by John Ortved
MATT GROENING (to Playboy, June 1, 2007): We have turned a few things down, believe it or not. I know it’s hard to tell.
Groening continues to make the hocking of Simpsons merchandise a priority. When he appeared on Charlie Rose to promote The Simpsons Movie in 2007, Rose brought out Simpsons posable figurines as examples of the ubiquitous merchandise. “Now you’re talking my language,” Groening joked. He then proceeded to insist, three times, in fact, that the toy that Rose was displaying was a “good one.”17
MATT GROENING (to The New York Times, October 7, 1990): I apologize to America. But a Bart Simpson air freshener that is smell-o-rific? That’s one of those things which when they ask you, how can you not?
ALBERT BROOKS, guest voice, The Simpsons, Oscar-nominated actor, Broadcast News: I’ll tell you one thing that’s funny: there’re people who wait outside restaurants. I don’t know, these people must have very big trunks, because they seem to have pictures of everybody. And I’m not a person who’s out on the town a lot, but I’ll go have a bite to eat with my wife and I’ll come out and there’ll be three people there with a picture from Taxi Driver or Defending Your Life, and they just carry around the stuff. And I’ve noticed, over the years, that they have some of these Simpsons toys, wanting me to sign Hank Scorpio. Someone last week shoved a Brad Goodman at me. I forgot about Brad Goodman. I thought, Oh, how do you like that? I said, “Where’d you get this?” “It’s in my car,” he said. “How big is your car? What else you got in there? If I was Telly Savalas, were you gonna come out with a Kelly’s Heroes doll?”
In 1991, David Geffen had the idea to do a Simpsons music album, released in time for Christmas, which became The Simpsons Sing the Blues. The writers wrote humorous lyrics for the actors to perform over blues and hip-hop tracks, produced by DJ Jazzy Jeff (yes, Bart rapped) and featuring the likes of B. B. King and Dr. John. “Do the Bartman,” its second single, was cowritten and coproduced (anonymously) by the King of Pop himself, who provided a guest voice during the second season (for a huge white insane cell mate of Homer’s at a mental institution). “I don’t think Bart would say, ‘I want to be bad like Michael Jackson’ [a line from the song] unless Michael Jackson actually wrote that line,” Groening later told Conan O’Brien. The album went triple platinum within weeks, reaching number three on the Billboard charts. Jim Brooks wanted to follow up with a second, The Yellow Album, but apparently Matt was against it, and the album was not released until 1998, to poor reception.
JAY KOGEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): I had never been a part of anything that was that huge, ever. People were selling T-shirts of the show on freeway off-ramps. Instead of selling oranges on the freeway, they were selling Simpsons T-shirts. All people were talking about was The Simpsons. It was gigantic.
MATT GROENING (to Playboy, June 1, 2007): Strange things happened. Someone returned a Bart Simpson doll to my family. They thought it was lost because my name was printed very large on Bart’s ass.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): We got to do amazing things. We got to go see Foreman v. Holyfield in Atlantic city, because we were in New York recording Jackie Mason for an episode in the second season. I was a huge sports fan, so to connect to that kind of stuff was really exciting. When we did the baseball episode (Mr. Burns loads up the company softball team with ringers, including Ken Griffey, Jr., Jose Canseco, and Roger Clemens), I got to meet a bunch of baseball players and that just seemed beyond anything I could ever hope for.
DARIA PARIS, assistant to Sam Simon, The Simpsons (1989–93): Even before The Simpsons went on the air, I was already wearing a Simpsons jacket. And people would stop me because they knew who The Simpsons were, because of The Tracey Ullman Show. So they already had this recognition that was a very strange thing. And once it started it was an avalanche. I mean, it was nonstop, and I’ll never be involved in anything like that again, ever.
