Billion-Dollar Kiss Read online

  The meeting itself laid out as these meetings typically did. What do you like to watch? What would be your dream show to work on? Where do you see yourself in five years? Have you found a decent place to live yet? Where’s your favorite place for sushi so far? There were no incorrect answers. After a potential client was given the impression that he was being suitably screened, the agents then declared that they were “big fans” and the future was discussed. The credentials of the agency were presented. Names were dropped. Success stories told.

  All I could think was “Wow! This could actually happen!” It was like listening to the homecoming queen hinting that she wanted to sleep with you and then describing in vivid detail what she was like in bed. I tried to say only enough so as to remain animate, afraid that if I said any more I would rapidly transform into Jeffrey the Babbling Idiot and blow the whole thing.

  The primary selling point for the big agencies was the promise of packaging. In other words, if a young writer was represented by Morris, he or she would be put together with a respected director, high-level writers, celebrity actors—the young writer would be rolled into the package offered to the studios. So when I say names were dropped, I mean names like Bill Cosby—stars. Since Morris had quite an impressive roster of stars, one could feel very confident that a Morris TV writer would be a working TV writer. If anyone still had any doubt about the big agency’s supremacy in television, all he had to do was look at the 1988 schedule. In the 8:00 time slot: Sledge Hammer! on ABC, Tour of Duty on CBS, and Cosby on NBC—all William Morris packages, programmed on all three networks throughout the same slot. A grand slam!

  Finally, these kinds of meetings ended with agents declaring that their specialty was “breaking in” new writers. That it was, in fact, their own area of expertise and no one in town was better at it than they. By the time these meetings drew to a close, most young writers thought they were ready to sign any kind of contract that was put in front of them.

  I arrived in Hollywood just as the machinery of finding, shaping, and marketing new writers was gearing up. Soon after my meeting at William Morris, the same questions I was asked and the same benefits I was promised would be posed and pitched with increasing frequency throughout the offices of television literary departments at all the major talent agencies. I didn’t know this yet, of course. What I did know was that William Morris was every bit as impressive as I had dreamed. I also knew that I genuinely liked Lanny. He was—there’s just no more accurate way to say it—a good guy. It was heady stuff to have my work considered by people like this, people who wanted to represent it, put their names on it; and even more so to hear palpable descriptions of a life where I could pay the rent by making more of it.

  I wanted to sign something right then and there before they changed their minds. The only reason I didn’t was because of this nagging feeling I had about that crazy lady I had met earlier in the day. “You’ll end up signing with me, you’ll see,” she had predicted, and I could still hear her voice in my head. I wanted to take some time and think about it all. The William Morris guys were gentlemen in every sense of the word about what I wanted to do.

  In fact, “Gentlemen” was the very first word on the agency contract that they sent to my stolen office at Universal the next day when I was at work. “Gentlemen: This will confirm the following agreement between us,” the authorization papers read. “I hereby engage you for a term of….” The attachednote explained that they respected my desire to think about it, but they wanted to be clear about their interest. There is little in life that equals the simultaneous thrill and terror of reading one’s first agency papers. The exhilaration that comes from being wanted is at the same time tempered by the contractual nature of the expression. With the exception of an apartment lease, it is, for most young writers, the first time they are asked to make a long-term and binding commitment—with consequences that go far beyond any lease. No matter how much a new writer thinks he’d cut off his left pinky to receive an offer of representation, once the massive contract documents are actually placed in front of him, he begins to sweat. Some writers even bring the contract to lawyers. But the fact is, if an agent doesn’t get a writer a “bona fide and appropriate offer” of employment within ninety days, the WGA-mandated Artists’ Manager Basic Agreement of 1976 (the AMBA contract) stipulates that the agency papers are null and void. Amazingly, though, this reality doesn’t keep writers from sweating out the decision to sign. And the fact that I was still haunted by that intense agent in the strip mall increased the quantity of perspiration on my brow.

