by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment
We really spent a lot of time if someone’s feelings got hurt. “Oh, let’s drop everything and fix that. And I’m sorry.” Rule number one: get along. Everyone knew the importance of getting along the whole way through.
Lisa Kudrow: I was a little older, one year older than the next cast member. I got engaged during the first season. To me there was life, and that had to stay on its course. And then there was work. My husband, Michel, really got what the priorities had to be. He was the one who said, “Go to Vegas.” And anytime I told him, “You can’t be part of this,” he would say, “Absolutely, I should not be part of this. You guys need to bond.” He was unbelievable in getting that and why it was important.
David Schwimmer: We were all approximately the same age. We had a natural chemistry, creatively and professionally. We spent an enormous amount of time together those first several years. We wouldn’t want to leave each other. We’d go out to dinner after work, or we’d go to lunch together, or play poker, or just play games. I think we were genuinely having the time of our lives, and also there was something very bonding about how scary the whole experience was. We had the other five, like a very protective cocoon.
Warren: One way in which Friends did resemble Seinfeld is that it really found its audience over the summer of 1995 in reruns. That’s when the main title song, “I’ll Be There for You” by the Rembrandts, exploded too.
Matt LeBlanc: It was that first season of reruns that did it. We were like number twenty-seven in the big grand scheme of things. It was that summer that we broke the top ten, or top five.
Warren: On January 28, 1996, after a particularly compelling Super Bowl (Dallas vs. Pittsburgh) that delivered a whopping 46.1 rating and 68 share, we played a special one-hour episode of Friends featuring guest appearances by Brooke Shields and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Despite the fact that most of the country had already been eating, drinking, and watching television for hours, the Friends special delivered a 29.6 rating and a 46 share. No network had ever accomplished that. For the night, NBC averaged a 42.0 rating and a 62 share. It was the most watched night in television history, with approximately 140 million Americans tuning in (Nielsen Media Research).
David Schwimmer: For whatever reason, I was “the breakout.” I was the guy who had the movie offers; everyone since then has had their time, their moment, but I was the first when the show started. And my agents were saying, “This is the time when you go in for a raise.”
I knew—because all of us were friends at this point—that when we started, each of us on the show had a different contract. We were all paid differently. Some had low quotes, some had higher. So I knew that I wasn’t the highest-paid actor on the show, but I wasn’t the lowest. And I thought, “Okay, I’m being advised to go in for more money. 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.”
Matt LeBlanc: David was in the position to make the most money. He was the A-story. Ross and Rachel. He could have commanded alone more than anyone else, and David Schwimmer quoted the idea of socialist theater to us. Did he know ultimately there would be more value in that for all of us as a whole? I don’t know. I think it was a genuine gesture from him, and I always say that. It was him.
David Schwimmer: They usually had three story lines going on at any given time. So I said to the group, “Here’s the deal. 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.
“I don’t want to come to work feeling that there’s going to be any kind of resentment from anyone else in the cast down the line. I don’t want to be in their position”—I said the name of the lowest paid actor on the show—“coming to work, doing the same amount of work, and feeling like someone else is getting paid twice as much. That’s ridiculous. Let’s just make the decision now. We’re all going to be paid the same, for the same amount of work.”
John Agoglia: We convinced ourselves that we’d be better off with the cast if we recognized their success early instead of waiting until their contracts ran out. Chemistry was crucial to that show, and it was important to keep the cast happy. We started giving them raises as they were going along. At one point David Schwimmer’s mother convinced the cast to negotiate as a group. She’s a prominent divorce attorney. Her license plate is “Ex Barracuda.”
David Schwimmer: I thought it was significant for us to become a mini-union. I was pushing for it. A union of the six of us. Because there began to be a lot of decisions that had to be made by the group in terms of publicity.
That was actually a by-product of how the impulse originated, which was from my ensemble theater. We all paid dues. We were all waiting tables and doing other jobs, but we all paid the same amount of dues, and we were all paid out equally. That idea was really important to me.
Harold Brook: The problem was how much they wanted to be treated the same. The numbers were insane when it came time to renew their contracts. The night before we were going to announce the schedule, I was in the bathroom at a restaurant and got a call from Warner Bros. “It’s starting,” they said. The negotiation started around 10:00 p.m. and closed around 3:00 a.m. We had two promos made—one was the season finale, and one was the series finale.
Dick Wolf: When they made the Friends deal, the $100,000 apiece deal, I was pretty upset. What I would have done was come out the first day, say I was disappointed the cast had chosen to negotiate in the press, and I had the unpleasant news that Matt LeBlanc wouldn’t be on the show next year. I guarantee that you’d never have gotten to a second name.
Harold Brook: We didn’t say “pass” a lot. It’s a ploy, and a lot of times we couldn’t back it up. You do it once, maybe it wins. You do it twice, it isn’t really a pass. Also the actor could be in another show at another network in a heartbeat.