HARRIS KATLEMAN, former CEO, 20th Century Fox Television: In May we have the selling season, when we take all our shows in and the networks buy them. The licensing division was doing merchandising rights right and left [this would be the spring of 1990, after the show had had its banner first year]. So I was in New York. That year we sold about nine shows, and I’m sitting with my whole staff ’cause you bring all your executives with you. We were sitting in my suite at the Ritz-Carlton, and they said, “What should we do tonight?” And all my people said, “We want to go to Il Molino,” which was the toughest reservation in town at the time.
I called Il Molino. I said, “I’d like a reservation for eleven people.” And this guy, it’s the owner, Frankie, I think his name is, said, “I’d liked to go on the next moon shot.” I said, “No, no. I really would.” He said, “Are you crazy? We’re booked up for a month.” So I asked him if he has children. He said, “Of course I have children.” I asked how old they were and whether they watched The Simpsons. He said, “Are you kidding? It’s their favorite show.” I said, “How would you like Simpsons T-shirts?” He said, “They’re not out.” I say, “How would you like Simpsons T-shirts, baseball hats—” I had the whole set in my suite. And he says, “If you got that, you’ve got a table. If you don’t, when you come in here and you’re kidding me, you won’t know what hit you.”
We went down there. I walked in and Frankie said, “Oh, so you’re the wise guy.” I said, “Here’s the stuff.” I had some T-shirts, I had baseball caps, I had everything we had in sample. And I said, “This is for the table.” And he took us to a table—there were ten, eleven of us. God knows what the people who had reservations did. They were probably at the bar until midnight.
MATT GROENING (to the Orange County Register, December 23, 1990): Look, I don’t own The Simpsons; Twentieth Century Fox does … So with the merchandise, it’s like standing in the middle of traffic trying to stop a locomotive. I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. Luckily, I like the locomotive, so it’s fun to go along for the ride.
DONICK CARY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1996–99). I think the show also opened the door for a lot of marketing ideas. There were Simpsons burgers and cups and stuff before there were Ariel Under the Sea mugs.
GEORGE MEYER, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–2004) (to The Believer): I don’t like that the Simpsons are spokespeople for Burger King and MasterCard and Butterfinger. In the first Gulf War, I was really upset that The Simpsons’ characters were being drawn on tanks and bombs. But those are things that I don’t control.
AL OVADIA, former vice president of licensing (to the Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1997): By June 1990, there was almost nothing else you could license that was in good taste.
Bootleg merchandise was soon nearly as ubiquitous as the real thing—unlicensed merchandise was popping up all over the world. For the most part, Groening found endless amusement in these imitations.
CONAN O’BRIEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–93): Friends of Matt’s would be traveling and they would find bootlegged Simpsons merchandise. Sometimes they were funny and sometimes they were disturbing. Like a Marge made out of a lizard’s skull, or T-shirts that were from some country—recently liberated from the Iron Curtain—that had Bart saying weird phrases that were mildly threatening or racist. I remember Matt cracking up once. “Did you see what they just found? Ceausescu had this in his basement.”
Fox took action wherever it could, including against an Australian beer company that began producing Homer’s favorite brand of beer, Duff. When a skinhead group, the White Aryan Resistance, began selling T-shirts featuring a sieg-heiling Bart saying, “Total Nazi, Dude,” Fox was informed by the Anti-Defamation League and had an injunction imposed.18
Also not amused by the knockoffs was one James L. Brooks. One story, which circulated throughout the Gracie Films building, involved Jim in New York City soon after the show had hit it big. Brooks spotted an African-American street vendor hocking counterfeit Bart Simpson T-shirts. Jim accosted him: “You’re taking food out of the mouths
of my children!”
The wave of Simpsons merch would eventually break. Mattel canceled their license in early 1991 (following Burger King, which, in June 1990, had sent thousands of Bart dolls back to their distributor 19), sensing that America had had just about enough of Bart Simpson and had begun to run the other way. While it may have been true that we were tired of Bart, or that he was overexposed, the decline in sales of his toothbrushes signified only the end of a fad, not of the show’s popularity.
