Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (26 page)

But force majeure and learning to live without writers and producers generating original material brought on a new level of development autonomy for studios. No more unnecessary pitches. No more weekly bidding for scripts. No more agency-driven, speculative writers’ market. No more producer-driven ideas. One manager told me, “Suddenly we couldn’t get anyone to read a script on a Friday if we tried.” We had woken up in the New Abnormal.

I arrived home from production of
Invention
and returned to Paramount for the last time. The writing was on the wall. I got a call from Bryan Lourd, my feature agent, who only calls with either very, very good news or very, very bad news. At this time in the biz, there was no very good news for producers without franchises. Brad Grey, though not my adversary by any means, was not Sherry Lansing. He had his own priorities. The consoling yet pained tone in Bryan’s voice was clear. Paramount was not renewing my deal.

For thirty years I had always been what we called “re-upped”—that is, a negotiation on my next contract would be initiated months before it came due, so the issue never came up except when you talked to your lawyer or agent about what great new stuff you got (or tried to get) in your new deal. Now, postrecession, poststrike, post–making only two movies in almost eight years, Bryan’s voice said everything.

Would I go to another movie studio? There were very few, if any, new deals at movie studios for nonfranchise “nonfinancing” creative producers and makers of romantic comedies. Bryan didn’t even have to tell me. I hadn’t made a franchise kind of picture since Jodie Foster went to the center of the galaxy in
Contact
.

I had some very bad nights, nights of self-recrimination and hindsight—woulda, shoulda, coulda. What if I’d thought of making
a deal with a movie star? They had become a smart new breed of producers with the leverage to get movies made, who were in production when their partners were. Or what if I’d found a director to partner with, as so many smart, forward-thinking ex-agents and managers had done? And what of these managers who were becoming producers and controlling the talent and seeming to make us old-school producers obsolete? Why hadn’t I thought of that? But all this second-guessing was useless; I’d done my best, what I knew how to do, and couldn’t torture myself over it. There was too much slack to pick up, too many other people who would be happy to take my place. Nora Ephron and I had a saying we’d repeat to each other when either of us had a flop: “Take another swing at the bat!” Then we’d paste big smiles on our faces and start strategizing. That’s what the game is all about: longevity.

I would still make movies, but what I’d been thinking for a while is that I would be moving to a new medium as well, one I would have to learn, where pitches still abounded: television. It seemed that more and more what I was missing in movies—making stuff up, creating original ideas—was the coin of the realm in TV. And television’s boundaries were expanding as the movie business’s were contracting.

I would have to start watching more television, that’s for sure—and not just cable. It was time to have a long talk with my television-oriented brother. I was headed to a new deal at a TV studio. I had been on movie lots for more than twenty-five years, and for the first time, I was to be housed on a different kind of lot. It was kind of sad, and kind of scary, but I had to shake that off very fast. There was no time for nostalgia. I had to fly with the times and learn a complicated new language. A new business, really, with different seasons and time slots, and drama and comedy rules, and millions of things I’d have to learn in three months, or three seasons.

But the good news was that it was all about writing and writers.
I could make up ideas again. And there was much better news than that: As movies had been getting dumber, television had been getting smarter. As movies constricted their parameters, television’s parameters were growing exponentially. HBO and cable had helped push what was possible, and longtime TV writers picked up the mantle and ran into brilliant uncharted territory. Feature writers felt the creative action happening in TV, and an exodus began. There was a blooming, booming business in this business—a way out of Egypt into a tempting, changing new land.

1.
William Morris Endeavor.

2.
Buchwald v. Paramount,
1990 Cal. App. LEXIS 634, was a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed and decided in California in which humorist and writer Art Buchwald alleged that Paramount Pictures stole his script idea and turned it into the 1988 movie
Coming to America.
Buchwald won the lawsuit and was awarded damages, then accepted a settlement from Paramount before any appeal took place.