David Schwimmer: That negotiation made us realize that the six of us should be making decisions as one and looking out for each other. It’s just like a union, that’s all. We’re all equals, and by the way every decision was a democratic vote.
I didn’t want to come to work feeling like people are resenting me for earning more, or me resenting anyone else for earning more. It’s just not the environment I want to work in. I think everyone feels that way.
Warren: An odd by-product for me of the success of Friends, Frasier, and Seinfeld and our other shows was that I found myself called upon to give more and more depositions. Our lawyers explained it this way: “That’s because you finally have successes, so people want to sue and claim that they own part of those successes. You never did depositions before because no one watched your shows, and no one cared to sue.” I said, “Oh, okay, so this is a good thing.”
Along about that time, I also discovered I had an impersonator in New York. One morning when I was sitting at my desk in Burbank, my assistant Patty walked in with a great deal of attitude (even more than usual). As she dropped a stack of mail on my desk, she told me, “You should be ashamed.”
On the top of the pile was a handwritten note from a woman in New York thanking me for a wonderful evening the week before. She had also sent along a necktie as a gift. The trouble was I had absolutely no idea who this woman could be, and—as I explained to Patty—I hadn’t been in New York the previous week. Apparently, there was another Warren Littlefield out there.
Patty tracked the woman down. Her Warren Littlefield was tall and dark with a mustache. Not me at all. Along about this time, David Letterman was routinely defacing photographs of me on air, so it wouldn’t have been all that difficult to figure out what I looked like. Fortunately, the phony Warren had been a perfect gentleman.
We got wind of him again a year or so later when he stood up the legendary agent Mike Ovitz for
drinks in Manhattan. The grief came my way. I remember thinking to myself, “It must be nice to be president of NBC without any of the responsibilities.”
That’s the good and the bad. Here’s the ugly. More and more, I was the recognizable name and face of NBC Entertainment. One day at the height of our Must See success, the mail room received a suspicious package addressed to me. Security evacuated our Burbank offices and called in the bomb squad. A robot was used to dispose of what turned out to be an actual explosive device. The police told me it resembled the sort of bomb preferred by the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Fortunately for us all, my specimen had been clumsily made and wouldn’t have exploded. But even still, I was just running a TV network, and somebody wanted to kill me over that? I was tough but it was a sobering afternoon. I remember ducking into John Agoglia’s office and all but breaking down.
So it wasn’t all laughs at the network, but it was mostly laughs, thank God.
Marta Kauffman: We didn’t experience the success of the show the way the cast did. We could walk through the airport, and we’d see pictures of them on the magazines, but that wasn’t us.
Lisa Kudrow: When we were on Oprah, I think that first summer, she showed us all of these people in Internet cafés. People were online talking about the show, which was the first time that people were using the Internet to connect with each other, like the new watercooler. I thought, “Okay, this is something then. This is a big deal.” That’s when I got it. She was telling us this stuff, and we were watching their little film that they’d made, and she was like, “You all look like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You have to know.” And we just went, “No, but this is great news.”
David Schwimmer: I had never been a part of the entertainment industry. I didn’t know anyone famous. I’d never seen it. I had a girlfriend at the time, and I remember walking down the street with her holding her hand, when some girls came up, pushed her out of the way, and asked for my number. They were like, “Oh my God, can you come out with us right now?” As if my girlfriend just didn’t exist. I found it very difficult to handle.
Matt LeBlanc: I remember I was living in an apartment in Beachwood Canyon, which, ironically, ended up being the apartment building that they used for the opening credits on Joey. I had to move so quickly. It was unbelievable. All of a sudden the people in the building were banging on my door. People knew I lived there.
I was like, “I’ve got to get a house. I need a house with a gate, because I need to be able to hide.” It’s funny, nowadays people that are famous get chased by the paparazzi. They have this fame, but they don’t have the money to hide from it. We were really fortunate that we were compensated well enough to be able to turn the switch off, as much as one can. Kind of disappear. Barricade yourself in.
Lisa Kudrow: We did a photo shoot for Entertainment Weekly. When we walked out of it—our cars were all the way across the street—and there were tons of paparazzi, and it was nighttime, and we were blinded by all the flashing. It was scary, because we hadn’t had that before. It was unnerving, because they yell at you. It’s more of an assault than any kind of congratulations or “we love you.” That’s not ever how it feels. So that was jarring, and then I think all of us understood, “Oh, I get why people get so antagonistic with paparazzi.”
David Schwimmer: For me, the fame is something I’ve wrestled with and struggled with since it happened. I don’t think I responded very well to the sudden celebrity, the sudden fame, and the loss of privacy. There were several moments that were quite traumatic for me. I remember in the early days of just going to the airport and walking to my gate when I heard bloodcurdling screams, and I thought someone was being killed. Before I knew it, a group of girls was running at me and literally grabbing me and wouldn’t let me go.
Lisa Kudrow: Fame doesn’t cure whatever is going on inside of you, however you feel about yourself. The lucky thing was that the six of us had each other to go through it with. All we would talk about is, “What about people who have this and they don’t have you and you, and they are just on their own dealing with this?”
