Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (5 page)

“I remember my first production meeting, at Paramount, on
The Magician
. All the department heads were going through the script: ‘Okay: The police uniform. Long-sleeve or short-sleeve? Let’s see, it’s October, so short-sleeve.’ So you settle that and then you go on. This was fascinating to me,” Chase said.

As important, he was being trained in TV’s eternal, intimate dance between story (which is to say, creativity) and time (which is to say, money). “Like, you have a scene in a funeral home, but the locations person says you can’t afford to shoot a funeral home. So you need to change it to an exterior, where you see people leaving and getting into their cars. It was real fundamentals. Paul Playdon taught me all that. And then later, of course, Stephen Cannell.”

• • •

N
obody (or at least no boy) growing up between the late 1970s and early 1990s could fail to know the prodigious body of work Stephen J. Cannell produced throughout that era—a collection of character-based, humor-laced, action-packed shows that included
Riptide
,
The Greatest American Hero
,
Wiseguy
,
21 Jump Street
,
The Commish
,
Baretta
,
Hunter
,
Hardcastle and McCormick
, and more
.
(TV has always had a taste for last names as titles, particularly if the names are fortuitously punny and evocative.) As far as popular success went, there was, above all others,
The A-Team
,
a perfectly calibrated piece of Reagan-era juvenile junk featuring a team of vigilante ex–Special Forces soldiers back from Vietnam and intervening on behalf of the little guy, preferably one running a wood mill, trucking company, or other suitably blue-collar operation.

What’s more surprising is that the same boys, who would have been of an age not accustomed to considering, much less caring, how their entertainment was made, would probably also know
who
Cannell was—even if they knew no other television producer or even that such a thing existed. This was thanks largely to Cannell’s signature “bumper,” a snippet of video that ran after the credits of each of his shows. It depicted the man himself, bearded, impressively coiffed, and usually puffing on a pipe, at his typewriter at the final moments of finishing a script. He would pound out a final few characters—no doubt a last-minute plot twist or crucial piece of character nuance—and then confidently rip the page from its carriage and fling it across the room, whereupon it morphed into animation, fluttered onto the top of a manuscript, and settled into a royal, curved “C.”

It was a classic piece of narcissism, to be sure; the video logo was periodically updated, and each iteration made sure to include more conspicuously displayed awards in the writer’s office. But it was also something more important: Regardless of what you thought of the quality of Cannell’s output (and it ranged wildly from awful to underappreciated), he was making a claim of television auteurship. What’s more, though he was a savvy, in some ways revolutionary, businessman, making a fortune by essentially starting his own studio and thus owning all his shows, Cannell’s bumper specifically insisted on his role, first and foremost, as a
writer
.

As he told an interviewer in 2004: “Somewhere in the early part of the eighties, I was starting to be referred to as a ‘television mogul.’ And I just kind of hated that. Because to me a mogul was a guy in a green suit who tried to score actresses. I kept saying, ‘I’m not a mogul, I’m a writer. I write every day for five hours. If that doesn’t make me a writer, what does?’”

Neither that figure nor Cannell’s pride in it, heightened by the fact that he had grown up dyslexic, ever wavered—though in later years he applied it to the writing of mystery novels rather than TV shows. Lunching at the Beverly Hilton several months before he would die of melanoma, at the age of sixty-nine, he was magnificent: bull-chested, hair swept back, wearing a thin, ribbed black turtleneck tucked into the tightest of tan pants and a corduroy jacket. He ordered tuna on white and used an entire room-service mini-jar of extra mayonnaise.

And though he could justly claim credit for kicking off the careers of such stars as Johnny Depp, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Chiklis, and many others, he seemed most proud of hiring David Chase as a staff writer for
The Rockford Files
.

Years later, Chase described what he learned writing for
Rockford
, which ran from 1974 to 1980, was later revived as a series of occasional TV movies, and stands as Cannell’s most accomplished creation. “Cannell taught me that your hero can do a lot of bad things, he can make all kinds of mistakes, can be lazy and look like a fool, as long as he’s the smartest guy in the room and he’s good at his job. That’s what we ask of our heroes.” Jim Rockford, in other words, was an early shade of Tony Soprano.

Played by James Garner, Rockford was a semi-deadbeat private eye who lived in a beachside trailer in Malibu. He had an astonishing collection of plaid jackets that he wore with equally astonishing aplomb. He didn’t like guns, or to work very much, and beyond a grudging sense of decency, he embraced no lofty cause of justice. “With Rockford it was always about ‘$200 a day, plus expenses,’ that’s all,” Chase said, giving the PI’s oft-mentioned terms of employment.

