Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (27 page)

Paul Attanasio was the trailblazer for successful feature writers crossing over. He was an ex–
Washington Post
reporter and was famously hired for expensive (often up to $250K a week!) production rewrites and polishes because of his ability to write smart and witty banter. He was the first big feature writer I remember crossing over, writing on
House,
and he soon brought many feature drama writers into the writers’ room along with him.

Gail knew all: “Paul came in very early on, and certainly working with him on
House
was—”

“So that was you!” I exclaimed, interrupting her.

“Yes,” Gail answered. “I did that while I was at Fox; it was a fantastic thing. He had done a show prior to that [with Gail’s partner, Lloyd Braun] at ABC, actually, called
Gideon’s Crossing,
so he was an example of somebody who was beginning to cross comfortably between both worlds. It certainly didn’t diminish him in the feature business, and he was sought after in the television business.”

“Is there now essentially a mash of the two businesses?” I asked her. “The end of the separation between the two businesses’ talent pools as we know them? Or is this a temporary occurrence because the movie business is currently such a disaster?”

“In my opinion, there’s nothing temporary about it,” Gail said. “It is the wave of the future. From an artist’s point of view, the point is being able to tell stories and get their message out. And as companies make fewer and fewer movies, that’s very hard to do. So the question is, can you tell your story in other places where things are happening? So instead of looking at it in a negative way, like, oh, the movie business is so horrible, woe is me . . . to be able to say, ‘Okay, I’m a storyteller, I’m an artist; I want to tell stories, and if I
can’t do that over there, I might have an opportunity to do it over here.’ And that to me is how people should be looking at it.”

I left Gail’s office wondering, Is everyone going to do television now?

•  •  •

One Sunday afternoon, Rick and I were watching an Eagles-Giants game. During a commercial, I taped this conversation:

RICK:
Who doesn’t do television now? Everybody does it. Anybody who says they won’t do it is out of the business. Right? You tell me, who says they won’t do it?

LYNDA:
Will Smith?

RICK:
Will Smith brought us a television show with a log line [
Hawthorne,
a nursing series on TNT]. We sold it, because they put Jada [Pinkett Smith, Will’s wife] in it, and once you put Jada in it, it becomes Will Smith’s company, Overbrook. Once it becomes Overbrook, twenty people come into your life. So maybe the biggest movie stars in the world—maybe they don’t have to do it. But by the way, Brad Pitt is doing a miniseries at HBO with Edward Norton. They’re doing
Lewis and Clark
as a miniseries.

LYNDA:
I bet George will end up doing TV.

RICK:
Well, he came out of TV.

LYNDA:
Of course he came out of TV.

RICK:
He did ten busted pilots before he did
ER
. I mean, George Clooney, didn’t he—

LYNDA:
He did something. He did that live one-hour thing with [producer] Laura Ziskin after he was a movie star.

RICK:
Right, exactly. Based on
Fail Safe.
He wouldn’t do a show for HBO?

LYNDA:
If it was political? Please, of course he would.

RICK:
He did an HBO series.

LYNDA:
K Street!
A series about lobbyists.

(We laugh.)

LYNDA:
Of course, Angelina’s not going to do TV.

RICK:
Right, but she doesn’t have to. She’s doing something at Lifetime, I think. I think she’s directing something.

LYNDA:
You know, there probably isn’t anybody. Sandy [Bullock]? Nope, Sandy did. She did something with George Lopez. And I submitted a Texas show to her last year.

RICK:
Who says “I don’t do TV” in this day and age? I don’t know. I mean, if HBO brings you something great, are you going to say, “No, I won’t do it”?

LYNDA:
And now Scott Rudin has two HBO series. [Note: Scott’s deal was canceled; we’ll see about that.]

RICK:
And David Fincher [
Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
] is doing
House of Lords
on Netflix.

LYNDA:
Yes, Netflix looks like it’s going to be the home for the A-list movie directors. There’s no one not doing TV.
²

How did this happen? Do actors follow the writing? The opportunities? Women certainly follow the parts! Rick and I talked about how they cast Claire Danes in
Homeland
. “You show an actor material; they respond to the character, to the material, to the writing,” Rick said. “If you’re a thirty-five-year-old woman, where are you going to get a part like Laura Linney [
The Big C
on Showtime] and Claire are getting in television?”

“Or,” I added, “Laura Dern is producing for herself with
Enlightenment
.” The paucity of quality parts for women in features made the question rhetorical.

I asked Rick if he had a hard time getting the top feature writers to do series these days.

“Oh, they’re eager and excited to do it now. They have been for more than five years. Eighteen years ago, Endeavor
³
was founded
on the premise that there was no such thing as a strict feature writer or a strict television writer. Everyone does both. We have people like Aaron Sorkin, who goes from medium to medium. He writes a play (
A Few Good Men
); he writes a television series (
West Wing
); he writes a movie (
The Social Network
). He’s a writer. And many of our successful television writers all came out of features, like Josh Schwartz; he was initially a feature writer, and then he did
The O.C.
and
Gossip Girl
and other shows. Writers write, and putting them in a box, which is what used to happen, is unhealthy.”

Now it’s fully transitive. Movies want TV writers for comedy rewrites and more; TV likes feature writers. Mitch Hurwitz of
Arrested Development
fame (now being restarted on Netflix) did a rewrite of a script that was meant to be my directorial debut—about girlfriends from college reconnecting over a weekend gone haywire—but sadly, after a momentary
Bridesmaids
bump, it went nowhere fast. Jonathan Nolan (called Jonah), with whom I was working on a big project for Paramount and who was also the writer of the
Batman
franchise, launched himself from tentpole city into television (
Person of Interest
on CBS), stunning everyone, especially me. He had just gotten his first pilot picked up, while I was awaiting the fate of my major tentpole in features. Drama writers are moving to television in droves. It’s like an oasis where they can write characters and not set pieces. Drama is a whole department in television, not a reason to be rejected. And since the onslaught of
tentpole über alles,
dramatic films have been mainly relegated to the indie side of the market.

