As March came and it started looking like Tom Wolfe and Barbara Wallace had a decent chance of shooting the pilot episode of the situation comedy they were developing for CBS, a couple of rather show-businessy things started happening for the resolutely un-Hollywood couple.
Wallace and Wolfe, who are from Chicago and plan to move back some day, started showing up more at their office on the Universal Studios lot, a theretofore little-used perk of the talent contract the writers have with the Studios USA production company.
And they got the services of a writers’ assistant, a very competent woman who was to work at that office and deal with the phones and the mail and their schedules and such, and also sit in on production and learn the trade.
The couple’s feelings about the vaguely feudal Hollywood custom of everyone having personal assistants are on display rather directly in the script they wrote for the “New York, New York” pilot.
Christine Baranski’s character, the hard-driving producer of a New York morning TV show, tells her new weatherman, an amiable Midwesterner played by Jim Gaffigan, that the woman in the scene with them is her assistant.
“Jim,” the weatherman says, introducing himself to the assistant. No response.
“And you are?” he says.
“Marsha’s assistant,” she says.
Wallace and Wolfe’s operation is, predictably, more democratic. Their assistant will tell you her name, Jan Libby, and make suggestions in the editing room, as well. The calendar she kept for them in March and April demonstrates the blur of activity it takes to get a TV pilot made and why having a little help isn’t a bad idea.
Of course, if it were really like the TV business, five or six of those would flop within weeks April demonstrates the blur of activity it takes to get a TV pilot made and why having a little help isn’t a bad idea.
Beginning March 13, 15 days before Baranski joined the project and filming therefore became a sure thing, money started to flow. That week, according to the plan, Wolfe and Wallace hired a producer, a production designer, a set designer, an accountant and a construction coordinator.
Sets needed building. Fabric needed approving. Roles needed filling.
They went to casting sessions almost every day for at least a couple of weeks.
A good script is important, of course, but a bad cast can kill even the best script.
CBS didn’t want the pilot if Baranski didn’t want to do it, but the wheels had to be set in motion or the couple risked having to scramble, last minute, and work with people who hadn’t been able to line up jobs anywhere else during the busy pilot season.
In a key step, they landed a highly respected director, Pamela Fryman, who has shot many episodes of the first-rate comedy “Frasier” and was shooting, Wolfe says, five pilots in toto this spring.
Television is a curious medium because the people who run the shows are, most often, writers. In the case of Wallace and Wolfe, a script they had written and revised in a room behind their house meant they now, as executive producers, had a $1.8 million budget and the head of one of the Big Three television networks waiting eagerly to see what they would do with it.
“It’s not like doing a movie where you do one and put it out there and hope people like it,” says Rob Burnett, CEO of David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, one of the partners in the production of “New York, New York.” “If things go well you’re doing a hundred of these things. You’ve got to know how to run the business.”
Some writers never grow comfortable controlling purse strings, but the advantages to this system illustrate why TV is known as a writer’s medium.
“What we enjoy most is writing,” says Wolfe.
“But,” says Wallace, “then when we find ourselves on the set and there’s something we don’t like, we want to have the ability to say, `I don’t like that,’ and be able to make the fix.
“We find that we have opinions about things that aren’t strictly writing that we didn’t know we had opinions about.” A pair of chairs, for instance, that wound up in an office scene in the pilot continued to bug Wallace long after the scene was shot.
It helped considerably that the couple had done one previous pilot, a show about vintage teenagers called “1973” that the WB network did not pick up.
That show, a presentation tape rather than a full pilot, had a budget of $1.2 million.
“The last pilot we did was actually on a tighter schedule than this one,” says Wallace. “So it seems like it was all hinging on this one moment, but really there was time.”
So while they were not frantic about having only a month to get ready to shoot after getting the firm “go,” they certainly had to hustle.
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It’s a hustle that takes place every spring under the curious system TV uses to fill prime time with fresh, or at least fresh-seeming, fare.
It took place, in one variation or another, 130 times this spring, as the six TV networks shot that many pilot episodes or, less frequently, presentation tapes.
It’s no way to run a business, of course, paying for 130 productions that will yield maybe 35 new shows for the networks’ fall schedules. Those lineups are being announced this week; specifically, Wednesday sees the CBS presentation that will make public the fate of “New York, New York,” as it may or may not end up being called (as well as this series’ other focal point, “The Rocky LaPorte Show”).
Of all those 130 shows — and assume, generously, that another 12-15 will serve as midseason replacements for fall-season failures — maybe five will be commercially successful.
But making television is not like making, say, television sets, where the fact that the set works and is attractive and has a decent marketing plan gives it good odds at success.
“Anybody who has been to business school has to be pulling their hair out,” says Robert J. Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. “The hits per acre is very low with this crop.
