Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (30 page)

CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and the CW all ran on a strict yearly schedule. They have upfront in May, when they expose their new shows to advertisers and announce their schedules to the aforementioned advertisers, producer-writers and agents (and each other). They buy pitches and scripts from June to early October. They have all their pilots written between September and December or the beginning of January. They pick up all of their shows in January (the madness of all these pilots casting at once cannot be overstated). Then they shoot in February and March, to go to post-production in April. Then they decide what’s going on the air at the end of April or in early May. Then the whole process starts all over again. I had been late with
Miss America
the previous year at Sony, and I had to internalize the calendar to make sure that didn’t happen again. But there were nuances to the calendar that I still had to master. And for these I would need, well, a master.

THE BUYING SEASONS

I zeroed back in on Gail Berman. Lord knows I couldn’t bother Rick again. I had to ask Gail about the seasons, since the year before they had smashed me in the head, even though I thought I had a good running start.

“I’m back,” I said. “I need some advice. The seasons.”

“Yes?” She leaned in.

“They come at you very quickly,” I complained.

She looked at me sympathetically. “There used to be a break. At least, everyone tells me there used to be a break, but I don’t really remember there being one.”

She didn’t seem as stressed out about this as I was.

I said, “Every time I think I’m ready, it’s like, ‘Oh, no, the buying window already passed.’ ‘Okay, well, you’re late on the network.’ ‘Wait a second. I just got my ideas together, and comedy is closing? And then cable is open? Now hold on . . .’ Like when—”

She interrupted my pathetic babbling. “I always say the same thing: I’d like to be finished selling by Labor Day. And every year the deadline gets pushed earlier. It’s weird.”

Oh, God, I thought. I’m already late. And nobody at my agency wanted to tell me. I pressed on. “Is that what I should remember? Be finished by Labor Day?”

“That’s what I always tell everybody,” she reiterated. “That’s the rule in my head. It doesn’t always work at this company, but the goal is to be done by then.”

Kissing good-bye all future hopes of visiting my New York friends in the Hamptons, I said, “So you can’t go away for the summer?”

“Not if you want to sell; you have to be finished selling by Labor Day. Most people look at me and say, ‘What are you talking
about? You can sell through October.’ But I always thought you had your best shot by getting in early, before they had everything else set up. Even your more out-there ideas might get set up if you do it early. So Labor Day is always a good deadline.”

The bad news absorbed, I asked, “When you can still wear white?”

Gail laughed out loud. She loved this, since we obey no clothing laws in California and this bonded us as secret East Coasters.

“Right!” she said. “While you’re wearing white, you can sell. Once you have to take the white off, you’re done!”

Then she explained why, and I knew I would never make this mistake again.

“It is seasonal because material gets old quickly, unlike in the movie business.”

I added, “And they seem to know what they want before they start.”

“They think they know, and then the season starts and something catches on, and then
that’s
the thing they want. There is a little bit of a buying flux around the end of October, when they start to say, ‘Well, this seems to be sticking, so we’ll need a companion piece for that.’ So you have to know what’s working to finish out the selling season. It’s a wonderful business. It moves.”

The mid-season flux. It was like a Zen koan. This was the kind of nuance only experience could teach! Looking for that companion piece to
New Girl,
this year’s big hit? How about
New Boy
! A guy moves in with two girl roommates.

Already pitched. Nextino.

Next at the speed of a neutrino.

I asked Gail if the feature business felt slow after being in television.

She found the question comical. “It was stunning to me. It was the biggest change for me. It was
so
slow. I thought, Well, we’re on
track here, and then that track just stalled. And somehow everyone was quite comfortable with that. I was out of that rhythm. That rhythm was off for me. I was expecting that script on such and such a day, give or take a couple of weeks. The script literally never came during my entire tenure.” She burst out laughing in retrospect. “Things like that were crazy to me.”

“But,” I said, realizing that I’d missed the hot spot of the network buying season, “there’s fast, and then there’s
fast
. One season’s over, you get started for cable and they’re already booked.”