  I asked everyone I could for advice. The consensus was that this was a very good problem to have and I should shut the hell up, realize how lucky I was, and, obviously, go with the better known of the two agencies. I pretty much reached the same conclusions on my own, but still, there was something about that woman…something about her assuredness and demeanor…something that I couldn’t let go….

  One of my buddies at Universal, Kevin Reilly, a fellow motion-picture marketing peon who I helped stuff Harry and the Hendersons T-shirts into envelopes (and the future president of NBC), introduced me to a girl he was dating named Jamie Tarses (the future president of ABC), whose father had actually created Molly Dodd. She didn’t mince words. “If Beth Uffner wants to represent you, you have to go with her. You have to,” she said. Jamie went on to tell me something that was not yet public knowledge. Beth was about to join forces with a growing literary boutique called Broder, Kurland, Webb.

  It was explained to me that unlike the big agencies, namely Morris, ICM, and CAA, whose business models were to package all of their various talent—actors, writers, directors, producers, editors, musicians—into a television series, literary boutiques were agencies that concentrated almost exclusively on TV writers. Although the big agencies were beginning to adjust their strategies to account for the increasing primacy of the writer in network television, this was akin to turning a battleship. Sensing an opportunity in the rapidly changing market, individual agents and small teams of agents began to center their attention on writers. And the really savvy ones limited their lists to TV writers. The idea of a specialized talent shop was nothing new. There were many small to midsize agencies that focused on specific kinds of actors. If you wanted young, classically trained talent, you went to J. Michael Bloom. If you wanted Jack Nicholson, you went to Sandy Bressler. What was novel here was the notion of applying this kind of specialization to writing talent.

  After Bob Broder and Norm Kurland were joined by Elliot Webb in 1983, BKW quickly and quietly became one of the most successful talent agencies in town. Their major clients? TV writers. With talent like the Charles brothers, Barry Kemp, Glenn Gordon Caron, Earl Pomerantz, and Donald Bellisario, and a hand in shows like Cheers, Newhart, and Moonlighting, the boutique was, agent for agent, just as profitable as any of the big three, and by some accounts, more so. While highly publicized stories about movie stars and the superagents who got them record amounts filled the industry trades as well as the consumer publications, literary boutiques like BKW consciously stayed out of the limelight, preferring their 15 percent back-end stake in several TV shows that might earn half a billion dollars each in syndication to a 10 percent commission on a handful of $15 million movie stars.

  When Beth joined them in 1988, Broder, Kurland, Webb, Uffner (BKWU) and a few other similarly sized boutiques would radically change the landscape of the business. Beth’s forte was finding and shaping neophyte writers. Her list was a sort of feeder program for her partners’ more established clients. Beth fed her new clients to her partners’ bigger fish who were getting shows on the air, creating the perfect paradigm for the packaging of series programming. Not only was the agency in a position to stock its packaged shows with its own writers from top to bottom, but even more importantly, young writers could be trained and groomed on those shows, eventually becoming future showrunnners who would command their own BKWU packaged series.

  While the big agencies
could promise young writers that they would be put into a package with star actors, literary boutiques could promise young writers that they would be packaged with established writers. As the writer-showrunner supplanted the actor as the must-have element in a TV package, boutique representation became the first choice for many TV writers, new and established. Many writers still went with the big agencies, of course, especially those who also wanted a screenwriting career. But many of these same writers, in particular the younger ones, often left when they discovered that a) the agency was too large to focus on their individual needs, and b) the agency was primarily committed to servicing the name actors who intrigued the writers in the first place. The literary boutiques prided themselves in taking a career-view to representation. They were able to provide a great deal of personal attention to their writers because they chose not to take on actors who required a notoriously high amount of maintenance. Writers rarely took up their agents’ time by repeatedly calling and complaining about the size of their trailers. This allowed the literary boutiques to stay firmly focused on the goal—not just to draw a 10 percent commission on salaries for a few years, but to groom and place future showrunners.