“But it isn’t science. It’s magic. The frustrating thing about show business is that it will never give up its secrets to rationality. When you’re dealing with cultural issues, the parameters are always moving and things like chemistry are so unpredictable.”
That’s why Thompson is not among those who consider the pilot process, with its production expenses and the cost of putting a cast together, to be necessarily wasteful. You are trying to start a fire, and you have to have all the fuel in the pit — scripts, cast, set — before you know whether it will light.
Still, there are people who think things could be done better, or at least more interestingly, and have at least as much success.
Al Franken, who cocreated “Lateline” for NBC and has a show he is trying to develop for Fox, says he has a writer friend who says “if he were a network executive, he would go to writers in the community and say, `Write the show you’ve always wanted to, but could never get through the process.’ A higher percentage of those would probably be hits.
“The idea is trust the writers a little more, their impulses rather than the programmers’ impulses.”
Burnett, who also executive produces Letterman’s “Late Show” and has a series he cowrote that is a candidate for NBC’s schedule, says he would eliminate pilots altogether, because having so many of them being shot at once spreads out an already thin talent pool.
Jeff Sagansky, former head of development at NBC and head programmer at CBS, argues for more gut-level decision making on the part of executives, who these days have to answer to large corporations and their stockholders and “pretty much have an expiration date stamped on their foreheads.”
Since nobody lasts longer than a few years in one of those jobs anyway, Sagansky argues, why not go down taking chances: “The whole pilot process, even though it’s a nice security blanket for all the Linuses that are running the networks, I’m not sure it’s any more effective” than just identifying what you think is good and airing it, he says.
As an example, he says that for all the executives’ tendencies to try to sign writers and actors who have had past successes, lightning tends not to strike twice. Among the bigger successes this current season are: “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” “Malcolm in the Middle” and “Titus,” none of which would have aired under a programming theory that relied exclusively on pedigree.
“Trying to create a quality TV project is almost an oxymoron,” says Paul Haggis, the writer and executive producer behind “Due South,” “EZ Streets” and the current “Family Law.” “It’s so difficult to do because there are so many different elements. You start off believing that you’re in control of everything and quickly realize that you’re in control of nothing at all — even the best of us, or the best of them. So much is determined by the character you create and then the actor you get to fill the role. Sometimes the gods just bless you.”
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The show called “New York, New York” got a crackling good cast the same imperfect way a lot of bad casts are put together. It started with Jim Gaffigan doing a stand up routine on Letterman’s show and signing with Worldwide Pants, almost exactly the same path that led to Ray Romano’s popular and respected “Everybody Loves Raymond” sitcom on CBS.
Gaffigan and Worldwide Pants brought the basic idea for the show to Wolfe and Wallace. CBS, which had a deal with Letterman’s company, also had a deal with Baranski, and so it brought her in.
Rocky Carroll was suggested as the arrogant anchorman. Wolfe and Wallace met with him, wanted him and he said he would join if Baranski would. And Frances Guinan, who they knew from his work with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, was cast as the other major character, the weatherman’s seemingly toadying assistant with a mysterious past.
And from the day everybody first got together for the table read, a week-and-a-half before the actual shoot on Stage 43 at Universal, it felt like chemistry.
“It was a room at Universal that’s just bad for comedy,” says Wolfe. “Wall-to-wall carpeting and fluorescent lighting and its like, oh, god, just a beige room. When you perform you’re aware of stuff like that. But it still went well.”
That Gaffigan could act, could hold his own in scenes with Baranski, was perhaps the biggest surprise.
On hand, recalls Gaffigan, “were executives from every branch of the military, it seemed. It was kind of a positive version of a reading of the will.
“I felt an advantage because, being a comedian, people had no expectations for me. It was like, `Let’s hope he knows how to read.'”
Wolfe and Wallace brought in some writer friends for the week so there would be fresh eyes on the material, especially if some scenes didn’t work as well in the playing as on the page.
And there were daily rehearsals, including separate run-throughs for the different production companies involved the two nights before shooting started, kind of a last chance for executives to offer suggestions.
“They were bringing in furniture as late as the night before just to get it right,” Wolfe says, “but the production week went great because there were very few changes to the script.”xxx
Finally, the night of April 28, a Friday, real people, most of them recruited from the Universal Studios theme park next door, were brought into the studio where “Coach” and “The Steve Harvey Show” have shot.
There were almost no flubbed lines, bloopers, temper tantrums or emergency rewrites, other than changing “Dimitri at the gyros place” to “Muhammed at the falafel place,” a presumably more New York reference.
Baranski, especially, seemed to be in total control of her newsroom domain, ready to leap into character at the sound of a clapboard. Sitcom shoots are normally tiresome as a spectator sport, but here cameras moved from room to room at an abnormally rapid pace, and it rarely took more than a single rehearsal and two takes before director Fryman moved on to the next scene.
