Authors: Barney Rosenzweig
Chapter 1
OUT OF THE DARKNESS ...
Cagney & Lacey
production central, Lacy Street, Los Angeles, April, 1988:
The very last day of the very last episode of the very last season of my television series took place on the first Monday of the month of April 1988. I was in my office, very much alone and waiting for an emotional reaction that would not come. I stared at the phone. Moments before, I had slammed down the receiver, ending an awful argument with my oldest child. She was then twenty-eight. I was fifty. One of us should have known better.
Those were difficult times between Erika and me, and my anger at the phone call was rapidly turning to guilt as I continued to glare at that damned phone, wondering if I should call my child back, what I would say if she would even take the call, and why these conversations with us were (seemingly) always so awful.
The phone rang. Weird to be staring at a phone and have it just ring like that. It was Barbara Rosing calling from our production office:
“We’re holding the last shot. They won’t make it without you there.”
My flesh and blood family would have to wait. I set down the phone’s receiver and walked the hundred or so yards to the squad room set of my beloved series.
The final shot was a somewhat complicated set-up with the camera placed on a small, crane-like dolly. This facilitated a smooth camera move throughout the squad room, so as to capture various, specific moments with individual members of the cast who had been spotted in different places in the set by the director. The purpose of such a move is to guide the audience’s attention to what is important in the scene, while adding a certain amount of cinematic fluidity to the filmmaking, while (not coincidentally) saving money and time both on the set and in the editing bay by reducing or eliminating the need for additional individual shots or “coverage.”
On my arrival at the familiar set of the 14th Precinct, I was asked, for the first time in my career, to ride the dolly and look through the camera’s lens as a final “rehearsal.” When the less-than-a-minute move was complete, I nodded my “approval,” thanked the dolly “grip” who had guided me through the whole process, and then dismounted the “best seat in the house” in order to fade into the background and watch my cast and crew do what they had done so well for over 125 episodes.
As the assistant director called for quiet, my mind drifted back to the argument with my daughter and how I might try explaining to her my poor temper during our not-so-long-ago fight by telephone. The thought entering my mind was to send her a note, referring to this very moment in the life of my show and the dark mood into which I was being enveloped, opening the missive with: “One of my children died tonight.”
Before I could even consider the possible tastelessness of that remark, my eyes began to well up. A moment later the final shot was complete. It was a “wrap,” and all on stage began to applaud, shake hands, and hug each other. Within minutes I was alone in the room. Everyone had exited to pack up; to grab a drink, a piece of pizza, or a slice of cake; and then to go home. I took a bench seat along the wall and surveyed the now-empty room, not unlike Walter Payton at Chicago’s Soldier Field at the end of his last football game. Like him, I just sat there, trying to soak it in, recognizing that—at least for me—it was the end of an epoch.
An electrician entered the squad room set, ignored me, and began his nightly chore of turning the overhead lights off, one by one. I wished I had hired a videotape camera person to record this moment, and then it was over. I was crying as Sharon Gless, and then a moment later Tyne Daly, entered the room. They flanked me and each gave me hugs, but in the seconds that elapsed before these two fabulous women joined me, my mind flashed back fourteen years to another darkened room, one with a flickering light behind me and a beaded screen in front as I viewed the movie
Scent of a Woman
—not the one with Al Pacino, but the original—a seventies Italian film starring Vittorio Gassman, which predated the American version by a generation. It was my second date with Barbara Corday, a woman then in her late twenties who was near the beginning of a promising career as a writer for television.
Ms. Corday was then the lesser half of the writing team of Avedon & Corday; her partner, Barbara Avedon, was at that time in her mid to late forties, a writer of several years’ experience, with an impressive array of television writing credits.
Relatively new to the game as a team, the Barbaras were having some success as comedy writers for hire when I picked them for their first dramatic writing assignment on a then-new hour series for CBS developed by former William Sackheim lieutenant, David Levinson.
