B004YENES8 EBOK (26 page)

Chapter 29 

HIGH-CLASS PROBLEMS 

The fight with the writing staff was over, for the time being. Their attitude seemed to be “we’ll wait and see what comes in from the freelance writers Barney has hired.”

We’ll never know because Corday had to pull out almost before she started. She had been offered the presidency of Columbia Pictures Television under chairman Herman Rush. It would involve many sacrifices, but the opportunity of becoming the then-ranking female in the entire industry was a tough one for anyone to pass up. (It was pointed out at the time that this would make me the first gentleman of Columbia; I was delighted.) Avedon, thus abandoned by Corday a second time, would press on with the two-parter alone.

We returned from New York City and the Columbia party at
21
for Corday in late June. Along with everyone else, I was excited for her, with my ebullience only tempered by my seeming inability to get my energy level back into high gear for
Cagney & Lacey
. I wondered if this was a complication brought on by the new economic facts of life in the Rosenzweig/Corday household.

Our financial future was now virtually assured. It was a “high-class problem,” as Corday said, but one I would have to deal with in terms of motivation. It’s sort of like being paid for a job in advance, or what a professional ballplayer must go through after he’s negotiated a monster deal for himself and then finds he is in a batting slump. I suppose if one has to have a problem, then this is a good one.

The billing thing would not go away. Because of the CBS advertising mistake earlier in the summer, Tyne had once again become crazed on the subject. The work continued to be good on the screen, but backstage a war was about to break out.

Tyne asked for alternating billing on the scripts, and Lefcourt, without discussing this with me, caved. Sharon was pissed. These were on scripts—something seen only by our staff, crew, and a handful of CBS executives. I overruled Lefcourt’s order and awaited Ms. Daly’s reaction; it didn’t surface—not directly, anyway. I then met with Gless, who confessed that she was unhappy at work for the first time in her life.

The scar tissue from those difficult weeks of renegotiation all those months before had not healed, not for any of us. Sharon was different from Tyne Daly or me. She was not an experienced or calloused infighter. The process was exhausting to her, while it seemed as if Tyne used her anger as an energy source. Just whom she might be trying to punish remained unclear. It might be me, but, then again, it might be herself. By alienating and exhausting Gless, she could punish us all. I knew a confrontation was coming and that it would be soon; I began to consider precipitating it.

Meanwhile, Tony Barr was back. Both he and Karen Cooper called from CBS yet again with major problems. This time it was on our script for “The Taxicab Murders, ” written by Ronnie Wenker-Konner and directed by Karen Arthur. Both of the CBS current programming executives had come to accept the fact that
Cagney & Lacey
did not always catch the bad guy; they even acknowledged that it was the very thing
TV Guide
chose to highlight in their headline for the Erich Segal article. But now, they said, we had gone too far. Not only did Cagney and Lacey not catch the bad guy, they arrested and interrogated the wrong guy!

That tore it for Mr. Barr. The good news was I had my loaded gun, and Tony remembered he had handed it to me just a few months before in that CBS screening room following our “Choices” episode. These arguments now had a lighter tone, a sort of passion check by the network, just to make sure I was still there and still caring.

I had fended off every objection they could come up with when Karen Cooper spoke up. “Look, Barney, you’re always telling us about the moral victories at the end of your shows. What’s the victory here, for God’s sake? They are wrong.”

“I’m glad you asked that, Karen.” I fairly leaped onto the phone speaker box on my desk and—truth to tell—it helped my performance immeasurably to have (unknown to Barr or Ms. Cooper) the entire writing staff there in my office as an audience.

“Cagney and Lacey arrest the wrong guy. They make a mistake. And what do they do?” I was positively evangelical as I went on. “Do they commit suicide? Do they resign their posts? Do they writhe about on the floor in self-loathing? No. They go to lunch. They tell a couple of jokes, and they go to lunch; and that’s the victory. They are indefatigable. They are
not
their jobs. They are human beings who occasionally make mistakes. And it’s OK. That’s an important thing to say to an audience, don’t you agree?”