Over the next few days, a final cut of the episode was prepared to show the network. Music and sound were mixed in. Wolfe and Wallace supervised the few last-minute changes that the network asked for, and then the show, and their future — including the potentially huge change of moving with their kids to New York for the production — moved into the system that determines whether it will make the schedule.
That system includes testing the show before audiences of both potential advertisers and average Americans, a practice that is controversial, to say the least.
Eventual big hits, like “Seinfeld,” are notorious for having tested very poorly. Test audiences, seeing a show and its characters for the first time, tend to like best what feels most familiar.
“American Beauty” screenwriter Alan Ball sat in on testing of his short-lived ABC sitcom, “Oh Grow Up,” and says he couldn’t believe that people with time to watch a TV show for five dollars were going to have such influence.
“These are like mall people off the streets who had nothing better to do,” Ball says.
Franken watched audiences indicate their moment-by-moment responses to his “Lateline.” They turned the dial to “pleasure” during punchlines and “displeasure” during setups. If only writers could come up with a joke that didn’t need a setup.
Not only does audience testing tend to favor the more homogenous shows, but the thought is it is used mostly as an executive CYA strategy. When a show fails, the head programmer can tell his bosses, “Hey, it tested through the roof.”
But the hope is that the best programmers use the testing only as one of many tools that help them decide. As important are what kind of audience profile the network has (CBS’s is older, more traditional, making a classically character-driven show like “New York, New York” seem to make sense); what holes it has to fill in its schedule; and, in the best cases, the quality of the show and the gut instinct of the programmer.
Paul Haggis, for one, thinks that CBS chief Leslie Moonves ultimately trusts his gut.
Still, everybody involved knows there’s no real predicting what will work and what won’t work. As Gaffigan says, “When you think about it, it’s like, Bob Newhart and Judd Hirsch were in a sitcom that got canceled.”
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In the days between delivery of the show and discovery of its fate, Barb Wallace and Tom Wolfe try not to get too hopeful. They’ve had their hearts broken before with shows that they’ve also felt, as Wolfe says about “New York, New York” after seeing the completed pilot, were “as good already as a lot of the shows on TV.”
And though they try to insulate themselves from the inevitable speculation, they can’t help hearing things.
Jan Libby tells them over lunch one day that she has heard the show is in CBS’s top five. Other comedies the network is considering are shows featuring Bette Midler and Ellen DeGeneres.
They return from lunch to find a clip on their desk, from the Hollywood Reporter, saying much the same thing.
Marcy Ross, the head of comedy development at their production company, Studios USA, hears through the grapevine that the show tested very well with the advertisers CBS showed it to.
Hollywood seems to smell a success, too, says Ross, judging by the number of calls she is getting from agents whose writer clients would like to be considered for the show’s staff.
“So much of television, the successful shows, is synchronicity,” says Ross. “This is just one of those situations, the right script at the right time for the right people. It feels like this is their time.”
In their early 40s, Wolfe and Wallace are approaching the age where Hollywood doesn’t like to hire you for comedy unless you’ve had a success.
“We’re coming to the end of the line where they’ll accept noble failures,” says Wallace.
Still, straits are hardly dire. They know HBO is interested in an idea of theirs. They’ve got a play, a comedy about the 1960 election in a Northwest Side ward called “Early and Often,” scheduled to go up at the Famous Door in Chicago this fall.
And they just bought a two-flat back in Chicago.
So while Wallace stayed in Hollywood, reading scripts submitted by potential staff writers and waiting for the call from CBS, Wolfe was driving across country last week with an actor friend, toting in a trailer some furniture that will go in the new building.
“We can go back if we have to,” says Wallace.
“We’ll dormer up the attic,” Wolfe says. “We’ll be living for a thousand dollars a month.”
“It’s always nice to have that backup plan,” Wallace adds.
What they get out of their latest adventure in television development is the chance, when CBS makes its announcement Wednesday, to become exactly what they are writing about: Midwesterners living in New York.
And if not, at least they get a tape they can show their friends and family, says Wolfe, “and not have to blurt things out to cover up embarrassing stuff.”
If cars were like “ER”
What if other industries developed new products the way the television business does? The Big 3 automakers, for example?
According to sources close to the auto industry, it costs $1 to $2 million to build a concept car — the counterpart of a TV pilot. The practice is to take a concept car to auto shows and gauge public reaction. If carmakers were like the networks they’d produce 20 concept cars a year and put them out on the circuit — then trash more than half, and build, say, eight. Of course, this would be expensive. To mass produce a new model of totally new design – engine, chassis, everything — costs $1 to $3 billion. A variant of an existing model — that retains many elements — runs about $500 million.
At any given time, General Motors has 100 concept cars on the drawing board. But it usually only picks 10 per year to take to shows, and then might build only one. GM seems to be getting more like the networks, though. Of 10 concept cars it built this year, it expects to bring out seven.
