by John Ortved
RUPERT MURDOCH, CEO, News Corp: I was at a program meeting with Barry Diller and the people at Fox Network and afterward Barry said, “Come into my office, I want to show you something.” He had a tape there about twenty minutes in length of all the little thirty-second bits that had been used on The Tracey Ullman Show. And he played it, and I thought it was just hilarious. I said, “You’ve gotta buy this tonight.”
Of course, nothing in the TV business is ever that simple.
HARRIS KATLEMAN: I showed it at the time to Bob Iger, who’s now the CEO of Disney but at the time was president of ABC Television and a good friend of mine. And Bob looked at the seven minutes and said, “I’ll buy it.” I told him that first I had to show it to Fox Broadcasting because it was technically part of The Tracey Ullman Show and I had a responsibility to them.
So I showed it to my colleagues at Fox Broadcasting and they poohpoohed me. They were not all gung-ho. None of them really wanted to do anything. And I let them know I had thirteen episodes ordered from ABC, at which point Barry Diller got into it and said, “Do you want me to commit for thirteen episodes?” I said, “You’re gonna have to ’cause if you don’t ABC’s gonna buy it.”
Although Diller would eventually green-light the project, other execs remember having to push the CEO to give The Simpsons a shot. Murdoch, for his part, takes no credit in The Simpsons’ creative development. “It was all them,” he told me, referring to Jim, Matt, Sam, and the writers. But in terms of executive decisions with regard to The Simpsons, and the development of other shows, Murdoch is more assertive about his involvement, as for example, when Diller left in 1992, and Murdoch named himself chairman of Fox. “Let’s put it this way,” he told Variety at the time. “Seven years ago I bet News Corp on buying FOX for $2 billion. It’s not as if I’ve been asleep for seven years.”g1
A former Fox exec who spoke to Daniel Kimmel for his book, The Fourth Network, said, “The reality is that there were not many ideas that came out of Barry Diller’s head … There wasn’t one show on our air that Barry Diller dreamt up … He’s been dramatically overpaid. But that’s the way Hollywood is with people like Barry Diller.”
And yet such criticisms are few and far between. When Diller abruptly left Fox in 1992—he had approached Murdoch about becoming a partner; Murdoch’s reply, “There’s only one principal at this company”2—it caused an uproar, and the press speculated that it could spell big trouble for Murdoch, Fox, and News Corp. “The very thought of Barry leaving Fox is mind-boggling,” Beverly Hills 90210 producer Aaron Spelling told USA Today. “This changes everything.”3 And yet Diller left 20th Century Fox in immeasurably better condition than he’d found it. Hits like Home Alone and Edward Scissorhands had helped Fox studio regain its footing, and Fox Broadcasting had finally made money in 1990, enjoying a 40 percent uptick in revenues the following year. Diller was confident about the position of the network he was leaving behind. “Fox has landed,” he said. “It’s a reality. Nobody can take it away.”4
The question of how much Diller actually had to do with developing The Simpsons remains open—but at the end of the day, it was under his supervision that the show was given the go-ahead. As far as which execs were responsible for convincing him to do so, that answer changes, depending on whom you ask.
CHARLIE GOLDSTEIN, former executive vice president in charge of production, Fox Television: There were a lot of people who were not as hopeful, who doubted whether the show could make it as a series. It was all brand-new. Nobody knew. John Dolgen was a big supporter of the show for the studio, for Brooks. He was a visionary. He was president of Fox Studios, and he answered to Diller. A very smart businessman. He wanted it to work. I was really close to the show from a production standpoint, and if it wasn’t for a guy like Dolgen, the show never would have been made. It would have been dumped.
HARRIS KATLEMAN: Oh, I don’t believe that. I think John Dolgen supported it equally with me. John was very supportive. You know, it wasn’t easy going against Barry and Rupert in those days ’cause nobody really knew if Fox Broadcasting was gonna work. So whenever you’re spending big money like we were, you needed a solid front, and John Dolgen and I presented a solid front to management.
Other top Fox execs remember it differently, that Dolgen and Fox Studio wanted to kill The Simpsons spots when they were on Ullman, and that the real champion behind the series was Fox Broadcasting president of television, Garth Ancier, who, while laughing, called other execs’ accounts “revisionist.”
ROB KENNEALLY, former executive vice president of series, Fox Broadcasting: Garth was totally into it, but he wasn’t willing to go to the mat. I mean, he couldn’t, and Barry was fairly intimidating. And when I came in, Garth was already reported as having had his anxiety attacks. Barry had pressed him pretty hard.
CHARLIE GOLDSTEIN: Can you imagine saying, “I think we could do a series based on a show called The Simpsons. You know those interstitials? We’ll do a whole series.” People would go, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Even I thought, on that one, You guys are nuts. But what do I know? I wish I’d got a piece of it.