Tony Barr was laughing on the other end of the phone. The major problem was over. “Do it your way, Barney.”

We did.

Heyday on the Hollywood dais circuit. From left: TV producer extraordinaire Steven Bochco, Fox TV president Harris Katleman, me, NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff, Dynasty executive producer Esther Shapiro, and Paul Witt of the highly successful Witt/Thomas production team.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

Success was grand, but it, too, had an underbelly. For the past fifteen years or so of my life, I had developed a persona—an attitude—that had served me well. I had cast myself as a victim of sorts. I wanted to do something, and
they
(the studios, the networks, or the system) would not let me. That was in the long ago; for now I was being allowed to do pretty much what I wanted. I had been proven right, and I was a success.

But all that energy, which in the past had been channeled and focused in a battle to survive, now had no place to go. It was rattling around and somehow making me tired and irritable. It was distressing. I wanted to stop fighting. Who, after all, does not want peace? I wanted to relax and enjoy my victories. It wasn’t happening. I was like the soldier who, returning home from battle, finds the horror of war a dim memory and now misses the adrenaline rush and his comrades in arms. There had to be, I thought, more to success than this.

It was confusing, for I was not longing for new conquests. I simply wanted to take time to enjoy things the way they were. I found my Hollywood community particularly intolerant of this. (Only in success do they persist in asking what your next project is. The idea that one might want to savor the current one—after working for years to get it right—is as rare as a gambler walking away with his winnings in Las Vegas.)

I sensed my inability to recognize that I was now at the time of life where I was reaping benefits for all that I had fought for in the past.

It reminded me of the quip Dr. Jonah Perlmutter (older brother to my friend and lawyer, Sam) had made about a dozen years before. I had been unemployed for some time,
Daniel Boone
was behind me, and, as a result of my dream to finance, produce, and distribute my indy project (
Who Fears the Devil
) all on my own, I had become a walking financial disaster. Still I was tan and lean from tennis games and enjoying my life on the beach in Malibu. On this particular occasion, I was holding court with a group of hardworking friends who were curious as to how I was able to manage so well without employment.

“I no longer have a neurotic need to succeed,” I explained.

At which point, psychiatrist Perlmutter joined the group and countered my glibness with speculation: “Perhaps you have a neurotic need to fail.”

To this day, I worry that he might have been right.

I was not the only one going through the success blahs. The entire crew seemed different. That June of 1984, the general mood among staff, writers, secretaries, assistants—everyone it seemed—was somehow discordant, less unified in purpose. I began to worry that with success might come a form of lethargy that I would not be able to handle.

I felt there was a real danger of things falling apart. In adversity—in those earlier, difficult days of short orders—temporary alliances had been made; truces had been effectuated. Now, no one seemed to realize that the real war was far from over. We would not be against summer programming for long. I had to find a way to communicate all this to all parties, including my own inner psyche.

I started with Tyne Daly. I told her it was time for us to repair, that I had had enough of our war. She took my hand and nodded. We agreed to get together as soon as our mutual schedules allowed so that we could deal with all this.

My next move was to include Gless in on the meeting with Tyne. I was determined that all our hidden agendas were going to be brought to the fore.

At week’s end, with the phone call informing me of the wrap of that evening’s production schedule around 10:30 pm, I excused myself from my dinner guests at home to return to Lacy Street for this meeting, which ended around 3:30 Saturday morning.

The meeting was good—not great. The women had their complaints, but I was determined to deal with the (for me) more real issues of pain and hurt we had caused each other. To do it properly, I said, required probably a week’s retreat, but at least some hurts and misconceptions were dealt with in the four-plus hours we had.

There was some yelling, some tears, and some tremulous voices. At one point, I pushed Sharon to confront Tyne with her anger over the billing thing, and she finally let Tyne know she had seen the (infamous) telegram sent from Yugoslavia about “honour.” For a minute or so, I joined this part of the fray as we sort of ganged up on Tyne. She was reduced to tears as she apologized for her past behavior. We wound up hugging each other.