CHRIS TURNER (from his book, Planet Simpson): The truly rare cultural force that The Simpsons tapped … was resonance. Pop-cultural resonance is what distinguishes the millions of records sold by the Beatles from the millions sold by Pat Boone … When a pop hit has resonance, it isn’t merely consumed. The audience connects with the resonant cultural object, identifies itself with it, absorbs it.
While it may not have lasted, the merchandising explosion signified a massive success. Of the principals, Matt Groening’s life changed the most dramatically.
KEN ESTIN, writer/producer, Taxi, The Tracey Ullman Show: Whatever Matt got, [Fox] stopped giving [to others] instantly, because in the first season of The Simpsons they already were making phenomenal money—money that nobody ever dreamed of. When I first met Matt, I don’t even think he had a house. Once he started working [on Ullman], he got a house in Venice that I think he was renting. Then he bought it. Then when The Simpsons came out, he bought the house next door and turned it into a game house where he just had Simpsons things in it. He put in pinball machines and toys and toothbrushes and light fixtures, just everything you could possibly imagine—I was amazed. You’d be in one house and then you’d walk next door to the other house and there it was. It was The Simpsons house—his game house—but he made money so fast that then he sold both those properties and bought a huge house somewhere else.
The merchandising made the show’s success highly visible, to the benefit of Groening, Gracie, and Fox, and to the chagrin of a few others, who would not be asked to share in the wealth.
NINE
Fallout Boys
In which Tracey takes on The Simpsons … Homer turns his back on his Hungarian heritage … and to no one’s surprise, media consolidation has negative effects on creativity.
It’s not show-friends, it’s show-business.
—Bob Sugar, Jerry Maguire (executive-produced by James L. Brooks)
By the spring of 1990, articles were appearing in the trades about the phenomenal pay dirt Fox, Groening, and Brooks had hit with The Simpsons. Of course, with this very public windfall, the relatives came calling—and they brought their lawyers. When they were developing The Tracey Ullman Show, the executive producers (Heide Perlman, Jerry Belson, Ken Estin, and Tracey Ullman) had each signed a standard contract with Gracie Films, which gave them a percentage, or “points,” of any earnings from The Tracey Ullman Show and any spin-offs. “Spin-off” being the key word here, which The Simpsons definitely was. As the cash came rolling in, the Ullman producers began to realize that Fox and Gracie weren’t passing any of it along.
When questioned by the Ullman producers, who were also his longtime friends, Jim Brooks deferred to Fox. Fox deferred to Gracie. Lawyers were called and the fur began to fly. Jim Brooks was a mogul by this point—taking him on could be disastrous for a producer’s future in the business. Heide Perlman, for instance, let the whole matter drop, because she wanted to do a series with Brooks. The Tracey Ullman Show’s three other producers stood up to Brooks and Fox, and lost in a big way.
The most public of these battles involved Tracey Ullman, who was very vocal with her complaints, saying of The Simpsons, “I breast-fed those little devils.”1 Ullman, who, like the other producers of her show, had a couple of points in The Simpsons, was suing for a greater stake, 5–10 percent of the adjusted gross, as well as 7.5 percent of their merchandising.2 Fox and Gracie argued that those percentages were only for characters she created, not spin-off characters created by others, in this case, Matt Groening.
KEN ESTIN, writer/producer, Taxi, The Tracey Ullman Show: In her contract it said she owned any characters created on The Tracey Ullman Show. However, the [jury] interpreted that obviously it didn’t mean characters created by other people.
After a year and a half, and probably $1 million in legal fees, Tracey Ullman had to be content with the points she had (she was the only producer from Ullman who would get to keep any stake in The Simpsons). It was presumed at the time in the industry that Ullman did not name Jim Brooks or Gracie Films when she filed the lawsuit so as not to jeopardize her relationship with Brooks. At the time of the lawsuit, Ullman was starring with Nick Nolte in the ill-fated I’ll Do Anything, which James L. Brooks was directing. Awkward.
