B004YENES8 EBOK (40 page)

The irrepressible Carole R. Smith, flanked by
Menopause Years
pals and stars, Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless, circa 1994.

Photo: Carole R. Smith Collection

David Paymer, as ADA Feldberg, “introduces” Cagney and Lacey in a scene from our first
Menopause Years
reunion film. Paymer’s appearance in the first two of this quartet of films merits a special comment: in the years that had passed since he began his career, first as a hapless street character on
Cagney & Lacey
in 1982 and then graduating to his recurring role as our assistant district attorney, the actor had become a star in his own right working with the likes of Robert Redford and Billy Crystal and, eventually, having his own series. He had truly grown beyond this tiny (but memorable) part and/or our ability to pay him. He “showed up” anyway for old time’s sake, and for a lot less than his market price, demonstrating a class and a sense of gratitude not very often expressed in the film and television industry.

© CBS Broadcasting Inc. Cliff Lipson/CBS

The overall reaction to the reunification of Sharon and Tyne and to the films themselves was excellent from all quarters. The first movie got outstanding reviews and was rated the number-one film on all networks for that week, the top-rated show of any kind on the CBS network, and ultimately the number-two movie on all of television for the entire 1994–95 season, subsequently being edged out (by an eighth of a rating point) by the
Rockford Files
reunion movie.

With that kind of success one could argue that the network might have called with—oh, I don’t know—say, a couple of simple questions, such as “How many more can we have, and how fast can you deliver?” In fact, the only calls were from the trade press, wanting to know just how large an order I had received from CBS as a result of our precedent-setting numbers. Lisa DeMores, of the
Hollywood Reporter
, agreed with my tongue-in-cheek supposition that perhaps the broadcasters had lost my phone number. I asked her to publish it, which she did, the very next day on the Reporter’s front page. I got my phone call that afternoon.

I argued successfully to save the second film for May sweeps rather than February as originally planned because I thought it best that there be a bit more waiting time between the two outings and because some of our promised publicity coverage, namely a
Ms.
magazine cover (it would have been our third) and a few other such breaks could not be ready for publishing in the time between the smash October release and the initially scheduled February air date. CBS programmers warned that granting my request might cause us to lose our Sunday night slot, but I wasn’t concerned—only because I didn’t anticipate the full ramifications of an upcoming changing of the guard at CBS.

This changeover was made official in the late spring of 1995; Jeff Sagansky announced he was leaving CBS, with power being turned over to Peter Tortorici, his lieutenant of the past few years. I had survived many battles with Tortorici during the creation of
The Trials of Rosie O’Neill
and would win most, if not all. These would prove to be pyrrhic victories, as time and time again (as he became more and more powerful) I was to realize what a long memory he possessed. I have often wished I had allowed this adversary to win some of those earlier fights on my public defender series.

Along with
Cagney & Lacey
, the
Rockford
reunion movie had done so well, I was told that CBS was now considering setting up a Mystery Movie Night that would play once a week through the month of May sweeps. This would, Tortorici said, be heavily promoted and designated as appointment television by the network, with a
Cagney & Lacey
one week, a
Rockford
the next, and a special
Murder, She Wrote
two-parter to make up three spokes of the wheel.

Then, without letting us know, Tortorici acquiesced to pressure from Universal Studios (home to both
Rockford
and the Lansbury show) to keep those two shows on Sunday nights in May while programming
Cagney & Lacey
all on its lonesome on Tuesday night. I thought this was absolutely ridiculous; Tuesday was traditionally a non-movie night for CBS and, at that time, a black hole for ratings on the network. It also meant we would be placed right opposite the very successful
Home Improvement
series and Steven Bochco’s
NYPD Blue
(usually referred to by me as “
Cagney & Lacey
in drag”). Bochco’s show was then at the height of its popularity, drawing a huge, urban, educated audience, the same target group coveted by my own series.

We did OK, not great, but great enough. CBS management sent flowers to both Sharon and Tyne with thank-yous. The second-place numbers on that tough night were apparently greatly appreciated by the CBS brass, and the proof of that was an order to production on the two additional
Cagney & Lacey
scripts previously commissioned during the Sagansky years:
Cagney & Lacey: The View through the Glass Ceiling
and
Cagney & Lacey: True Convictions
.

We would, for economic reasons, make these in Canada, heading back to the city where it all began for two months of back-to-back production in Toronto on scripts by Michele Gallery (one of those very fine
Lou Grant
writers I had been unable to hire all those years ago for my series) and directed by John Patterson and then Lynn Littman.

In these last two films, Cagney would now be divorced, and Lacey back at work on a regular basis. Multi-award-winning actor Michael Moriarty would provide Christine’s romantic connection in film number four.

Between these films, due diligence regarding my purchase of the
C&L
library droned on. The Orion files were a “rat’s nest,” and each of those file drawers contained some sort of bad news with nary a moment of “bank error in your favor.” A cursory look at the Canal Plus deal revealed that, although they would put up the money, I would be (again) an employee and without a very good contract at that.

