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05.03.11
Who’s Laughing Now
posted by Absinthe | 9:31 AM
Osama Bin Laden cost me my first job in Hollywood.
It wasn’t a particularly good job, and it wasn’t, from a career perspective, likely to have been all that far from my last. Still, there it is.
I usually don’t bring this up unless I’ve been drinking. First of all, because so many people lost so much more that day - their lives, their families, their futures, their minds – that griping over a bottom-of-the-ladder writing gig on a stupid game show that didn’t have anything more than a pilot presentation order seems to be a horrifying failure of perspective. Secondly, it usually takes a couple of drinks before I’ll tell you anything meaningful about myself. Information about the war on my neuroses is usually given out on a need-to-know basis, and you Don’t Need To Know. And last, telling tales out of school is a quick trip to persona non grata-ville in LA – memories are long, grudges are heavy, and nobody ever got fired for saying no. But since I never developed a persona worth noticing, and a long time has passed, and the timing seems apt and I won’t be naming any names …
It was not the ideal starter job. Cable. A game show, a genre Chuck Barris would probably admit is even less respected than reality. I had high hopes when I went out to LA, polished specs mailed out well in advance, even managed to set up a couple of meetings with agents before I’d even rented a place. They’d listen to me politely for five minutes and then tell me to go write a Drew Carey Show spec. I’d try to work out the best way to confess that signing up for that show, whatever its merits, would be akin to me taking a hit out on myself: By midseason someone, possibly me, would be looking to kill me. In that time the conversation lull would get painfully awkward and the person in the room with the cheapest suit would ask me if I wanted another bottle of water before I left.
Before I left.
So my dreams of fast cars and easy money (okay, functioning car and actual money) were not looking so hot. But then the week before I moved my whole life halfway across the country, I got a call. While we were on our honeymoon. And the call said, hey, we’d like to hire you for next to nothing for a job with no security doing something you’re not terribly excited about and by the way can you start three days after you get home from your honeymoon? So of course I said yes, yes, a thousand times yes, and is there by any chance I could have more than 72 hours to pack up the accumulated detritus of 27 years on this planet? Maybe 96 hours? And they said no, and I said, ok, then.
It wasn’t much of a writing staff. It was two middling, untested joke writers doing something they’d never done before, supervised by two producers who knew their jobs but also knew they were running a longshot project for a particularly fickle, schizoid network. (Which has since made good, but that’s another story.) We wrote scripts, threw them out and started over, invented themed minigames, pored over trivia books looking for new questions that could be rephrased in mildly humorous ways. We actually begged the network for notes at a couple of points, feeling that their requests were heavy on buzzwords but low on substance. We filmed silly skitlike creations; in one of them, I appeared as a hapless criminal, who for some reason (or, perhaps, no reason at all) was wearing a beret, and who was punched by a man in drag with balloons stuffed in his shirt. This is one of many, many reasons why I will never be president of this or any other country.
We booked a theatre, performers, a host, volunteer contestants, did as many runthroughs as our budget would allow. Which wasn’t many. I got dragooned as a tech and a voiceover artist and probably a dozen other things that weren’t in my job description but that my theatre experience made me barely competent for. It wasn’t perfect, but somehow it worked. It was light, funny, and surprisingly savvy for a shoestring production. It was exactly what they’d asked for, something hip and self-aware, that you might stumble across while flipping channels and keep watching. And we got it all together just in time for the folks from the network to fly in from NYC.
It was really only one guy we were doing the show for, but he brought like a five-person entourage with him. We packed the audience with enthusiastic people from the production house and lined up our most vivacious contestants. We had material for two shows but thought the show was solid enough we might only have to do one.
Turns out we needn’t have bothered with the one. The guy, the fucking network guy, took no fewer than seven cellphone calls during the 21-minute presentation. Which I knew because he had the best seat in the house, just to the front of our jury-rigged AV setup, and he talked so loud he almost made me miss some cues. If I’d had a dart gun or a sap I’d have knocked him out just for the satisfaction, because if you’re the kind of person who flies across the country to watch a show put on expressly for your benefit and cannot focus on that show for less time than it takes to get your fucking hair cut, then you are a world-class tool. And, regrettably, we had neglected the critical world-class tool demographic during the development process.
Lost cause notwithstanding, we dutifully started setting up for a second runthrough, but then the producers told us to save the effort and concentrate on smiling giddily instead. Unfortunately none of us did coke and the NYC crew was in an impromptu closed-door conference with our bosses. So we stewed.
The producers came in after a while, with their irrepressible, jaded grins fixed, and said, “Well … they like that it’s a game show.” Quick round of facepalmings, some hysterical laughter.
“Well, what -” we began.
“<redacted> says it was hard to follow.”
“How would he know? He was on his fucking -”
And then I got shushed. In a kindly, placating fashion, but yes, I got shushed. Uncharacteristically, I stayed that way. We listened to the notes, had some good ideas as to how to implement them, promptly got drunk enough to forget them, got back to work the next day.