  I followed Jamie’s advice. After I couriered two bottles of Glenlivet to William Morris with a thank-you note, I called Beth Uffner and said yes.

  Immediately thereafter, now that I was finished obsessing about and finally making what I thought was the biggest decision of my life, I was struck by the absolute and utter ridiculousness of my current state of affairs. I finally had an agent. Great. Now what? I was so busy focusing on representation that I neglected to give due consideration to the rather serious matter that there was, in fact, no industry in which my agent could represent me!

  The strike was getting worse. Way worse. During the last week of June 1988, the Writers Guild turned down the latest of several offers from management. This last one, which the studios promised was their best and final offer, was rejected three to one by the nine-thousand-member guild. Both sides firmly dug in their heels. As the work stoppage lengthened, the pain it was causing increased. Daily pickets were growing heated. Universal announced more layoffs and summarily closed the commissary. The WGA had handed out more than $2 million in interest-free loans, the majority of its strike fund. Writers were beginning to face the fact that they might not be able to pay their bills. The specter of writers losing their homes became more and more real. A splinter group had formed within the guild that wanted to settle. The group was garnering more and more support every day, raising the possibility of a dramatic battle within the WGA itself. Since divisiveness is precisely what management wanted, studio representatives fanned the flames every way they could.

  The studios publicly and privately stated that they would stop at nothing to keep shows in production. Management promised that they had plans in the works to have several shows back in production right after the July 4th holiday. But they stopped short of explaining who would write these shows.

  While I was trying to decide between agents, my boss’s boss, the head of Motion Picture Research, put me in touch with an old fraternity brother of his who happened to be working on the lot—as Universal’s senior vice president of Current Television. This executive had positive words about both agents, as well as my spec scripts, which he asked to read. Right after management’s promise to keep TV shows in production, this executive called me for a meeting.

  Being summoned to Universal’s executive office building, “the Black Tower,” is an otherworldly experience. A trip to the fifteen-story glass monolith, built to make Lew Wasserman’s authority clear and indisputable, gives you the definite sense that you’re going to meet the Wizard. The senior vice president of Current Television had an office on an upper floor with a commanding view to the north. You could see all the way from the picketers down below, across the entire smog-filled valley, to the San Gabriel Mountains. The office was furnished like most Universal executive suites, with formal studio hand-me-downs. The executive, easygoing, laid-back, stood in stark relief to both his stuffy office and the tense town below.

  I sat down, cracked open the cold Perrier that had been thrust into my hand, and listened as he got right to the point. He offered me a job: $10,000 to write a script for Charles in Charge, a sitcom starring Scott Baio.

  How could he offer me a writing assignment in the middle of a writers’ strike? Well…he proceeded to tell me a story about when he was a kid in college and he took a job as a scab baggage handler during a strike. It was a colorful story about how he needed money for college, for his future. He wanted to work. They didn’t. He wasn’t uncompassionate, but why should he show allegiance to a group to which he didn’t belong?

  His story resonated with me. I sure wanted to work. This wasn’t my strike. Why should I show allegiance to a union to which I didn’t belong? In fact, the WGA wouldn’t even let me join. In order for me to enjoy the privileges of membership, I first had to be offered a job, and the WGA certainly was not offering me a job. To the contrary, they were keeping me from getting one.

  For the most part, Hollywood is a union-shop town. This means that in order to work, you have to be a union member or become a union member. But in order to become a union member, you first have to be offered a job by a company that has signed a collective bargaining agreement with the union. The way this usually works is that if a studio or showrunner wants to hire a new writer, they tell the WGA, and the writer pays a $2,500 initiation fee and becomes a union member. But because there was a strike on, the studios had not signed the current bargaining agreement and were not signatories of the guild. Therefore, the studios were free to hire whoever they wanted and the union was closed to new members.

  No one had asked me about whether or not the guild should strike. No one had offered me the right to vote on the matter. But a major studio was offering me a real, high-paying professional writing assignment. My very first one. Why the hell shouldn’t I take it?!