3.
Profits.

The Golden Age of Television

At the premiere of Showtime’s 2011 series
Homeland,
President Obama’s favorite show as well as everybody else’s I know, my eighty-seven-year-old father and my brother, Rick, had a conversation about the rapidly changing creative primacy of television and movies that hit the bull’s-eye.

The series, the first to be green-lit under Showtime’s new president, David Nevins, stars movie actress Claire Danes as a neurotic and brilliant CIA agent who has a very complicated relationship with a returning American POW, who she’s convinced has been turned by the Al Qaeda terrorists who captured him. It won the Golden Globes for Best Television Series—Drama, Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series—Drama for Damian Lewis and Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series—Drama for Claire Danes. Nine months later
Homeland
stunned the town by sweeping the 2012 Emmys in its first season. It again won for its lead actor (Lewis), actress (Danes), writing (Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon and Gideon Raff) and beat
Mad Men,
the odds-on favorite, to win Showtime’s first Outstanding Drama Series Emmy.

Our family had a special rooting interest, as Rick found and represented the original Israeli series on which
Homeland
was
based and packaged it with his clients,
24
showrunners Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Gordon brought in WME director Michael Cuesta. WME then packaged their actress Claire Danes, and Rick sold the series to Showtime. It was his dearest project in his long career.

Rick is the calmest person in our family, a natural leader who is grounded and very sane. When he was young, my parents would brag about his baseball prowess by claiming he had hit ten home runs that week, and he would correct them by saying he’d hit only six. One of his many virtues is that he can outwait an Israeli and an insult. After the screening, Dad and Rick had a conversation that Rick remembers like this:

“At the end of the pilot, which lasted approximately fifty to fifty-two minutes, something like that, Dad turned to me and said, ‘That’s it?’

“And I said, ‘What do you mean?’

“He said, ‘That’s all? I want to see more!’

“I said, ‘Well, it’s over; that was just one episode.’

“Then he said, ‘Well, why don’t you show more?’

“ ‘We’re just showing the pilot, the first episode.’

“And he said, ‘You know something, you should make a movie of this; it’s too good for television.’

“I answered back, ‘You know, Dad, I don’t know if you realize it, but you just insulted me.’

“And then he couldn’t stop talking about it the whole way home in the car, how he was going to start watching it. I explained that if it was on too late for him at nine o’clock, we could record it on his DVR, but that was too complicated a conversation. But he really was engrossed in it. It was great. You hear him talking about it all the time now. He loves it.”

I asked Rick what this meant. We both knew that Dad only watched MSNBC, sports and the Sunday news programs, and he had a regular movie habit.

“His perception is, good things go in the movies, television is crap.”

That attitude has been changing, if slowly, in my Dad’s set. But among the knowing in pop culture and in the industry, it is a different universe than the one our dad was born into, or the one I entered when I went to my first Golden Globes awards and realized how Movie People looked at Television People in the Old Abnormal.

I vividly remember sitting there at our round table on the ballroom floor with a huge, dumb smile plastered on my face, with nominees Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and my great friend writer-director Nora Ephron in what seemed like the middle of the universe. We were there for
Sleepless in Seattle
. Everywhere I turned there was another boldface name getting buzzed on the mediocre champagne, laughing, bussing cheeks and working tables.

Suddenly, I looked up and noticed a parallel universe on a semicircular tier above us, with rows and rows of people talking and bussing cheeks and working tables just like we were and getting buzzed on the same bad champagne.

“Who are they?” I asked someone at my table.

“They are Television People,” I was told.