If
The A-Team
’s cigar-chomping, leeringly macho colonel John “Hannibal” Smith was the perfect incarnation of 1980s triumphalism, Rockford was equally in tune with his times, a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam wiseass, the closest that TV could get to Elliott Gould’s shambling, scruffy take on Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s 1973 version of
The Long Goodbye
. The show was underscored with just a whiff of melancholy, an intimation of resignation and loneliness discernible in the harmonica break of Mike Post’s theme music, if you were inclined to hear it.

Even allowing for retrospective clairvoyance, it’s hard not to see Chase’s fingerprints all over “The Oracle Wore a Cashmere Suit,” his first credited episode of
Rockford
. This is less true in the main action—a characteristically convoluted double murder into which Rockford is reluctantly drawn—than in the details stuffed in around the edges: the rock-and-roll references, the malapropisms, the happy coincidence of Rockford making an appearance, shuffling, Tony-like, out to the beach in his bathrobe. The “oracle” of the episode’s title is a celebrity psychic with the Sopranoesque name Roman Clementi, whom Chase seems to have taken gleeful pleasure in writing as an oily, unrepentant charlatan. Clementi has precisely the blend of qualities most likely to draw out the sharpest point of Chase’s pen: vanity, fatuity, pretension, physical cowardice. To see the psychic flinch from a drug dealer who hits him in the face is to immediately flash on Assemblyman Ronald Zellman cowering as Tony Soprano beats him with a belt for the crime of falling in love with the mobster’s old mistress.

An even clearer indication of Chase’s creative temperament came with
Off the Minnesota Strip
, which aired in May 1980 on the
ABC Monday Night Movie
. It is hard to imagine a film of its bleak tenor appearing in a modern movie theater, much less on prime-time network TV, interrupted by sunny ads for detergent. It was the story of Michele, nicknamed Micki and played by Mare Winningham. Micki is a teenage runaway who returns home to suburban Minnesota after spending time as a prostitute in New York. Again, premonitions of
The Sopranos
abound: Micki’s mom is harsh and remote, her father an impotent milquetoast. Micki herself is no reformed angel with a heart of gold: she’s a narcissist, a sexual manipulator, and a pain in the ass. There is a brutal scene in which the dad, played by Hal Holbrook, is forced to sit and listen to a frank account of his daughter’s sexual exploits. (There is also wicked wit: “Anyway, I guess it feels good to hit the old bed again,” Holbrook says by way of good night.) “Just My Imagination” and other rock-and-roll hits are on the sound track.

Above all,
Minnesota Strip
showcases Chase’s gift for granting complicated psychologies to characters who are themselves incapable of examining, much less expressing, what’s going on in their heads. This is the primary distinction between Chase and two fellow showrunners whose work he loathed: David Milch and Aaron Sorkin, both given to investing all of their characters with an eloquence suspiciously close to that of their creators. (Chase never understood how somebody could like both
The Sopranos
and, say,
The
West Wing
.
“It’s like when I was in high school: if you liked the Supremes, you couldn’t like the Marvelettes. If you liked Dylan, you couldn’t like Donovan.” He left little doubt as to which show was which.)

Off the Minnesota Strip
ends as untidily as can be, with Micki and a boyfriend lighting out for the Sunset Strip and stopping just short, the question of what they’re looking for and whether they’ll get it left dangling and unanswered. In
The
New York Times
, John J. O’Connor called it “the champion downer of the year.”

“In the end,
Off the Minnesota Strip
is little more than a homily on the futility of it all,” O’Connor wrote. “For Michele, for her parents, presumably for the rest of us, the message seems to be ‘turn off the set and start slashing your wrists.’”

Nearly thirty years later, after a similarly ambiguous ending,
The Sopranos
fans would be debating whether the message of that series amounted to the same thing.

• • •

C
hase won his first writing Emmy for the script of
Off the Minnesota Strip
. To his consternation, it made him that much more sought after by television companies. Of the many development deals he was offered by studios such as Warner Brothers, he chose to spend two years with an obscure company called Comworld Pictures.

“I thought, ‘These cocksuckers will never get anything on the air and I’ll be able to do nothing and write my movies.’ Which is what I did,” he said.

The convoluted strategies didn’t end there: Chase dreamed of selling a TV idea that was good enough to get a pilot made but not so good that it would ever go to series. That way, he reasoned, he could ask the studio, having already invested in an hour-long pilot, to cut its losses by putting up a relatively small amount to finish the story as a stand-alone movie. One idea he pursued on his deal at Universal seemed perfect. It was the story of a dissolving marriage, set in the present but told heavily through flashbacks to happier times in the 1960s. “I thought, ‘Most pilots don’t get bought, so I’ll shoot this, cut it together, and I’ll be in the movie business.’”