  Well, there was a good reason, actually. According to the WGA, if they ever found out, I would be “blackballed,” barred from future membership, unable to ever work as a professional writer in Hollywood. But the Universal executive assured me that there was no way the union would find out—as long as I never told anyone about the offer. As of this writing, with one exception, I never have.

  I had a major decision to make, and this one I had to be very careful not to talk about to anyone.

  FOUR

  Green Envelopes

  “An agent is a bulldog. You don’t want him sitting at your dinner table. You want him outside, tied up in front of the house, barking like crazy.”

  —A TV WRITER-PRODUCER

  “I look at my writers like annuities.”

  —A TV LITERARY AGENT

  Unlike New York, Los Angeles is a relatively easy city in which to be poor. For one thing, as many of the nation’s homeless who have made pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of Santa Monica can tell you, it’s warm and sunny in Southern California. This cuts down on some basic cost-of-living expenses and simply makes a struggling life more bearable. Unlike nearly every other city in the country, no one (okay, almost no one) is from Los Angeles. People, young people, come from all ends of the earth to pursue a goal, a dream, that can only be realized in the City of Angels. Consequently, there is a massive subculture of interns and assistants, coffee-getters and lunch-deliverers. Though there is no question that living below the poverty line sucks, in L.A. there’s a certain nobility in it—it is an accepted and expected part of the proverbial dues-paying process. This process bonds people, creating a tight-knit community. As though pulled together by some unseen force, industry people always seem to find each other in L.A. They are drawn together like iron ore clinging to a magnet after it’s run along beach sand.

  After a few weeks, the romance of indentured servitude in Brentwood wore off, so I packed up my few belongings, left my garage, and crashed in the spare room at my buddy Delbert’s piece-of-shit ap
artment on Genessee in West Hollywood. A fellow drama student from Carnegie who had graduated a year before me, Delbert was an actor-waiter who spent his time reading Sartre, smoking Camels, and tattooing a great deal of himself with funds garnered from the pawn shop on Santa Monica. He was a great drinking buddy, a loyal friend, but a dreadful roommate. I soon sublet an amazing split-level apartment a few blocks away on Hayvenhurst from a yoga instructor who was leaving for Nepal. She was more concerned about finding an agreeable caretaker for her cat than the rent, so she made me a deal I could afford.

  If I wasn’t working at Universal, hanging out at Canter’s Deli with Delbert, or trying to keep that wayward cat alive, I was getting together with other aspiring TV writers. Through the Carnegie Clan I immediately met a lot of people in the industry. I went to parties at Belinda Wells’s (John’s ex’s) home in the hills on Camrose. I met new friends who were assistants and interns for meals and drinks. I took classes at UCLA’s extension program, where I met many young writers, one who more than a decade later would end up hiring me. In fact, this kind of networking had a role in nearly every writing job I would ever have. Most TV writers have a similar story.

  Having been treated like quite an oddity for blowing off a sensible future to pursue an eccentric endeavor like writing, I was thrilled to have finally found so many other like-minded spirits. However, despite all the support and fellowship that L.A. had to offer, I was hungry, figuratively and literally. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to work as a writer. And to someone who was living hand to mouth for a shot at that dream, ten thousand dollars seemed like all the money in the world. While interning, I stayed very well informed about the various catered meetings throughout the marketing department at Universal. I was always on hand to help clean the kitchen and conference rooms. Half of Tom Hanks’s tuna sandwich would be a nice lunch. Sid Sheinberg’s remaining Chinese chicken salad made a great dinner. The leftovers from the regular Friday executive meeting sometimes got me through a whole weekend. But as much as I appreciated the free meals, after my offer from Universal Television, I began to wonder exactly why I should forgo the opportunity to eat food that hadn’t already been picked over by the rich and famous. Ten thousand dollars could literally change my entire life. I thought about the offer, constantly and carefully.