Levinson would serve as executive producer for the Universal Studios project, and I was being asked to produce under his aegis. The series was alternately called
Sons and Daughters
or
Senior Year
. It was to be a continuing, or serial, drama, focusing on the lives of a group of suburban high school students. It was set up as a cross between
Peyton Place
and
American Graffiti
. Unfortunately, it had all the drama of the lighthearted
American Graffiti
and all the humor of the hyper-dramatic
Peyton Place
.
The setting was a medium-size American town. The heroes were ball players, sports editors, and cheerleaders. The heroines were pom-pom girls and gals from the wrong side of the tracks. I was, in most ways, perfect casting for this vehicle. I had been one of those kids; I had grown up in Montebello (a small, working-class town in the midst of southern California oil fields), and it was not so many years before that I had forgotten what that was like. I don’t think the then-thirtysomething David Levinson much appreciated my unique pedigree.
My supposition is that he was probably brought up as the overachieving, scholarly son of a well-to-do Chicago family, who spent much of his boyhood practicing the piano and attending concerts in the metropolitan environs of the Second City. Being asked to create a series about kids who grew up without his discipline (and who seemingly, in that long-ago time, were having a lot more fun than he) was now the task at hand. I’m guessing he never liked those kids. Worse than that, he didn’t much like me.
I refer to it as my period of watching paint dry. Levinson would allow me to do little else. The show was the first cancellation of the season. I don’t think the then-network chief Fred Silverman allowed CBS to air three episodes.
Not everything was bleak that summer. Barbara Corday had recently separated from her second husband, and I was in the process of ending my five-year “thing” with the beautiful Jeannine from Malibu Beach. It was all business during the day, but vibrations of mutual availability were in the air when Corday phoned my office.
“I don’t know what the proper protocol between writers and producers in a situation like this is,” she began, “but I was wondering if you’d like to come over for dinner one night this week.”
“Your protocol is fine,” I said, then added, “Look, you work, I work, why not go out to dinner?”
From that moment, Barbara Corday knew she had found the man for her. My feelings were articulated then and years later in the “Choices” episode of
Cagney & Lacey
: Barbara was a cactus. Jeannine was a fern. Barbara didn’t need any watering at all. That was OK with me.
Dinner was our first date, and that led to our second night out together and the movie
Scent of a Woman
. The theater was in Westwood Village, and the 400-seat house was at least half full. The movie was in black and white, and the story took place in southern Italy shortly after World War II. The laughs at this sexy comedy were audible and primarily based on the relationships (or lack of same) between the somewhat older, sometimes slightly vulgar Italian men and the objects that attracted their lusty attention: the beautiful Italian girls of that sunny climate, invariably dressed somewhat scantily in what seemed to me appropriate given the film’s summer setting.
Most of that Westwood audience, including me, seemed to appreciate what they were watching; that is until I became aware that the film was having quite a different impact on my date. Ms. Corday was clutching the arm of her seat so tightly her knuckles had been drained of their color.
“Are you all right?” I whispered as I leaned closer to her.
Her answer was succinct: “This is the most degrading, the most sexist film I have ever seen,” she said. She was, I surmised, clearly upset.
“Do you want to leave?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “You watch. Later we’ll talk.”
I am a heterosexual male and a product of the 1950s. The evening I am describing took place in the mid-1970s. Words such as
sexist
and
feminist
were not part of my everyday lexicon. I sat back to watch the movie with a clearly angry woman on my right.
Gloria Steinem talks about moments of epiphany: those all-too-rare occurrences where the proverbial lightbulb goes off and you have an insight, an ability to understand something in a way that heretofore you had not. Ms. Steinem calls them “clicks.”
Epiphany
is too grand a word for anything having to do with me, but that night in a darkened movie house in the heart of Westwood Village, I had a click. It was, for me, a mini-miracle that changed my life from that evening on—a watershed moment that would heavily impact what would, ever after, become the bulk of my work as a Hollywood television producer.