They gave us four more weeks on the contract; we spent the time rejiggering the project, pulling as many fresh eyes as we could in to give us feedback. Salvaged what we could from the scripts – we repurposed a bunch of material from the runthrough we didn’t use, and pulled more stuff we’d rejected back when we still had a cool idea instead of what we were working on now, which was a basic quiz show. (We’d made another all-too-common mistake: giving the network what they asked for, rather than what they wanted.) Tapes were made and FedExed to New York; helpful notes might as well have been sent back west by Pony Express.
With time running out – at least, as far as I was concerned, because if the network pulled the plug without watching another runthrough, I was out of a job – we finally got word: they were coming back. It’d be a no-budget presentation rather than a low-budget one, with one of the producers serving as a host (ably, and better than the pro we’d hired the last go-round) and no technical equipment more complicated than a bell, but it’d prove the concept. It was so simple even an idiot who can’t put down his cellphone for more than three minutes could follow it. We figured we were still a longshot, but we’d put in the hours and shoehorned some good jokes into the script. The show wasn’t anything special, but it worked.
We got word on Friday that they were coming out the following Wednesday.
Wednesday, September 12, 2001.
So obviously that didn’t happen according to plan.
I actually went in to work that Tuesday, because nobody had told me I shouldn’t and it was, after all, my job. I and the other writer stared dully into space, refreshed the CNN webpage obsessively, went out back for cigarette “breaks” every half hour, called it a day at noon. In the days to follow, nobody knew anything. Which isn’t unusual when you work in media; what was odd was that nobody felt obligated to obfuscate their ignorance. “Should we be working on something?” we’d ask. “Dunno,” would come the reply. “Are they ever coming out?” “Dunno.” “Will we still have jobs forty days from now when the budget runs out?” “Dunno.”
Eventually, as people who think they’re funny tend to do when they’re trapped in a room together with nothing to talk about but a tragedy, we started to make jokes. Not good ones, or even memorably bad ones; the only bit I vaguely remember was a short series of classified ads offering office space in the air previously occupied by the Twin Towers. “Recently vacated; some structural deficiencies.” But they made us laugh, or at least got us to forget for a moment that we honestly had no idea if something even more horrible was about to happen. If you could die any minute, there’s no such thing as “too soon”, and if you’ve lived this long without realizing that you could die any minute, I have some good and bad news for you. The good news is that jokes are emotional vaccines; the bad news is that I may have graduated last in my class at comedy school, but you still have to call me “doctor”.
The network quietly let the project expire. I mean, we made a tape of our best work and sent it to them, once air traffic was restored – no way were they getting on a plane – and they sat on it and then just didn’t call until the last possible moment, and then said, “Sorry, no.”
In TV you can’t give somebody with power a single reason to say no to a project. Because they’ll do it. The appetite for risk may have increased somewhat in the intervening years, as production costs drop and the marketplace splinters, but there are still a lot of network VPs out there who make a very good living by saying no ten times a day and not even having to say yes once a year. And 9/11 gave everyone a lot of reasons to say no. Thousands of them. You couldn’t even take it personally. For one brief moment, everyone in the room would have agreed that what we were doing was meaningless. We’d all forget it eventually, but not soon enough to save the show.
And there you have it: my brilliant career as a game-show writer, strangled in its crib by a monstrous act that took place thousands of miles away. The bugger of it is that even now, nearly ten years on, I can’t tell you whether or not what happened was bad for me. The past is another country, and we don’t live there anymore; I can’t go back to see whether, undisturbed by this calamity, I’d have gotten somewhere, found good work, stumbled one time less on the righteous path to a WGA job. A decade later I wouldn’t want to go back anyway. I’m happy where I am.
I take no joy from the news that the sonofabitch of all sonofabitches is dead, though I’ll admit I delight in the chance to make jokes about it. I wish I could remember the old ones, the ones we spat out like broken teeth in the days when nobody knew anything, when we were all heartsick and frightened and angry. Maybe the old jokes would be funnier today.
What matters is that they were funny enough then.
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Topics: Human Interests, I Heart LA | 3 Comments »
May 3, 2011 at 12:08 PM
Well said.
I’ve never thought about how my life might have been altered by 9/11. That might be an interesting subject to dwell on for a bit. I will admit that I knew nobody firsthand who passed away, only friends and acquaintances who lost people that day. It’s odd, because it’s such a monumentous event and yet, I almost feel guilty (probably not the right word, I don’t know) in a way because it kind of skipped me while seemingly touching everyone around me.
May 3, 2011 at 1:05 PM
I was there…across the street watching people fall to their death (some which were probably my friends and I couldn’t ID them falling to their death. I even went back the next day to try and help dig people out…I don’t know, I left it there after that day…never went back for years…even when I go by there today I just ignore it and walk right by. I think what Bobby is talking about is survivor guilt…many Jewish people felt it after the Holocaust. Life is queer with its twists and turns…and it will end for all of us in some way, shape and/or form.
May 6, 2011 at 1:20 AM