Katleman may have been wise to approach Diller with some backup—the man ran his network “with fear” as a prime motivator. Once, during a company retreat in the mountains of Colorado, Fox executives were stunned at how friendly and cordial Diller was being. “I think Barry has altitude sickness,” John Dolgen exclaimed. His staff used to half joke that Diller’s phone number at the office was 203-P-A-I-N. Harris Katleman, whom Diller would accuse of having a “bunker mentality” for being one of the few people who disagreed with him, would stand up to the Fox president. “I’m gonna do what I want to do,” Katleman would say. “If you don’t like it, fire me.” Diller used to joke in return, “I’ll keep you and torture you.”
While surely Katleman, Dolgen, Ancier, and others played their part in getting The Simpsons series on the air at Fox Broadcasting, Jim Brooks was the true driving force behind the network’s acceptance of it.
ROB KENNEALLY: The way we got Barry to finally say yes was, “Well, let’s do a Halloween special. Let’s do a Christmas special.” And ultimately when we pitched that to Jim Brooks and his group, their response back was, “We don’t make pilots.”
MICHAEL MENDEL, postproduction supervisor, The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons (1989–92, 1994–99): Barry Diller just wanted to make specials and Jim Brooks put his foot down and said, “It’s a series or nothing.” The network wanted to play it safe, and they weren’t sure if this was going to work. I don’t think that happens today. I don’t think anyone gets on the phone with Barry Diller and says, “Take it or leave it. It’s a series.”
RON KENNEALLY: So—it’s over. We tried every which way. We couldn’t get Jim Brooks to do a Christmas special. We tried to convince him to do a series of specials. Couldn’t get that. Couldn’t get Diller to move. It dies. It literally sits on the development room floor. The way The Simpsons ultimately got made was in the renegotiation of Jim Brooks’s overall deal at the studio. It was put in the deal that they had to do The Simpsons as part of it. The studio was desperate to hang on to Jim Brooks for films, and the lawyers at the time pressed the studio—thank God for all of us in the TV department—to make The Simpsons as part of his renewal.
GARTH ANCIER, former president, Fox Broadcasting: You know, once we got to the homestretch of the thing, Barry was actually quite encouraging of The Simpsons. He saw the potential of it, there’s no question that’s true.
BARRY DILLER: I wanted to do anything that did not involve making a commitment of thirteen episodes. But Jim said, with six months of lead time, it wouldn’t work any other way.
GARTH ANCIER: It was a tense atmosphere, because there was so much at stake and there was so little that any of us really knew. We would spend probably several hours a day together, talking through with Barry in particular, what we were trying to accomplish and how we got there.
The Simpsons certainly fit the criterion we w
ere following at that point, which was, How do we do something different from the other networks? The question was, Could you tell a half-hour story that would maintain the pace of what they were doing on the vignettes? I totally give credit to Jim, because he was the one who visualized how you could do that.
MATT GROENING (in George Mair, The Barry Diller Story): I designed The Simpsons to be a TV series. That was always my secret plan. The idea of putting animated characters on at prime time was considered very controversial. I was worried that just having one shot at getting people’s attention would not do it.
BRAD BIRD, executive consultant, The Simpsons (1989–97); director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille: First of all, nobody had really done a show like that—to some extent Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Flintstones. The idea of doing an animated show for adults in prime time was considered really off-the-wall at the time. And because Fox was a new network, they were willing to try that. They sensed that they could do a different kind of comedy than the kind that was traditionally done for sitcoms, meaning they could afford to jump around the world and go somewhere elaborate for the sake of a single-shot joke. So they were beginning to see that they could accelerate the comedy and go a lot more different directions at once. But they also knew they had to give it substance. So Jim Brooks, being the genius that he is, wanted to make sure it was more than an expanded version of the one-minutes that were on The Tracey Ullman Show. And that it had a plot and a subplot, and that underneath all the goofiness there was some emotional realism.
GEORGE MEYER, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–2004) (to The Believer, September 2004): Launching a new TV show is probably one of the most difficult things that a writer can do. In the early days, it’s like a baby crawling across a freeway. It’s such a miracle if it gets across.
While most execs saw that The Simpsons had potential as its own series, any and all doubts about the show ultimately came down to cost. Unlike dopey Saturday morning cartoons, which cost in the low thousands of dollars per episode to create, The Simpsons would cost hundreds of thousands per episode. Early on, these costs were frustrated by the producers’ lack of experience in animation.
RUPERT MURDOCH: You look at it in today’s figures, and the risks of making The Simpsons its own series weren’t that great. But at the time, we were very conscious of how much money we were spending on production.
BRIAN ROBERTS, writer, The Simpsons (1989–92): For the first six to eight months, nobody knew who we were. There was the writing staff in the building across from the Gracie compound. In the editing room we were operating out of this little trailer. During those sessions, it was me, Matt Groening, and Sam Simon, and sometimes Jim. And for eight months [before the show first aired] it was a joke. We couldn’t even charge food from the commissary because nobody knew who we were.
The Simpsons moved onto the Fox lot in 1988, with the writers settling in the Gracie bungalow, and the postproduction folks setting up shop a few yards away. The other appendage of The Simpsons’ operation, the animators at Klasky-Csupo, got to work in their offices on Seward Street in Hollywood.
MARGOT PIPKIN: As soon as Simpsons became the series, it was about managing a huge studio of people. I mean, we went from this tiny little studio at Klasky-Csupo to a studio that could do a big prime-time series.