That night—I am almost reluctant, embarrassed really, to explain—I was watching the film, and without any conscious thought on my part (and with no further comment from my date) I found the movie had been transformed. Somehow, in my mind’s eye, what I was looking at on that flickering Westwood screen took place not in Italy, but rather in Stuttgart, Germany. The time frame was not post–World War II, but the late 1930s. The women were not women, but male Chasidic Jews. By making this transference, I “saw” the sexist humor for what it was, something that only worked at the expense of someone less powerful and accomplished, only to the detriment of the object of the joke. The seemingly lighthearted movie playing on the screen had, as a result, become a truly anti-Semitic document.
It was a revelation.
It forever altered my perception. Corday would later comment: “Barney’s not a feminist, but he gets it.”
I got it all right.
What I “got” that evening has become an automatic response. It applies to automobile ads, to bachelor parties, and to what used to be one of my favorite pieces of musical theater, Leonard Bernstein’s
Candide
. I can’t watch it anymore without being offended. As for advertisements, for me, it is no longer a half-naked girl selling that product; it is a scantily clad Chasid. The empty, insincere smile sickens me. I know there is nothing short of force, or a desperate need for money, that would bring this person to do such a thing. It is degrading and—as a witness—I, too, am somehow demeaned.
Since that evening in the spring of 1974, I’ve walked out of more than a few stag parties, declined invitations to several others, and have been turned off to some previously enjoyable entertainments. On the other hand, it gave me an understanding of how it might feel to be accorded second-class citizenship status in a land where few acknowledged that bias, and it put me in touch with the sense of how it feels to be powerless in a world of the powerful. It made me uniquely qualified to advance these observations by making
Cagney & Lacey
. What a terrific trade-off.
Chapter 2
FUNNIER THAN CALIFORNIA? WHAT ISN’T?
By the end of ’74, Corday and I had become an item. By mid-1975, the Barbaras had expressed an interest in working with me on developing several ideas, including
The Malachite Kachina
, a treatment for a theatrical motion picture I had acquired from Cliff and Jean Hoelscher, a young, bright couple I had met at the Atlanta Film Festival in 1972 while screening
Who Fears the Devil
, my first independent feature motion picture.
Initially I had hoped to woo a major female film star to the title role. Once it became clear that was not going to happen, I pitched the character of the distaff private-eye, with its hoped-for filmic send-up of classic film noir, to Avedon & Corday. A development deal on the concept was made with NBC as a possible series to be called
This Girl for Hire
. It became the first of several properties I would develop with this writing team.
The two Barbaras, who needed to make a living and keep themselves current in the job market, would work for other producers as well during this period, but more and more the synergy of our troika was something we all acknowledged. Our lives began to intertwine, and, along with Avedon’s then-husband, Dr. Mel Avedon, we would become a more than occasional social foursome.
My education from both Barbaras concerning the feminist movement had now escalated to reading on the subject, including Molly Haskell’s
From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies
. In that work, which remains a fascinating textbook on Hollywood’s on-screen view of women from its earliest days, Ms. Haskell made a statement that haunted me: never in the history of motion pictures or television had Hollywood made a film where two women related to each other as did Paul Newman and Robert Redford. In other words, there had never been a buddy movie featuring women. Why not make one? I approached Corday with the idea. She liked it. She presented it to her partner. I went to Ed Feldman, my old pal from my previous life as a motion picture publicist.
Since his days of publicizing Ray Stark and Company, Ed had become the head of Filmways, a small motion picture and television company that put up seed money for films. Though the company did not finance pictures, it could be effective in setting up a venture that would facilitate funding and, more importantly, was willing to put up highly speculative start-up dollars for a motion picture screenplay.
I pitched Ed the idea: a Newman and Redford movie, with and for women. Not much more needed to be said. A good “pitch” is most often given in what is referred to in the trade as a TV Guide log-line. In other words, you ought to be able to communicate your idea in a short sentence. We talked about genre. That meant Ed was interested. The ball was now in my court. I liked the cop arena and used the then-successful motion picture Freebie and the Bean (with James Caan and Alan Arkin) as a prototype. Because Filmways had just had Fuzz , a profitable film in release with Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch playing police officers, there was no argument from Ed. We fought for New York as a locale despite the extra expense because, as Barbara Avedon explained, “it’s funnier than California.”