She smiled. “Remember, no white. You’ll get it next year.”

SPEED JUNKIES: FROM NEXT TO NEXTINO

First of all, during pitch season (which is essentially always, since most of cable is open full-time, but here I’m talking about network pitch season) everyone is racing all around L.A., going from pitch to pitch, every hour on the hour. The networks are located as far away from each other as they possibly can be, from West L.A. to the deep Valley, with only CBS in between. They are devilishly scheduled in sequence so that only Indy 500 race car drivers can make them, and they all take place on the same day with no concern for the seller’s point of departure or driving ability. This accounts for the heart-thumping danger of the whole thing. Can you get there on time? How fast can you go without getting a ticket and missing the meeting? What alternative is there to the permanent Carmageddon on the 405? Will you scare your team into thinking you will hold up the pitch? Are you the one who will walk in late, after most people are already there? If so, the network will start the meeting without you if you’re not the showrunner.

In the end, you get there, after being sent to a back parking lot, which further delays your arrival and forces you to sprint to the
meeting and arrive out of breath and disheveled. In the network waiting room, eleven bigger pitches with comedy stars attached await, and the network president himself comes out to visit with them. How can you make them laugh after that? Sweat forms on the brow of your writer. It’s all part of the game.

SO THIS YEAR 2012

Having gotten absolutely nothing on the air the previous year, I was determined to get it right in 2012. I studied the calendar. I hadn’t scheduled any trips over the summer. I studied my IPs (intellectual properties, or books, as they’re called in other cities) in
Kirkus
and watched TV like I was a cross between a slacker and Alessandra Stanley, television reviewer for the
New York Times.
I discovered a network show that I got hooked on like crack—
Revenge,
on ABC (which, as it turns out, was based on
The Count of Monte Cristo)
. I spent months reviewing every classic novel I had ever read or not read for plot ideas. Emily Thorne, the heroine of
Revenge,
was a kick-ass female lead, pretending to be someone she wasn’t in order to avenge her father’s death, even daring to marry into the family who murdered him so she could exact her punishment. I became a student of how it generated and rapidly burned up story. I had to be ready by the time the industry returned from the “upfronts”—still sort of mysterious to me, as I hadn’t yet earned my ticket there by winning a slot on a network schedule. Every May there’s a huge hoopla when everyone who matters in television is in New York attending the upfronts. Equally as important, the time slots and full schedule are announced, throwing everything into turmoil when old shows are moved and new shows get fantastic or terrible time slots. Then the execs come home and start staffing the selected shows with writers, and the whole season starts over again with June pitches.

Sony had a new head of drama, Suzanne Patmore-Gibbs, and everyone told me I would love working with her. We were both alumni of Pomona College, she a lit major, and the whole thing seemed almost too good to be true. It was an exciting hire for Sony, as Suzanne had just been head of drama at ABC, where she had developed many of their hits, including—as it turned out—
Revenge
!

To prepare for our first meeting, I met with a very talented friend who had also had a hand in bringing
Revenge
to life, Patrick Moran. Moran, the boyfriend of my writer Jordan Budde, who created my Texas procedural
Emily Swan,
was the smart, natty and charming senior vice president and head of creative development for ABC Studios. He had been a Fox executive on
Glee,
and is known to work wonderfully with writers. He joined ABC as head of drama, and two years later was promoted to senior vice president of the studio in charge of drama and comedy. I was thrilled when he agreed to give me his take on the genesis of
Revenge
and help get me ready for my new season.

We sat in his office at ABC on a rare slow day; the upfronts were going on in New York, and for a brief moment the decisions were out of our hands.

Patrick’s priority is to provide shows to his own network, but he has made a great case to his network president, Paul Lee, that he can attract better writers to his studio if the writers he makes deals with feel they can sell their ideas to other networks as well. His studio makes huge profits for Disney by selling their shows overseas and to cable, hoping for syndication dollars. This is where the money is in television, as networks can only make advertising dollars.

He said, “I’d been wanting to do an updated
Count of Monte Cristo
for a long time, and just hadn’t been able to get it to work.”