SHERRY GUNTHER, animation producer, The Simpsons (1990–92): We quickly found that, as talented as some of the veteran [animators at Klasky-Csupo] were, they weren’t capable of rethinking and doing the pose-to-pose animation that we were establishing as a look for The Simpsons and that worked really well with the timing of the comedy. So we really had to get very creative, not only in the way that we structured the show and the production itself, but also in whom we hired and where we found all these people. And we ended up getting really, really talented young people whom we didn’t have to unteach. We had a lot of first- and second-year CalArts students coming to work for us.
The young animators hired by Klasky-Csupo would ultimately define The Simpsons’ signature look.
BRIAN ROBERTS: David Silverman [who had animated some of the shorts at Ullman] had a style going all the way back to film school, and some of his early cartoons had very specific shapes and a smooth style that he applied to The Simpsons. If David Silverman hadn’t been there, I honestly don’t think that the characters would have developed in the way they finally did.
DON BARROZO, animation editor, The Simpsons (1987–present): I had to use this white clapboard garage that was just outside of the main building [at Klasky-Csupo]. That’s where my editing was. But it wasn’t wired for that kind of stuff. So I was constantly blowing fuses—I had a whole big box of fuses that I would change just about every other day.
But it was nice. There were only about thirty people on the show at that time. That was August of ’89. A very, very small crew.
The artists were all in a central room. The windows were always wide open. And the pigeons were literally walking around on the floor. And everybody was really young, mostly just CalArts graduates all in their early twenties.
WESLEY ARCHER, director, The Simpsons (1987–97): [When the show became its own series] we just moved upstairs in the same building—the windows didn’t have screens and the pigeons would hang out in there. Sometimes if I didn’t like a drawing I would just toss it out the window, because there was a Dumpster below.
DON BARROZO: Back then, each director, each one of their crew was in a separate room. Gabor’s office was right there in the middle of everything, so he was never apart from anybody. And those were fun times. Frank Zappa and his kids were big Simpsons fans. So Moon and Dweezil Zappa were both taking live drawing classes at night a couple of times a week.
MARGOT PIPKIN, animation producer, The Simpsons: It was a lot of work, and what I remember at that point was just really trying to bring the animation up to the level of the writing, because I was noticing that these scripts were very good and we didn’t have a lot of artists or a lot of time.
Unlike Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry, where the humor was mostly slapstick, the writing in The Simpsons scripts required a whole new level of attention from the animators. Comedy on The Simpsons often came from the reaction of the characters in exchanges of dialogue, or in layered, subtle jokes—the humor was no longer as simple to animate as a coyote falling off a cliff.
WESLEY ARCHER: A lot of animation artists were used to working on shows where the writer was at the bottom of the [totem pole]. They were either Hanna-Barbera artists or Disney artists. Wherever they came from, we had to tell them, “Look, you gotta see how funny these scripts are and trust the humor of these scripts.” And not everyone really understood the humor.
MARGOT PIPKIN: Well, when it went on to become a series, we as animators had to relearn how to do a television series. Richard Sakai brought over a bunch of Taxi episodes and showed us how to pull back so we didn’t do the big, exaggerated cartoon take; we had to do a much more contained sitcom take. And that really works on The Simpsons. We didn’t realize that’s what Jim Brooks wanted.
KENT BUTTERWORTH, director of first Simpsons episode: It was decided I would direct the first episode, since I had the most experience with series television. Matt and Sam Simon were working out of a trailer on the Fox lot, near Gracie Films’s bungalows. We had meetings several times a week at the trailer. It was at this stage that a lot of the basic setup of the show was established: What car did they drive? Where was the dent on the car? The kitchen. How important is it to have a realistic layout for the house? What exactly is it that Homer does at the power plant? All these things were being discussed.
MATT GROENING (to the San Francisco Chronicle, 1990): I love it because it has the feel of an early sixties sitcom. And that’s as it should be. What is The Simpsons but a hallucination of the sitcom? And that has to be the ultimate American nightmare.
The show was ultimately successful in threading a line between what could be considered the American nightmare and what others could see as
a much more realistic impression of the American dream. What impressed early audiences and critics about the new series was how “real” it was: the characters, their emotions, and their reactions to the fairly normal challenges that confronted them were believable. At the other end of the spectrum, more conservative viewers saw Bart’s sassiness, Homer’s beer swilling, and the family’s constant state of uproar as a challenge to the myth of family values that had been propagated for generations by TV families. The tension was rooted in the fact that this was a nuclear family: a dad who worked nine to five; a mom who took care of the baby, shopped, and did chores all day; a bratty preadolescent son; a brainy eight-year-old daughter; and a dog. And yet the writing was so knowing, and the actors so talented, audiences who so desired were able to feel that these cartoons were closer to their real lives than anything else on TV. And with few exceptions, The Simpsons explored fairly realistic situations: Homer lived in fear of losing his job; the Simpsons were short on money; Marge was a dissatisfied housewife; Lisa’s intellect and sensitivity were underappreciated by her family. These were problems experienced by families everywhere.