I then explained, as best I could, my philosophy (borrowed from the venerable Howard Strickling, my first boss in show business, and not Governor Dukakis, who would popularize it years afterward) that “a fish stinks from the head.” I told them that I alone was no longer the head; that we were a troika. To only a very small extent did they accept that responsibility; still the idea was introduced.

They had a litany of complaints; most were reasonable, some based on misinformation. I promised to begin the very next Monday to deal with what I could to the best of my ability. It would have been lovely to say all this was now settled, but we were a long, long way from that.

Over the weekend, as they had done once before in a time of trouble, Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless convened with champagne on Sharon’s living room floor, where they set out to—and basically did—repair. On the following Monday, I gave a speech (as opposed to
pep talk
) to the cast and crew. Everyone seemed most impressed, including Tyne and Sharon, who had their share of nitpicks, but basically agreed the speech was a B+.

A few days later, an incredulous Dick Rosenbloom called. He heard I had made a speech, but now wanted to know what it was I had said to Tyne and Sharon. Over the weekend he had received a phone call from Sharon thanking him for the ads in the trades, and today he had received a personal note from Tyne Daly to the same effect. He was in disbelief. Repair was in the air.

Chapter 30 

THE SUBJECT IS MONEY 

The summer numbers against ABC’s reruns and NBC’s baseball had
Cagney & Lacey
constantly in the top five—usually number one or two.
Advertising Age
predicted a 28-share average for the show against football and first-run movies in the fall, and I hoped they were right. That summer also brought six
Emmy
nominations—two more than the previous year and a gaggle more than year one, when the only nomination garnered was for hair dressing. (Evidently, Academy members, not unlike the American viewing public in general, had ignored our premiere episodes, but apparently did assume that any show featuring two females must have them well coifed.)

Nominations this time were for Sharon and Tyne (of course), the show itself, film editing for both “Choices” and “Baby Broker,” and sound mixing for “Bounty Hunter.”

The odds of success, at least through 1984–85 and into one more season, seemed good. The syndication marketplace for one-hour dramatic series was at an all-time high and growing. My gambler’s instinct began to take hold. It was time, I felt, to make a play.

I was not predicting the syndication market collapse of 1986, which would cause investors in hour-long dramatic shows to lose fortunes and totally turn the television industry on its ear. I’m not prescient; I’m not even particularly clever. I’m also not greedy. I simply felt it was time to walk away from the tables and not look back (or care) what the guy who took my spot was making.

All I wanted was to get mine. I also had little or no faith in the Orion team, who perceived the universe quite differently. The sky was apparently going to continue to expand, if not be limitless, as far as Orion’s Jamie Kellner was concerned. The man, who I first knew as Dr. No when I needed an ally at Orion, was now Dr. Know. I thought his position was no more than bluff and bluster.

Orion was a movie-driven company. The partners at this company cared little for television, but the movies they had been making in 1983 were losing money—a lot of money. Out socially with Herman Rush, Corday’s boss at Columbia, I told him of what I thought was an interesting window of opportunity. He listened avidly and followed my suggestion by going to the top brass at Orion with a firm cash offer... cash they could use to shore up their movie division... over $800,000 per episode, retroactive to episode one, with a guarantee to keep us in production for another full year past our current order, even in the event the network was to cancel the show. If we failed at the network, the deal was worth fifty to sixty million dollars; in success, over twice that amount. Tens of millions net to Orion and millions for me, plus at least one more year of working on the show I loved.

The men of Orion turned it down.

This was not
funny money
they were rejecting. Mr. Rush was the chairman of the television division of Columbia Pictures Corporation—then a wholly owned subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company. This was a guaranteed payday of monumental proportions, backed by one of America’s great companies.

They turned it down.

Their argument was that if they sold to Columbia they might as well go out of the television business. (My sentiments exactly and who, I asked, would have noticed?) I countered with the suggestion that if they didn’t want to sell to Columbia, then they should market the show themselves into syndication and do so immediately while we were hot.