Not for the last time, Chase’s plan backfired. CBS, enchanted by the success of two ABC shows about baby boomers,
thirtysomething
and
The Wonder Years
,
picked up Chase’s series, now called
Almost Grown.
Chase called his agent, who naturally expected that his client would be elated. “I said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to get me out of this.’ He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I told him, ‘I want to kill myself! I don’t want to do a series.’”

Almost Grown
debuted in November 1988. The central couple was played by Eve Gordon and Tim Daly, who would later appear in a recurring guest role on
The Sopranos
. On the writing staff was Robin Green, a former magazine writer and alum of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, whose career, along with that of her future husband, Mitchell Burgess, would be intimately entwined with Chase’s for the next two decades.

“I don’t know how he managed to get it on the air,” said Henry Bromell. “It was a show about failure. And that’s not a surprise, something you realize in season five: it
starts
with a marriage having failed. Only David would have written that show.”

Though well reviewed by critics,
Almost Grown
proved too grim, and with a little help from CBS’s decision to air it opposite
Monday Night Football
, the show
was canceled after only eight episodes had been broadcast. Chase was left with his worst opinions of TV confirmed and the growing conviction—given the lack of positive response to any of his feature screenplays—that he’d made a fatal karmic error.

“I began to think that I was not going to succeed in movies because I wasn’t sacrificing enough. I wasn’t willing to quit, to get off that nipple, the weekly salary, the nice house in Santa Monica. I wasn’t willing to do the artistic thing, cut myself off and live the freelance life,” he said.

The outside world, meanwhile, saw someone with a growing reputation for outsize but wasted potential, a kind of human version of a Black List script: the most talented failure in television. When John Falsey called to enlist Chase as a writer for a new show set in the South during the civil rights movement, Falsey recalled, “The truth is, I don’t think anybody else wanted him.”

A Great Notion

T
he industrial coal country of eastern Pennsylvania is an unlikely place to find the seed of an electronic media revolution, much less a cultural one. Yet in this story it provides two.

The first came in 1948, when an enterprising appliance salesman in Mahanoy City, a town nestled in the picturesque but receptionless hills one hundred miles outside of Philadelphia, planted an antenna atop a nearby mountain, ran a literal cable into town, and began offering a new service. He charged $100 for installation and $2 per year thenceforth for the privilege of watching TV without the vagaries of wireless transmission.

The second occurred twenty-four years later, on November 8, 1972, and a mere forty miles away, in Wilkes-Barre. That was when, despite weather problems that forced a technician to stand on top of a roof, physically holding a microwave-receiving dish in place, HBO debuted to a tiny group of subscribers.

The idea for premium cable had been dreamed up by Charles Dolan, who had recently sold a large chunk of his Manhattan cable company, Sterling Communications, to Time Life Inc. and was casting about for a way to make it profitable. The answer—dreamed up, according to company lore, on a family vacation aboard the
Queen Elizabeth II—
was a subscription service focused on sports and movies. He called it “the Green Channel.” The name was quickly replaced with a placeholder: Home Box Office.

From the time of that first broadcast—of the film
Sometimes a Great Notion
, based on the Ken Kesey novel
—
much of both the problems and the promise that would drive HBO for the next four decades was already in place
.
The primary question, of course, was how to make people pay for something they either already paid for or, worse, got for free. In 1972, the answer was relatively easy: In those pre-VCR days, there were few options to see Hollywood movies outside of the theater, or even
in
the theater, since cinemas had yet to catch up with demographics by shifting from urban downtowns to suburban multiplexes. (The TV writer and essayist Rob Long has argued persuasively that this, as much as any particular upswell of artistic sensibility, was responsible for the New Cinema of the early 1970s and, once the suburbs got screens, its death at the hands of blockbusters such as
Jaws
and
Star Wars
.)

Live sports broadcasts, largely controlled by local networks and afflicted by blackouts, were an equally rare commodity in 1972. In its first decade, a significant chunk of HBO’s programming included out-of-market NHL, NBA, and New York Yankees games, in addition to boxing, which would remain an important franchise for years to come. Any honest HBO executive past or present would also allow that two other programming elements made possible by its premium status did as much as anything else to distinguish the network’s identity: breasts and curse words.