These days, if you look upstairs at the Golden Globes, Movie People are sitting upstairs with Television People, and downstairs, Television People are sitting with Movie People; they have merged. Distinctions are moot. In 2011, Mila Kunis—the hot-as-can-be movie star of
Ted, Friends with Benefits
and
Forgetting Sarah Marshall,
among others about to be released—who broke in the seminal hit
That ’70s Show,
¹
sat downstairs for her supporting-actress nomination as Natalie Portman’s nemesis in the ballet/horror film
Black Swan;
Michelle Williams of
Dawson’s Creek
fame sat nearby for her best-actress nomination for
My Week with
Marilyn
. Upstairs, Jeremy Irons sat for his nomination for Showtime’s
The Borgias,
waving to his agent down below; nearby was Oscar perennial Kate Winslet, nominated for best actress in a miniseries for
Mildred Pierce
on HBO. She could chat with eventual winner for a comedy Laura Dern (
Enlightened
) or Jessica Lange for best actress in a series (
American Horror Story
); this goes on and on. In the same year, TV star Melissa McCarthy (
Mike and Molly
) was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress in
Bridesmaids.

James Wolcott commented in
Vanity Fair
’s television issue in May 2012: “There’s always one pill present . . . who takes pride in disclaiming that he or she never watches television . . . pity these poor castaways. They must sit there with glassy, uncomprehending eyes while the rest of us tongue-flap about the latest installment of a favorite series down to the last crumb, like Proust scholars.”

I wondered when this began and why I was so slow to notice at first, so I went to talk with Gail Berman, who had run Paramount just as the convergence between movie talent and television talent was becoming clear. She had been hired away from her successful five-year stint as president of the Fox network, where she’d put everything from
American Idol
to
24
to
House
on the air. It was obvious that Gail would have seen all of this coming.

I found her sitting happily in her new office in the fancy Lantana complex in Santa Monica, where she’s partnered with Lloyd Braun in a “multiplatform content” company. Over her desk was a watercolor painting of Paramount, signed by an artist named “Meany.” We found this hilarious.

I asked her if she had noticed any television prejudice among movie people when she ran Paramount. The question was a bit disingenuous; I knew she had stumbled into a surprising amount of TV snobbery, given that there had been such a long line of notable studio heads recruited from television networks before her: Frank Price, who ran Columbia for years, came from CBS and Universal TV; Barry Diller had come to Paramount from ABC with Michael
Eisner, who later ran Disney for decades; there was NBC’s legendary boy wonder Brandon Tartikoff, who’d been hired at Paramount in the nineties; and even Peter Chernin, who was Gail’s boss at the Fox network before he ran the studio.

I had been surprised by the attitude, because I’d assumed at the time that her success in TV was the very reason she had been hired.

“You know,” she said, slowing down for this answer, “I think feature people have a tendency to look at things myopically, as though television were some sort of foreign business that used other sorts of means of enticing people to work in it or that didn’t have a creative process. And it was hurtful, but also really fascinating and amusing on some level. I would talk to people and they would purposefully say, ‘I never watch TV.’ I would say, ‘You don’t? Geez, Louise, what do you do?’ It was amusing to me. If you’re not watching TV, you’re missing out on a lot of stuff going on! The twenty-four-hour news cycle? The incredible writing? It’s where everything is headed.”

•  •  •

One of the things Gail did during her tenure was hire J. J. Abrams to reinvigorate the
Star Trek
franchise. How televisionizing is that?

“Going to J.J. was a natural for me,” says Gail. “He was already in the movie business, having done
Mission: Impossible
while I was there, and I just knew he would hit it out of the park. J.J. is a storyteller. That’s his intention: to do it across platforms, regardless of the medium.”

“When did you first start seeing feature writers in TV? When did all this blending start?”

“At Fox, I used to meet with various feature people who would come in and sit with their arms crossed and say, ‘I’m told I can make some money here,’ and we’d say, ‘Not here you can’t, time to go’—people like that who had a chip on their shoulder about TV. But this is all history.”

“But the writers’ strike was a huge part of the deluge, right?”

“It started before the writers’ strike,” Gail answered. “But there was still a taint around it at that time. Back between 2000 and 2005, we enticed Paul Attanasio (
Donnie Brasco, Quiz Show
) to come on board.”