I wanted to get away from those tables a winner. Kellner said his predictable no. He felt the show was going to be worth $1,100,000 per episode, maybe more. Why sell now for $800,000? Despite Jaime Kellner’s bravado, in all the time we were on the air, these guys could not even launch a
Cagney & Lacey
calendar or a T-shirt. I had no reason to believe they could successfully merchandise the series.

I even tried to convince Mace to join me in an effort at selling out our position to Orion. I felt the company would never buy out as small a profit participant as myself but hoped they might go for a larger package. Mace apparently thought I was trying to pull a fast one.

A little over a year later, the collapse of 1986 was a reality. It was brought about by many forces in the marketplace, all easily predictable with hindsight: President Ronald Reagan’s deregulation led to an explosion in the number of independent television stations, and almost overnight there were too many to be supported by advertising revenues. Some would go under, and heavy debt—owed to program suppliers such as Orion—was seen as one of the reasons. Technology was also a factor; when
Cagney & Lacey
started production in Toronto in 1981, there were perhaps a million VCR units in the United States. By the time we closed up shop in 1988, there were over fifty million. That, too, had its impact on free television, as did the proliferation of cable.

The bottom line was that in 1987, less than two and a half years after Herman Rush’s offer of $800,000 per episode, Orion would sell the series to Lifetime Cable for $100,000 per episode. Instead of looking at a hundred million dollars, Orion would gross (even including ever-expanding foreign revenues) less than a quarter of that amount. Not chicken feed to be sure—especially on an initial investment of under $30,000—but to the profit participants, the difference between a twenty million dollar and a hundred million dollar gross is the difference between getting something substantial and receiving very little, if anything, at all.

All I knew in the summer of 1984 was that I had a severe case of opening-night jitters, pre-
Emmy
anxiety, and a motivational problem for myself, the staff, the crew, and the stars. I would have felt better, I thought, with a lot of cash in my pockets.

While it is true that the next ten to twelve months were exceptionally rewarding, there were, as referred to earlier, “challenges.”

For the record, Barbara Avedon did eventually turn in part of the much-argued about two-parter. Because Corday was unable to work with her, Ms. Avedon took on another partner (an element not approved by us). The gossip was that Avedon, in fact, handed over the assignment to the Corday surrogate and turned in the resultant first draft without even reading the work herself. We were told her intention was to address herself to this draft when she had our comments in hand. Whether she had read it or not, she had, by her own admission, not really contributed to its writing. I felt this was unprofessional and disloyal to me and to the show she had helped create.

I was embarrassed. Worse yet, the script was awful, but more than any of this—from my perspective—was the position taken by the writing staff: This was
Barney’s folly
, and they weren’t about to rewrite a script they hadn’t ordered and never wanted. I was outraged and stayed away from the office for days while trying to cool off enough so as not to have to fire all of them. This “lovers’ quarrel,” as Peter Lefcourt termed it, was ultimately resolved through compromise by both sides.

Writer Patricia Green was brought in to begin—virtually from scratch—what would be our two-part episode on breast cancer. I did my part by promising Rosenbloom that my days of trying to bring Avedon back to
Cagney & Lacey
were now history.

I had learned from my business manager that I either had to spend less or make more. This news again focused my attention on the lack of fairness inherent in my
Cagney & Lacey
deal. My settlement with Orion required my involvement with other projects for the company. They had refused to alter my antiquated deal on
Cagney & Lacey
or to open the coffers of the series itself in any substantive way.

The fact that, at that time of the 1984 World Series, Orion would not trade
Cagney & Lacey
for ownership of the San Diego Padres and that I was more important to the former than Steve Garvey to the latter had me getting more and more agitated on the subject.

My old deal remained in place while Orion simultaneously paid me under the terms of my new contract. I would have to continue developing other projects under this arrangement, but it was acknowledged that the bulk of my time would be spent on
Cagney & Lacey
. What was not being addressed was the fact that with so much time being spent on the series, the upside of my overall deal—the potential for great gain by developing new projects during a time when I had some heat—was substantially reduced.