From the vantage point of four years in television, it’s clear that the great writing in TV isn’t due to the influx of feature writers. The greatest shows from the start of this era were born from network stalwarts like David Chase, whose
Sopranos
changed the landscape forever, but who was a writer for years on
Remington Steel.
A journalist turned TV writer, David Simon, wrote
The Wire.
I wept like I did for Anna Karenina over seasons two and
three of
Damages,
written by longtime television writers and former playwrights Glenn Kessler, Todd Kessler and Daniel Zelman.
Mad Men
’s illustrious creator, Matt Weiner, still struggles to make his first feature, and
Homeland
’s Howard Gordon came from network hit
24
.
Breaking Bad
was the brainchild of Vince Gilligan, who had grown up on
The X-Files,
a breakthrough Fox show. Television became great via its own writers pushing boundaries as outlets like HBO made it possible, creating a loop of reactions, from Fox courting the youth demographic outward to the hungrier and more ambitious networks. Those writers knew where to push and had the relationships and trust to transform the envelope as the media universe changed. TV became an oasis for starved feature writers, tired of writing set pieces or tiny tadpoles for free. They are starved for the opportunity to write juicy, flawed characters—mothers having affairs or dying of cancer, crack-dealing teachers, all the permanent no-nos of the movies.

Their feature credits and prestige lend credibility to these projects, which helps them get made. Big feature directors are also doing lots of television as they look for work between stalled movies. (My favorite network series,
Revenge,
had its pilot shot by director Phillip Noyce, of
Clear and Present Danger, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Salt
and
Patriot Games
fame.) The television business is in constant motion: The networks have to air something, and there are more and more cable and online outlets blooming every day. Everyone knows that a hit series is a gold mine.

An apocryphal Hollywood saying goes: “A hit movie gets you a great table at Morton’s; a hit series gets you a house in Malibu.”

Or, as Rick said this weekend when we chatted about why I should get into the television business, “It’s like what famous bank robber Willie Sutton said when they asked him why he robbed banks: ‘It’s where the money is!’ ”

Certainly the agencies and corporations have learned this, as television rakes in a huge proportion of the entertainment
conglomerates’ revenues compared to film, a total reversal of the old norm. Now the writers, managers and producers are getting wise.

All of this is dependent, of course, on getting a series on the air. And that is dependent on figuring out what a series is, something I would learn on the job while watching a lot of television.

TRYING TO LEARN THE GAME

My team and I unpacked our boxes from location in Boston after wrapping
The Invention of Lying
in June of 2008, year of the Catastrophe. We moved into our new bungalow at Paramount TV, which we treated like our old bungalow at the Paramount motion picture studio. We decorated it with all our wonderful things, only to discover it was really half a bungalow. We were sharing it with another producer “pod.” Fortunately, it turned out that all of our bungalow-mates were happy with our antique Texas chandelier and furniture. But we discovered that we weren’t supposed to be redecorating our bungalow. Apparently, television offices are supposed to be hellholes in which everyone writes twenty-four hours a day.

And so, early one morning as we were moving in, the personnel police arrived and took down our chandelier, movie posters and antique coatrack, much to my executive Rachel Abarbanell’s shock. Rachel has been with me for seven years and has evolved to become my trusty president of production, lifesaver and chief of everything.

She had organized our move impeccably; she wanted me to be excited when I walked into the new office to begin this new facet of our careers. She called me at home in dismay. “Our Texas chandelier and movie posters are coming down!”

Our bungalow-mates told the personnel police, “But we need
a coatrack!” (It was usually eighty-seven degrees in the Valley.) It didn’t matter, because we weren’t supposed to have a decorated office.

I discovered this when I visited other television offices. They turned out to be frantic production offices thrown together with interchangeable office-catalog furniture; everyone in them is too tired and busy to look up to notice a chandelier. In other offices, people are keeping their heads down in case their shows get canceled. Each office has cycled through five shows in six years, so they are not homey spots where you entertain movie stars and highly sought-after hoo-hahs. “But we’re still doing movies too,” we tried to explain to the personnel police. They didn’t want to hear that, since Paramount was paying us to do television.

It was the most interesting possible time to be learning TV. I had made a miniseries called
The ’60s
for NBC years before, and it had been a blast—it was even nominated for an Emmy—but that was essentially making a long movie. It was not playing the television game by any stretch. Now there was so much to learn, it was unbelievable. Everything was “The Package”; “The Season”; “The Showrunner.” I had only a vague sense of what these all-important terms really meant.

Who my agent was was critically important. I’d been repped by CAA (Creative Artists Agency) throughout my film career. Well, too bad for me; I had to switch to WME. This is not a business whose rules were made to be broken. How many pages were in a script? There should be 121 in a feature; 57 in an hour-long drama. Fascinating. A page a minute. How many acts? Three in a feature; five, I discovered, in a TV pilot. (For commercial breaks!) And what on earth was a cold open? Or a teaser? Just learning the language would take a few seasons. And figuring out what seasons were would take a few seasons.

I arrived at my Studio City office and sat in my chair, twirled a bit and tried to figure out where to begin. Rick had tipped me
off that movie producers tend to fare better in drama “one hours” than comedy “half hours,” so I figured that would be my departure point. I twirled in my chair, read the paper, read Kirkus book reviews, trolled the Internet, twirled some more and started calling writers. But something big was bothering me. A bit embarrassed, I called Rick.