The mix worked. By 1981, HBO was carried on one thousand local cable systems across the country and boasted some four million subscribers. (Dolan had quickly departed the company and would go on to create Cablevision, which owned Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and Rangers, Radio City Music Hall, and AMC Networks.) In the ensuing decade, under the stewardship of Jerry Levin and Michael Fuchs, who took over as chairman and CEO in 1984, that number would grow fivefold. At the same time, certain fundamental problems marked those years, chief among them the difficulty of finding enough content to fill the 168 hours per week that a full-time network demanded. HBO’s constant repetition of its stable of movies became a well-known joke. (“Show me a Home Box Office patron, and I’ll show you someone who has seen
The Great Santini
fifteen times,” Jack Curry wrote in the
Daily News
.)
The more subscribers felt they had seen all HBO had to offer, the more vulnerable the network was to the scourge of pay TV: so-called
churning
, in which consumers repeatedly pick up and then drop cable services.

The all-consuming thirst for content also made HBO, for as long as it was primarily a movie station, dangerously dependent on Hollywood studios. These had started out dubious of the network and grown increasingly hostile. In 1980, it took a federal antitrust case to prevent 20th Century Fox, Universal, Columbia, and Paramount from banding together to start their own pay network, called Premiere, as a direct challenge. With the rise of VCRs and competition from networks like Showtime and The Movie Channel, all strategic roads began to lead toward the same destination: original programming.

• • •

M
ovie and TV production wasn’t totally alien to HBO. In 1982, the network had joined with CBS and Columbia Studios to form Tri-Star Pictures, which produced such films as
The Natural
and
Birdy
. (HBO left the partnership in 1987.) In 1986, the first
Comic Relief
concert was aired, a fund-raiser that would eventually have eleven installments. The network also had varying degrees of success with sketch comedy (
Kids in the Hall, Not Necessarily the News
), miniseries (Robert Altman’s
Tanner ’88
), and oddball children’s programming like Jim Henson’s
Fraggle Rock
.
Meanwhile, as the nineties dawned, its documentary division, under the direction of Sheila Nevins, began developing a strong reputation with films ranging from Emmy-winning investigations such as
Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel
to the titillations of
Real Sex
and
Taxicab Confessions
.

For the most part, though, the network had declined to challenge the networks with ongoing scripted series. There were a few exceptions:
1st & Ten
was
a football sitcom costarring O. J. Simpson.
Arli$$
chronicled the adventures of a big-time sports agent
.
To the extent that these shows drew on HBO’s nascent brand, they were primarily the easiest, and crudest, expressions of what it could do and most networks couldn’t. Nearly every episode of the sitcom
Dream On
, from David Crane and Marta Kauffman, who would later birth
Friends
, featured at least one sex scene so outrageously gratuitous that it almost felt like an inside joke on the nature of pay TV.

Which is not to say that self-reflexive irony, if indeed there was any on
Dream On
,
did anything to diminish the appeal to teenage boys, especially in those pre-Internet days. In that way, an otherwise forgettable show intimated a canny strategy that continued to work for HBO long after it moved on to more upmarket fare. Rare is the episode of any HBO show that doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity to remind you that “adult entertainment”
means more than sophisticated storytelling
.
And if one watched
The Sopranos
more for the Bada Bing! and the blood than for the existential musings, well, who was to know? Any more than it could be proven that you
weren’t
reading
Playboy
for the articles.

The most important premonition of what HBO would soon become came in 1992, with the debut of
The Larry Sanders Show
. Just as
The Sopranos
would be nearly as funny as it was dramatic,
The Larry Sanders Show
was a half-hour comedy as cruelly dark as anything TV had seen before. A behind-the-scenes look at the making of a late-night talk show, it starred Garry Shandling as Larry, the neurotic, narcissistic host. If Shandling and his supporting cast, including Rip Torn and Jeffrey Tambor, weren’t exactly playing mobsters or murderers, they were a good deal less likable than any characters you could find on network TV—much less on a sitcom. That went equally for the celebrities who soon lined up to play exaggerated, usually ugly versions of themselves. To appear on
Larry Sanders
was to show yourself as not only a good sport, but savvy enough to lampoon Hollywood while participating in it. And the audience was flattered by its knowing inclusion in that world, the same way it later felt intimately connected to the jargon of Baltimore homicide cops on
The Wire
or the economics of running a funeral home on
Six Feet Under
. The pleasure came less from the putative glimpse into how a late-night talk show worked than from imagining how one could convince Michael Bolton to appear as himself in an episode in which he was described as “a pair of lungs with a dick.”

In raw numbers, not all that many people watched. “I used to get the numbers every week, and
Def Comedy Jam
”—the African American comedy showcase that debuted the same year—“had like four times the ratings of
Larry Sanders
,” said Kevin Reilly, then the head of television at Brillstein-Grey, the influential management company that produced both shows and would later develop
The Sopranos
. But volume of viewers really didn’t matter. Buzz did: among critics, among loyal, chattering viewers on the coasts, and among other Hollywood creatives.