The Filmways legal department had informed us that our selection of the title
Newman and Redford
would not hold up in court should we be sued. We would have to come up with another and did, including such unfortunate choices as
Cross my Bra and Hope to Die
.
Fair Game
was tentatively agreed upon for reasons no one seems to recall, and a deal was struck. Including their fees as writers, my supervisory money, the dollars to send both of the writers to New York for a week of research with the NYPD, plus script typing, Ed was committing a total of $27,500 of Filmways’ money. It was the last time anyone would have to put up a speculative dollar on what would become
Cagney & Lacey
.
Avedon & Corday delivered the screenplay less than two months after taking off for that research trip to NYC. I thought it was a funny and raunchy theatrical motion picture screenplay. Ed was ecstatic with the results, and it was now his job to be about the business of getting a major motion picture studio interested in putting up the mega-bucks required to make a motion picture.
The Barbaras would keep writing for television, including several projects I had in development (a movie-for-television, an after-school special, a daytime soap, and a dramatic television series). We enjoyed working together more and more, despite our lack of success in actually getting anything made. We were in development hell in almost every section of the business to which a writer/producer team can gain access. No one was giving us a green light to production. A large part of this was the climate in the Hollywood community at that time, and that brings about this background information:
When I began in television in the 1960s, networks were run by broadcasters, men (there are still, nearly fifty years later, precious few women in the truly lofty upper echelons of network management) who came from radio. In those days the overriding message from the New York broadcasting giants was “leave it on.” A good show, it was believed, would find its audience; the network chiefs left the show-making to the show-makers. They were successful with this formula, and when corporations become successful they did the equivalent of what a successful individual might do … they bought something, not a new hat or a new car, but maybe a new building. And what they did with that new building was fill it up—with executives. In the late 1960s, and all through the early 1970s, that’s just what the networks did.
Fresh out of graduate school, in their low-pay/high-profile positions, their payment was in power; they could say no to men and women with great credentials, earning five to ten times per year their own meager compensation. Their payment was in access to the super moguls with whom they might eventually ally. Why serve a long apprenticeship when all it might take is the “green lighting” of a certain project that could well feather some future nest of their own? Does this sound like a conflict of interest? In the 1980s, young men and women on Wall Street would lose their careers and some would go to jail for far less onerous activity. Generals at the Pentagon, who reaped far less compensation, would find themselves under congressional investigation. But in Hollywood it was business as usual—a great scandal, save for one key missing ingredient. No one cared. No reporter wrote about it; “Indy-Prod with a Multi Pic-Pac”—the headline announcing the whereabouts of the new about-to-be millionaire was the extent of journalistic exploration.
In the late 1960s, a seemingly unrelated event was taking place. Quinn Martin, one of Hollywood’s finest producers, with such credits as
The Fugitive
and
Streets of San Francisco
, developed a way of keeping a core group of writers under his wing and exclusively his. He would pay them more than money. He would massage their vanity, allowing them to be called “producers.”
Of course these writers weren’t producers. Quinn Martin was the producer. Every show bore his individual stamp. It didn’t matter. Quinn called these writers producers to keep them happy and on the job even if they were producers in credit only. Other companies followed suit, popularizing the concept of what would become known as “the hyphenates.” A proliferation of credits followed, totally altering the role of the producer as I had known it.
The producer who fought this proliferation (and therefore diminution) of credit was labeled a troublemaker. I was not the only one-time prominent producer to be blacklisted by a Harvard MBA newly employed at a major network. In the late 1960s, as a result of creative differences over a TV movie project I had started under the supervision of then-freshman ABC exec Jerry Isenberg, I found myself marked “uncooperative” and therefore unemployable at that network. My blacklisting at ABC extended years past Isenberg’s leaving the network—and his subsequent sojourn into indy-prod with his own multi pic-pac.
In fairness to Mr. Isenberg, I was uncooperative. I thought (and still think) that being uncooperative was a big part of my job; that being the producer meant fighting for what I believed was correct … that defending the original vision was the way to demonstrate my passion for the material. Isenberg wanted someone who would follow his instructions … to go along with his notes.