I was now making over $500,000 per year, a lot of money for a kid from Montebello but a fraction of what peers such as Bochco on
Hill Street Blues
or Gary David Goldberg on
Family Ties
were bringing down. Their fees and ownership positions in their series amounted to tens of millions, way out of the realm of possibility for me due to my antiquated deal with Mace, the unfairness of which was now being fully exploited by Orion.

Jamie Kellner finally presented me with a compromise worthy of the term. Orion would recognize that my involvement in the series was so time-consuming for me—while being important enough to them—that my chances of creating and/or following through on new ventures were at least somewhat curtailed. In exchange for this potential loss of upside revenue, Orion would settle me out on that issue by granting me a small percentage of their gross sales on the series. This would have no impact on other profit participants, coming, as it did, totally out of Orion’s share, and, to my satisfaction, potentially meaningful with the production of enough episodes. My requests, that I share in the fruits of success and that Orion leave Mace alone, were thus honored. Of course this would come back to bite me in the ass in the future, as Mace would interpret this as an illegal conspiracy against him, but I didn’t know that, or anticipate it, in 1984.

The subject of money is an awkward one. Many of us in show business (which in this era includes not just television, movies, and the theater but athletics and certain kinds of journalism as well) are extremely well paid. To the average person, it must seem out of all proportional reason, but oftentimes we are dealing with exceedingly short life spans and incredibly long odds. To be a success, to be associated with a once-in-a-lifetime hit, is tantamount to winning the lottery, and every bit as rare.

“Once in a lifetime.” Often that is exactly what it is—only once. The demands of time and stress on one’s lifestyle are enormous; the monies made by the corporations who employ us, phenomenal.

The people who pay Oprah Winfrey over $60,000,000 per year are, themselves, making a substantial profit. So are the employers of the fabulously successful and highly paid Katie Couric and Shaquille O’Neal. That
Cagney & Lacey
brought to me less money than the 10 percent received by the agent for Gary David Goldberg on
Family Ties
remains a bit of a sore spot.

By the end of the third season (which in the summer of 1984 was just commencing production), we would have fifty-seven episodes. They would all be made at or near the license fee. With the foreign revenues already then pledged or in hand,
Cagney & Lacey
was in profit at its initial network run—virtually unheard of for a one-hour filmed show on network television.
⁴⁷

The summer came to an end with all of us awaiting a late (mid-October) premiere date on CBS . We had never before had such a long stretch of production without any kind of feedback. The pressures of working in this kind of vacuum while awaiting the results of our six
Emmy
nominations only added to our pre-opening night jitters.

That fall, I hired executive assistant Carole R. Smith, who still works for me all these years later and is pretty much a member of the Rosenzweig family household. I also brought in my discovery, Georgia Jeffries, to write for
Cagney & Lacey
. Actually, it would be more factual to state Ms. Jeffries had been discovered by others as well, and even had one or two scripts commissioned. I knew none of that when my then-secretary Niki Marvin brought a spec script by Ms. Jeffries to my attention. Based on my read of that material, we commissioned a script from her for “Unusual Occurrence,” making it the first project of hers ever produced (thus my claim of discovery). Her second script for us (“Rules of the Game”) led to her being asked to join our staff. She went on to be the recipient of two Writers Guild Awards and one
Emmy
nomination for her work on
Cagney & Lacey
. Ms. Marvin, whose career with me was not particularly pleasant for either of us, went on to produce Stephen King’s
The Shawshank Redemption
as a feature motion picture. Clearly she was “miscast” in the role of secretary.

I was becoming more convinced that we were doing better work than ever before and that we had some excellent episodes completed and in preparation. Finally, on October 17, 1984, opening-night ratings were in: 21.6/34 share: the highest-rated show of the night on all three networks. It was a good beginning.

Our second episode that season took the hour against a Sophia Loren movie-for television and was the highest-rated show of the night on any network. The previous week’s numbers had us fifth in the nation. All over town we were referred to as the success story of the season on CBS— a blue-chip show.