It’s important to note that in the legal battles over The Simpsons, it was Fox that was being sued, not Gracie Films. Simpsons’ pie was being divvied up by Fox, but if the producers were going to get their points, they would be coming out of the piece being given to Gracie. Gracie was directly between the two, and Jim Brooks was far from supportive of the Ullman producers. This was, after all, money that would be his if not theirs. He and other Simpson producers—though noticeably not Sam Simon—testified against Ullman in court.
KEN ESTIN: What happened is Jim Brooks and Fox decided to give none of the merchandising money to The Tracey Ullman Show and keep it all for The Simpsons. Meanwhile, Jerry Belson and Heide Perlman and I were saying, “How come we don’t get a penny from The Simpsons? It doesn’t seem right. It was a spin-off of our show.”
I’ve seen dozens of spin-offs, and the creators of the original show always get something for the spin-offs, and we went to Jim Brooks and we went to Fox, and they wouldn’t talk to us. They said, “Jim Brooks is Jim Brooks and he doesn’t negotiate with people.” And Fox was not gonna negotiate with us and wouldn’t show us the books and wouldn’t talk to us at all about it. They said, “It’s over for you guys.”
Another reason Fox gave for denying the Ullman producers their cut of The Simpsons was that Ullman had never made any money. Because The Simpsons was spun off from The Tracey Ullman Show, Fox argued that their points were worthless until the costs incurred by Ullman had been covered. “For the first two years of The Simpsons they were saying, ‘Ullman’s still in the red, so you get nothing,’” a friend of the producers remembers. “The history of Hollywood is, ‘Yeah, you have points, try to get ’em.’”
KEN ESTIN: Now, nobody knew The Simpsons was gonna make $3 billion for Fox; we had no idea what we were losing on the merchandising. So [after the first season of The Simpsons] I hired my cousin just to do my negotiations—no lawyer, no real agent.
Fox comes to me and says, “We’re all angry at each other right now and it’s bad for everybody. We wanna be in business with you, so as a good-faith gesture”—they used these words or I never would’ve fallen for the ruse. They said, “As a gesture of good faith, we’re willing to pay you all your piece of The Simpsons will ever be worth. We’re willing to pay it to you now so you’ll have the money now. You won’t have to wait for it. Is that something that would make you feel better?” And my cousin says, “Why not, Ken? You’ll take it. You’ll invest it in real estate or something.”
My cousin said to me, “They’ve told us that The Simpsons will never do well in syndication because it was on Fox instead of one of the regular networks.”
I made the stupid mistake. I said, “Okay. As a goodwill gesture so we’ll all work together again and let bygones will be bygones.” Because Jim Brooks was furious at me, I said, “We’ll bury the hatchet.” Richard Sakai was my best friend and I said to Richard, “We’ll bury the hatchet. I’ll take the $400,000 less the $125,000 for my piece of The Tracey Ullman Show and The Simpsons together, and we’ll all just forget this thing.”
I sold my share for a net gain after my attorney fees of about $250,000. I calculated that my share would’ve been worth about $10 million now, and I sold it for $250,000. I made the decision; nobody twist
ed my arm. But the bottom line was that when they said it was a good-faith gesture so we’d all work together, in my stupid, naïve way—and I was pretty young then—I really believed it. I later on discovered that they will say anything to anybody to make a deal.
Heide Perlman’s the only one who said she wanted to stay in business with Jim Brooks. So she decided just to forget the whole thing. She did two television series with Jim and they both failed. Jerry Belson had been Jim Brooks’s best friend for as long as I had known them, and they stopped talking.
Brooks and Belson’s relationship went all the way back to Hollywood in the mid-sixties, when Belson, one of the youngest members of the guild, had been tapped by Carl Reiner to partner with Garry Marshall to write episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. They were part of a cabal of great comedy-writing friends that included Brooks’s cocreator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Allan Burns. Jerry and Jim collaborated on projects, went on vacations with their families together, spoke nearly every day, and even celebrated holidays together.