Into the 1970s and beyond, network executives more and more elected to deal with the writer directly, believing that they could always hire a production manager to care for whatever logistical functions might arise. The producer was, in their view, extraneous; besides, most writers in Hollywood, having been conditioned for years by producers and directors in this collaborative process, were accustomed to “taking notes”.
For some writers this new era was a boon. Being good at a meeting was the criterion. One’s acumen at a typewriter became secondary. Some, it is true, excelled at both. But now, for the first time, the writer who stuttered, took time at his or her lonely desk to think out an idea or phrase, was too old to be considered hip by younger network types, or—just possibly—too temperamental or opinionated, that writer was at a distinct disadvantage.
“Giving good meeting” was a must. The era of the hyphenate saw the network executives take over the role of the project initiator. They took control of what would be said and by whom.
To be affable—agreeable to the “new” idea pitched
by
the network executive
for
the network executive—to be able to interpret and execute the story the MBA network executive wanted,
that
became primary. What would get on the nation’s television screens became the province of the very few. Broadcasting was to become narrow casting.
The effects of the young MBAs and the newly anointed hyphenates in Hollywood cannot be overstated. Bright though many of these executives were, brilliant as some would prove to be, it was basically one person giving out ideas to writers instead of multiple producers pitching their diverse projects. The narrowness of vision, even from an ingenious source, was still only one view. The sameness of it would become all too abundantly clear, as television would—with the exception of a few bright, shining moments—become worse instead of better: less courageous, less innovative, less passionate.
It was also inefficient, for in the wake of this creative rough-shodding by networks came an era of fiscal irresponsibility of writers-turned-producers. The literary bent of many of these talents ill-prepared them for the visual, fiscal, mechanical, and temperamental realities of day-to-day production. Arguments about what a line of dialogue might mean were colored by the ego of the writer-producer himself, or, conversely, by his too-easy willingness to take yet another note and make a change.
Lacking someone with an overview with whom to communicate, the production manager would often find himself waiting outside the hyphenate’s office for the pages to come out of the typewriter while the whole production team expended precious (and costly) time awaiting word of what to do next.
Because the hyphenate would now be on location scouts and occupied at preproduction or casting meetings rather than at the typewriter, there would no longer be ten scripts in hardcover to start a season. This created major economic and creative repercussions. It is not a coincidence that the most expensive
Cagney & Lacey
episodes ever made were the few I wrote.
Behind all of this was the new pseudo producer, the network executive. The power and money of his organization solidly behind him, the anonymity of his desk squarely in front of him, this executive was closest to having it all. Their names did not go on the screen to risk the wrath and ridicule of critic and public alike; their careers, contracts, and personal fortunes were not at stake. They were like grandparents who enjoy the child but never have to deal with the dirty diapers. They had it all, except for money; for the fact was (and is) they weren’t very well paid in dollars. Never mind, indy-prod with a multi pic-pac would eventually take care of that.
It is a myth that talent, like cream, rises to the top. Too often, it is those fragile, talented individuals who are crushed by the system.
The erosion of the network audience has come about largely due to new technology, but partially, I believe, also because of the incestuous vision of the too few who became the storytellers. Ironically, that very erosion would, ultimately, force the networks to cut costs and reduce the size of their executive staffs, which had caused the problem in the first place. The proliferation of credits, which resulted in the loss of so many truly talented producers in this field, would eventually have to be confronted. It was.
A new title would be invented, one that has yet to be seen on any television screen: show runner. It is evidence of a desire to return to the way it was done in the beginning. A show runner, not necessarily a writer or a director, someone with an overall vision, someone who can handle the network or studio needs, who can communicate with the cast, hire the writers and the directors, supervise the editorial concept, and turn out, week after week, a consistent, promotable product. It sure sounds like a producer to me, but that credit, if it is ever to mean anything again, will have to be retrieved from an awful lot of production managers, staff writers, and assistants.