, unlike in the movie business.”

  I added, “And they seem to know what they want before they start.”

  “They think they know, and then the season starts and something catches on, and then that’s the thing they want. There is a little bit of a buying flux around the end of October, when they start to say, ‘Well, this seems to be sticking, so we’ll need a companion piece for that.’ So you have to know what’s working to finish out the selling season. It’s a wonderful business. It moves.”

  The mid-season flux. It was like a Zen koan. This was the kind of nuance only experience could teach! Looking for that companion piece to New Girl, this year’s big hit? How about New Boy! A guy moves in with two girl roommates.

  Already pitched. Nextino.

  Next at the speed of a neutrino.

  I asked Gail if the feature business felt slow after being in television.

  She found the question comical. “It was stunning to me. It was the biggest change for me. It was so slow. I thought, Well, we’re on track here, and then that track just stalled. And somehow everyone was quite comfortable with that. I was out of that rhythm. That rhythm was off for me. I was expecting that script on such and such a day, give or take a couple of weeks. The script literally never came during my entire tenure.” She burst out laughing in retrospect. “Things like that were crazy to me.”

  “But,” I said, realizing that I’d missed the hot spot of the network buying season, “there’s fast, and then there’s fast. One season’s over, you get started for cable and they’re already booked.”

  She smiled. “Remember, no white. You’ll get it next year.”

  SPEED JUNKIES: FROM NEXT TO NEXTINO

  First of all, during pitch season (which is essentially always, since most of cable is open full-time, but here I’m talking about network pitch season) everyone is racing all around L.A., going from pitch to pitch, every hour on the hour. The networks are located as far away from each other as they possibly can be, from West L.A. to the deep Valley, with only CBS in between. They are devilishly scheduled in sequence so that only Indy 500 race car drivers can make them, and they all take place on the same day with no concern for the seller’s point of departure or driving ability. This accounts for the heart-thumping danger of the whole thing. Can you get there on time? How fast can you go without getting a ticket and missing the meeting? What alternative is there to the permanent Carmageddon on the 405? Will you scare your team into thinking you will hold up the pitch? Are you the one who will walk in late, after most people are already there? If so, the network will start the meeting without you if you’re not the showrunner.