My attorneys were becoming exasperated with this process. At this point in show business history, so many deals have been made, so much—so-called—new ground broken, that most of the work for an entertainment lawyer is, in reality, hand-holding, agenting, and minor amendments to boiler plate contracts. That was not the case here. This was tough slogging through international deals, contracts, residuals (some paid, some maybe not), bankruptcy filings, and handwritten receipts, often in a foreign language. I became exhausted with the procedure, as did my attorneys.

It was then I realized, as I had so many years before, that at this point in my life, I longed for a partner. I simply could not do all I needed to do alone, could not bounce back quickly enough from the daily disappointments and the hourly calls about another piece of negative information from the Orion archival files, and still do the real work that was required of me. I tried more than once to merge with someone with whom I thought I might be able to work or with whom there might be some synergy. One was simply not interested; the other was flattered but frightened of the independent game. Who could blame them?

Chapter 45 

ON THE ROAD AGAIN 

That spring in the mid-1990s I would hit the road again with Sharon and Tyne, doing our best to promote our (by then) virtually unpromotable one-time-only Tuesday night movie. We felt tossed away by CBS against the very formidable (and firmly established in their time slots)
NYPD Blue
and
Home Improvement
and so moved quickly on to Toronto and production on the third and fourth
Cagney & Lacey
reunion movies.

On the way we moved to center stage in front of hundreds of thousands of women, all gathered on a Sunday in April for a rally of the National Organization for Women, at the Mall of our nation’s capital. Sharon and Tyne were both thrilled to be featured at the event, and the audience could not have been more receptive. Tyne, harkening back to that time in London at the Drury Lane Theatre, turned to me and stated gratefully, and graciously, “Barney, you do get me onto the best stages.”

Sharon and Tyne acknowledge the crowd from the outdoor stage of a Washington DC women’s march at which they were featured.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

It came to pass that sending the women flowers and a thank-you for giving CBS respectability on that spring Tuesday night was one of Peter Tortorici’s final acts as network programming chief. It had been three years since
The Trials of Rosie O’Neill
had been canceled, largely due to this executive’s altering the show’s time slot so often that even the most ardent fan could not find the show. Likewise, he had all but precluded any future for
Christy
, despite the show’s critical acclaim, Tyne’s
Emmy
, and the terrific job MTM president Bill Allen had done attempting to get the network to pay some attention to this series.

Tyne Daly as Miss Alice with Kellie Martin, who played the title role in Christy, on the set of our location in Tennessee.

© CBS Broadcasting Inc.

Both shows were caught in the switches of the new demographic needs now expressed by Sagansky’s immediate successor. It was all so wasteful and so stupid.

Mr. Sagansky had become inordinately successful, in a very short time frame, by rescuing CBS from the ratings cellar simply by doing all he could—as quickly as he could—to appeal to the audience that was the CBS base. Before that was Kim LeMasters’ futile search for the so-called fountain of youth, the audience ranging in age from teenagers to folks in their forties.

Sagansky, knowing the CBS audience had traditionally skewed older and less urban, immediately turned LeMasters’s strategy on its head. He successfully catered to those viewers over forty in his quest for a quick turnaround for the network, achieving his goal, but not without some cost. Advertisers pay more for younger audiences than they do for old, and it irked Larry Tisch and the corporate power elite in New York that a higher-rated CBS show would make less money than a lower-rated, but younger appealing show, on ABC. It may have irked them, but they were making money—a whole lot more money than they were when LeMasters led them to the number-three spot among the three major networks.

Sagansky would eventually depart for greener pastures. His replacement, in an attempt to impress the bosses and their desire for even higher advertising revenues, all but abandoned Sagansky’s successful philosophy and (almost inexplicably) returned to the same ideas that had brought Kim LeMasters to failure. This time it would not take Larry Tisch and his crew at CBS corporate so long to react. Within weeks of our Tuesday night showing and the accompanying flowers of 1995, Mr. Tortorici found himself out of work and replaced by one of the industry’s shining stars, Lorimar’s studio head, Leslie Moonves .

The announcement of the Moonves ascension in the nation’s press boosted CBS stock several percentage points (the only ratings that
really
matter to management), increased the sales price of the network in their dealings with Westinghouse (preceding the eventual sale to Sumner Redstone’s Viacom Corporation some months later), and added to Mr. Tisch’s already substantial fortune by tens of millions of dollars.

I didn’t own any CBS stock, but I remember feeling at the time that, poor as things were with Peter Tortorici, this announcement did represent another one of those moments of “change equals psychological loss.”

Peter T. was less than forthcoming, a gent who played his cards very close to the vest. Worse, from my perspective, his learning curve seemed inordinately flat. All that aside, in the brief time-frame he was ensconced at CBS, I produced the final season of
Cagney & Lacey
, two seasons each of
The Trials of Rosie O’Neill
and
Christy
, as well as the
Cagney & Lacey
reunion movies. At the very least Tortorici knew me as a producer who could deliver a pretty decent product on time and on budget. Most important, for better or for worse, he was a network chief to whom I had access.