“
The Larry Sanders Show
manifestly revealed to everyone that you could do something totally original, get noticed for it, and that it could have a cultural impact,” said Richard Plepler, who later became HBO’s CEO. “And I believe that that show opened up the imagination of a lot of creative people who said, ‘You know what, you go over there, you can do some interesting stuff.’”

• • •

B
y most normal standards, David Chase was doing interesting stuff himself in the early 1990s—working for a pair of young writer-producers who would likely have found themselves working on cable had they started ten years later. Josh Brand and John Falsey had been barely thirty when they created
St. Elsewhere
for MTM. They departed the show soon after its debut, thanks to an ugly struggle for control between Brand and executive producer Bruce Paltrow. At Universal, they had created a miniseries called
A Year in the Life
for NBC, which was then picked up for one critically acclaimed season. They then struck improbable gold, or at least fairy dust, with an eight-episode summer replacement called
Northern Exposure
, about a neurotic New York doctor stranded in an eccentric Alaskan town. With its blend of comedy, soap opera, and a kind of hip, literary sensibility (Falsey and several of the writers he recruited had studied fiction at the University of Iowa), the show was an immediate hit with critics.

“They were very conscious of wanting to do something that was not like television,” staffer Barbara Hall remembered. “There were constant references to short-story writers and playwrights, not TV episodes.” Robin Green, also a writer for the show, was sent home the first week with a collection of John Updike stories to study. Surprisingly, the show was also a ratings hit, which bought Brand and Falsey something approaching a free pass on whatever they wanted to do next.

“Back then, before HBO and cable were players, the networks would set aside an hour or two a week for a show that wasn’t going to be a ratings winner but that they could be proud of,” said Falsey. “With
Northern
, Josh and I had reached that niche.”

What they filled it with was
I’ll Fly Away
. Set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the show centered around Sam Waterston as a southern district attorney navigating the moral and legal displacements of the civil rights movement, and on Regina Taylor as his African American maid, Lilly, caught in the same currents. Brand said the show’s inspiration was a scene in
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
in which Atticus Finch asks his black housekeeper to stay at his house while he attends to business: “I thought, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be interesting to see it from her point of view.’”

Brand had admired
Almost Grown
, so when James Garner sang David Chase’s praises one day over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air, he and Falsey brought him in for a meeting.

“He was David,” Brand said. “You know, not the most cheery person you can meet. When he left, we looked at each other and one of us said, ‘He’s an odd duck, man. But he’s a really talented writer.’ So we hired him. Frankly, we didn’t give a shit about his personality.”

Henry Bromell and Hall rounded out the small writing staff, though Chase emerged as the star. “I remember we each went off to write our first scripts and then passed them around,” said Bromell. “Mine was pretty good. I remember reading Barbara’s and thinking it was really good. But David’s . . . David’s was like Chekhov.”

In “The Hat,” which became the second episode of
I’ll Fly Away
’s first season, Lilly retrieves and fixes a cowboy hat that her young white charge, John Morgan, has lost out a car window. Before she can return it, though, Lilly’s daughter falls in love with the hat, forcing Lilly to pry it away from her to give it back. In the final scene, as Chase wrote it, John Morgan cavalierly discards the hat again.

“It said everything,” said Bromell. “About the two families. About money. About power. About how Lilly couldn’t say ‘Fuck you’ to her boss. I said, ‘David, that’s really good. In any medium.’ And he said, ‘Eh. I don’t know.’”

Brand said, “If you came to see David in his office, he’d kind of look at you like you were trying to pick his pocket. You’d say, ‘David, it’s nothing! I’m just trying to have a conversation!’ He’d be, ‘What? What?’ Just very suspicious. But I really liked him. I thought he was funny, because he was so intense.” Brand paused and smiled. “Though, you know, I always thought Richard Nixon was hysterically funny, too.”

Chase was proud of his work on
I’ll Fly Away
, but that hardly meant he was happy. His battles with enemies both internal and external continued—the latter camp represented largely by the powers at NBC, on which the series aired. Network commercials for the show featured Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World.” The spots drove Chase crazy.

“If I’d had a gun, I would’ve killed somebody,” he said, as worked up about it in 2010 as he was in 1992. “What fucking wonderful world? Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi civil rights workers being murdered, housewives from Detroit being gunned down in their car, black kids being lynched? They were trying to sell a series about human pain as a cute story about some cute little boy and his nanny. And it fucking made me want to puke.”