Matt LeBlanc: I don’t think America can relate to celebrity and wealth. You become an alien, basically. They’re not going to have pity for you. They’re not going to have compassion for you. You need to represent the common man, or they can’t identify with it. They’re like, “I really can’t feel bad for you in your big mansion.” Or, “Aw, your Ferrari had a flat.”
David Schwimmer: As an actor, the training I received was that I walk through the world as an observer of life and of people. That’s my training. My job is to actually be looking out all the time and watching people. But the effect of celebrity on me was that I suddenly found myself with a baseball cap, with my head down, hiding everywhere I went. And I realized that I was going to have to figure out a way to still be an actor filled with wonder at the world and curious about life and watching people. It’s like those two couldn’t coexist. It’s been very difficult to navigate that.
Lisa Kudrow: I think before you are famous, you think, “Oh, if you’re famous, you’re loved and adored. And then maybe I can love and adore myself. If I’m good enough for the general public, then I might be good enough for myself.” Then, when you really experience that attention and everyone cares what you’re doing and wants pictures of you, it doesn’t feel like a warm hug. It really feels like an assault. Then not long after you start to realize, “This has almost nothing to do with me, and I better do the work.”
At first it was all thrilling. I remember going to the Golden Globes, and I was at a table with Kathy Bates. Then you learn soon enough that you’re meeting these people, but you’re not friends. It’s just meeting people. That’s all it is.
Matt LeBlanc: I never set out to be a role model. I set out to pay the rent.
Warren: For the first time in my memory at NBC, we had to worry about overexposure. We became gatekeepers for the Friends cast. Everybody wanted a piece of them—an electronic interview, a photo shoot, something. We realized the cast was so white-hot that we had to pull back, to help protect both them and their show.
To their credit, they all just kept their heads down and worked. Worked hard. The writers and actors on Friends were notoriously particular about what made it onto the air. A Friends shoot night could extend well into the small hours of the morning.
David Crane: Our hours were crazy. There were so many mornings when we were still finishing the rewrites. We’d get notes from the studio and the network.
Marta Kauffman: But it was our notes that killed us. We knew we had to listen to the audience. Their silence tells you a lot. Laughing in good and bad ways. Laughing at setups instead of jokes.
David Crane: We also felt everyone’s opinion was valid. There was no hierarchy. It made everything better, but longer too. Sometimes we lost our energy because we took so much time trying to find a better joke when we should have just moved on.
Warren: Audiences on shoot night—and shoot night can run for many hours—are kept engaged by people like Mark Sweet, who has been warming up crowds for network shows since 1981.
Mark Sweet: The bleachers hold a couple of hundred people. You’ve got hours of time to fill, and doing stand-up doesn’t translate well in that environment. I try to make the audience members feel that the taping is an event and they’re valued. I did the whole run of Coach, the whole run of Everybody Loves Raymond. On hiatus from Coach, I’d go over and do Cheers.
One of the writers from Coach went over to Friends, and I went with him. That show used to go until one or two in the morning. They’d have to bring in a whole new audience, always had one in reserve.
David Crane: We’d walk out after every episode and say, “There’s another one that didn’t suck.” And we meant it.
Marta Kauffman: We only had problems with standards. For a long time, we couldn’t show a condom wrapper.
David Crane: The rules kept changing. For the first three years we could say “penis.” Then w
e couldn’t say “penis.” Then we could say “penis” again.
Marta Kauffman: They’re masturbating on Seinfeld, and we can’t show a condom wrapper.
Warren: That made me crazy. I had a lot of battles with broadcast standards over that. What could be more socially responsible than these characters practicing safe sex?
David Crane: Seinfeld had different rules. Apparently, you can masturbate at nine but not at eight.
Lisa Kudrow: I think it was after our fifth or sixth year where it just got easier because we insisted. We had enough power at that point. “We only need this much time to get it done.”
We insisted on starting in the afternoon. Marta said, “We won’t find an audience at three.” We told her, “People plan vacations around this show. Let’s try.” It worked, and then we weren’t done at two in the morning. It was a lot easier.
Matt LeBlanc: It was sometimes hard to get through scenes because the crowd knew what you were going to say before you could say it. We would do it just for kicks sometimes. With a joke, you could get ten laughs out of it. They knew every arrow that was in each of our quivers.
David Crane: Then in season eight or nine we had Joey fall for Rachel, and that scared everybody. She was pregnant. The actors freaked out. Matt kept saying, “It’s wrong. It’s like I want to be with my sister.” We said, “Yes, it’s absolutely wrong. That’s why we have to do it.” You can’t just keep spinning the same plates. You have to go places where you’re not expected to go.
Matt LeBlanc: It felt wildly inappropriate. That’s how close we all were to the character. I was like, “That’s Rachel. She was supposed to be with Ross. Wait a minute.” Everybody got super-defensive about the whole thing.