I had never met Mr. Moonves. If he knew me at all it was only by reputation, not altogether a bad thing, I thought, but it did put me into a larger kettle with a whole lot more fish .

The Moonves announcement was in early June. By then I was more than midway through production in Toronto on both the third and fourth Menopause Years reunion flicks. Sharon and Tyne had a great time, and both films had gone well and were made a lot more economically than the two I had done the previous year in Los Angeles. The efficiency and hard work of my long-time associate Paula Marcus (not available on films 1 and 2), the exchange rate of the Canadian dollar vis-à-vis American currency at that time, and the incentives put forward by the governments in Ontario (local) and Canada (national), brought in several hundreds of thousands of additional dollars to my production company.

By the time of the Moonves announcement, it was clear that
Christy
would not return to the network, Bill Allen had been unceremoniously dumped by his new management team at MTM, and I had come to think of The Rosenzweig Company as a business that was at a point of diminishing returns in more ways than one.

It had been less than a year since my mother had passed away, my father was in failing health, and a cursory check of my corporate books caused me to realize that, despite a great deal of production activity and a fairly efficient operation, my little company was barely treading water.

There were major economic forces at work in the film and television industry at this time, and my tiny corporation was being buffeted about by the gravitational pull of the opposing powers that were. The battle over the government’s financial interest and syndication rules as applied to the television industry was moving from the boardrooms of the major studios and networks to the FCC and the U.S. Congress. Determined to make independent production less attractive (so that key issues being negotiated would be ceded by the production companies and studios), the networks had begun to engage in a form of price fixing and restraint of trade that in better times would have brought out the forces of the justice department.

Or maybe not; where, after all, is the congressman who would stand up and challenge a network’s business dealings (something arguably more tangible than being critical of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at a football telecast)? Who is the politician that would risk not being on the evening news back home when running for reelection?

Like someone in a small boat, tossed at sea by the wakes of major vessels, I would either have to get a whole lot larger (investing whatever saved capital I had in the process), merge with another entity, become a publicly held corporation, or fold most of my tents and reduce the size of my company, my profile, and, of course, my overhead. Orion’s decision, in the final stages of the due diligence process, to re-license
Cagney & Lacey
to Lifetime Cable for a few million—thus dramatically reducing its value to me as a potential buyer—would pretty much make the decision for me.

Orion’s Len White must have been as tired of due diligence as I. (Either that, or, once again, his company needed to make a rent payment or keep the utility bill current.) It was all right with me. I was sick of the whole process and found myself saying, more often than not, that I would rather talk about
Cagney & Lacey
than actually make it. In reality, that is true for me of just about anything having to do with show business.

I had decided that what I would like to do is what I had always wanted to do, which was to get out—out of show business and definitely out of Los Angeles. There was the concern that I did not have enough of a stash to live life as elegantly as I would like. I thought (then at fifty-eight years of age) I could work a few more years to achieve whatever financial cushion I might need. The accumulation of capital was never my thing; still, I resolved to work toward that, provided I could do so on my terms.

It is a tricky thing to write, in a book for general consumption, about personal finances. There will be readers (hopefully) from varied economic stratum with multiple definitions of when “enough” is just that. What is a lot to one individual is not so much to another. Certainly, if one were to live by the standard of 99.5 percent of the Americas, I was doing great. But to Michael Eisner, Brad Grey, Steven Bochco, or any of the truly successful people in Hollywood, my cache of cash was chump change, to be sure.

From Toronto and our wrap party for cast and crew, I flew into New York for a meeting with CBS president Peter Lund and a subsequent dinner with Larry Tisch and his extraordinary lifetime spouse, Billie.

The Lund meeting took place at his New York office within hours of the official Moonves announcement and continued on as we took a friendly walk through the streets of Manhattan toward whatever it was that constituted his final appointment of that June afternoon in 1995.

Talking with Lund was easy and affable. How I began was to state what I believed was then absolutely true and with which Lund said he agreed: that
Cagney & Lacey
was a CBS asset at least as valuable (and less expensive to maintain) than Dan Rather. (This was 1995—nearly ten years before Rather would run afoul of the Bush bloggers who would seek his head and did succeed in getting him to resign his post as network anchor.) What I proposed was that I be allowed to continue making two
Cagney & Lacey
movies per year for the next five years. I would promise to make them for a competitive license fee and to deliver Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly in the title roles. Furthermore, if at any time the movies failed to perform up to a pre-negotiated ratings level, the network then would have the right to cut back or cancel whatever movies had not yet been committed to production. Simple.

Lund thought it all had merit but was (understandably) clear that such commitments would now have to come from Moonves. I understood that, of course, but spoke of my apprehensiveness about this since, not only didn’t I know Moonves, but worse, he didn’t know me. Lund promised he would pave the way for that, referring to me as “First Family” at CBS.

Sharon and I dined that evening with the Tisches, and business was never discussed. It wasn’t (I thought) necessary.