I later read that Paul Lee also wanted to update
The Count,
and
his deputy Suzanne told me she did as well. This was obviously an idea waiting to pop. The question was, who could break it?

Patrick continued: “And then, when I came here, I wanted very much to work with Mike Kelley [
Swingtown
], who had a deal at ABC. He was working on something else that he loved too, but that ultimately didn’t work for various reasons. I pitched this
Monte Cristo
idea to him, but he turned me down. He didn’t respond to it at all. I pitched it again, and he still didn’t respond. The producers he was working with [Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen, of the
Twilight
franchise] were excited about doing a show set in the Hamptons and kept at him until he finally relented and said he’d give it a try, though without any commitments. This was very late in the season, around October.”

October! My God! No one can get anything on in October—unless, of course, you’re the main supplier to the ABC network.

“And then, after working on it for a while,” Patrick continued, “suddenly it started to click for Mike.”

“What was it that clicked?” I asked.

Patrick thought for a moment. “It was Emily’s revenge, her single-minded determination to redeem her father at all costs. The madness of it was clicking in the writing. Mike was enjoying it.”

And so was I, along with so many other women I knew.

“Casting was the key,” Patrick added. “If the heroine had been a bit older, she’d lose sympathy; any younger, she’d be insane. They cast her perfectly, with an actress, Emily VanCamp, who had a following from the long-running series
Brothers and Sisters.
” Patrick went on, “Madeleine Stowe was a dream ‘get.’ She wasn’t afraid of the part, as many other actresses were.”

“She’s divine,” I said. “This is the best thing she’s done since
Last of the Mohicans.
”

“You
are
a fan,” Patrick said.

•  •  •

Of course, what Patrick didn’t know is that the president of my company, Rachel Abarbanell, had been enduring versions of
Revenge
for six months. Heroine as blighted orphan, à la
Jane Eyre.
Heroine as abandoned-at-birth aristocrat (a loosely updated take on
Anastasia
) showing up at her real family’s current estate, only to be thrown out by her siblings. My drama meeting with Sony was two weeks away. The upfronts were ending, and I was reading Deadline Hollywood to get the last of the pilot pickups when Rachel suddenly burst through my door.

“Read the log line of
Notorious,
which NBC just put on its schedule,” she cried.

“You read it,” I said.

“A female detective goes undercover in the home of the rich family for whom her mother was a maid to solve the murder of the daughter who was once her best friend.”

“It’s a
Revenge,
” I said in despair. “I’m too late. Who is the producer?”

“Gail Berman,” she said.

I started to laugh. I was one full buying season behind. “Well, at least if I get beat by a season, it’s by a master.”

Onward. Nextino.

•  •  •

Still, I had my
Revenge,
which was so ridiculously complicated that it had taken me all season to develop, and by the time my fabulous writer and I were ready, ABC was filled to the brim with soaps. I was saved by a fresh and funny procedural from
Dexter
showrunner Manny Coto, a kind of
Moneyball
meets
Homicide
that he called
The Defectives.
Even though ABC had hung out a sign at the beginning of the season that said
no procedurals
, by that time they were so loaded up with
Revenge
-a-likes that they needed a procedural again, so they bit. Manny turned in a terrific script, and we crossed our fingers and waited to hear. They didn’t pick it up. We
were crestfallen. He was a wonderful collaborator, and the show would have been so much fun.

Then, out of the blue, a spec pilot from a first-time writer named Cameron Porsandeh, who had done a thousand interesting things in his life besides write TV, was submitted to me by WME. It was about a very scary man-made virus that runs amok in an outlaw lab in the Arctic. After a little work, I brought it to Sony and they bought it, attaching a major showrunner, Ron Moore (
Battlestar Galactica
), with whom they had a deal. We were going to go out competitively with the pilot when SyFy offered a rare pilot-to-series order (meaning they were committing to a thirteen-episode series, not contingent on seeing the pilot first). Blackjack! I was getting something on the air this fall, albeit from left field.