#12 If You Can Write It, We Can Fuck It Up
(Originally appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine, No. 40, 2002)
(Nota Bene: some of of the information herein, while accurate when written, has not aged well because there have been seismic changes in the industries that define what the essence of television actually is. Cable and then streaming have altered the landscape in ways that are still evolving. So . . . just know that what follows remains at worst a true and honest history of How Things Were.)
Okay, today we pick up a metaphysical remote-control, and we zap it at the construct known as The Television Industry, in the hope of finding a channel which speaks our language.[1] It may prove to be a mythic quest, a mission unattainable, because TV is such a bizarre and alien landscape even to mutants who write books and stories. To the mundane, work-a-days, it must surely be as arcane as a collection of Quechua coins.
But . . . . I can help. I am here to be your personal interlocutor. Through me you shall understand the mysteries of the TV People.
I’ve always wanted to write for TV for one reason—the TV People have incredible amounts of money, and I believe it’s my noblesse oblige to separate them from as much of it as possible—and transfer said separation to me.
But that’s proved to be about as easy as finding a sincere human emotion in a John Waters film or a Danielle Steele novel. In the more than 30 years I’ve been writing, I’ve done very little work in television, with a commensurate lack of shekels carted off from TVLand. Prior to the adventures I’m going to share today, my previous “scores” on the small screen have been meager: back in the very early 80s, I sold a script based on one of my short stories to a would-be producer who had pitched an anthology series[2] to a then-upstart cable channel called “Showtime.” My script was as tight as a pimp’s hatband, the production values impressive, but the acting “talent” was rankly amateurish (despite a cameo by your columnist as a handsome young waiter), and the Showtime execs ran screaming from the screening room. A few years later I sold a half-hour teleplay[3] to the local PBS channel in Maryland, and they did a nice job with it, airing on their own series which featured local playwrights and later getting it on American Playhouse. About 8 years later, I sold a few stories to Tales from the Darkside, but they rewrote my scripts, and only aired one of them, a story that had originally been published here in CD.[4]
Other than that, friends, nada. The Big Z.
Yeah, I know, pretty sad. But there are a few reasons for it, which I should get into before moving into my TV sales of the 21st Century.
1.) You need excellent representation. Meaning: you have to have a TV/Film agent who is The Deal. Such agent must live and work in that arid wasteland we call El-Ay, and he/she must be hard-wired to whomever’s at the controls in all the major studios and offices of the currently-hot producers and show-runners.
(This in itself is a tough order because it’s entirely possible to have a great and powerful literary agent in NYC who knows absolutely NOTHING about selling a script or a “high concept.” treatment—and has no way to get you into the pipeline.) Or worse, to have a wonderful New York literary agent who loathes Hollywood and couldn’t care less about selling them any of your work. Or, thirdly, you have a literary agent who has affiliates in L.A. who are nominally representing your literary “properties” but don’t really try to sell them to anybody on a daily basis—because they don't “know” you and think they’re doing their job when they send out a copy of one of your books to a producer’s assistant who called in for a copy to be read for “coverage.”[5]
As to which of the above three scenarios is really the worst is probably a matter of degree and taste. The results are pretty much the same—you don't sell anything to TV and you don't get to write anything.
2.) If you don’t live and work in Los Angeles, you don’t have much chance of working in TV. For a long time, that sentence was pretty much the S.O.P. mantra on the Left Coast, but there are signs the times they are a-changin’. For one thing, there is more and more stuff being produced in Vancouver because of the budget and union constraints. The other is the invasion of the newest e-technologies which allow people to be “connected” so they can work together anywhere on the globe—to such an extent that the barriers of working on opposite ends of the continent seem more like different sides of the same street.
But it still doesn't hurt to attach a face—yours—to the work being e-mailed and PDF’d and otherwise ethered and sat-zapped around the planet. However, I’ve learned the TV People still respond with more immediacy to “in-yer-face” than “in-ter-face.” There is the ritual mating dance in L.A. called “the pitch,” and the Execs are old school when it comes to pitching them. You have to do it in person. You have to be fast and funny and facile. And you have to be brilliant without letting them know you are infinitely smarter than they are. Giving good pitch is not for everybody. You have to have big balls and you have to be dynamic and you have to have good ideas—but ideas that are not so good they scare the Execs (most of whom are not exactly Mensa candidates)—and you have to be entertaining. Many writers—especially “book writers,” as they say in Hollywood—seem to be introverted, reedy-voiced, and homely. They are about as exciting and inspiring in the flesh as a newel post. (And this does not bode well for succeeding in the pitch.)
Me, I never had that problem. I eat pitches for breakfast.
3.) Take this for what it's worth, but most of the stuff I’ve written is simply too sophisticated for TV. Yeah, yeah, some of you are saying . . . who does this mook think he is? Sour grapes if I ever heard them . . . and all that biz. No, friends, please, another word or two, okay? I know I’m a good writer or I wouldn't have survived this long in the publishing shark tank. I wouldn’t have been able to eke out a living at what's essentially a mug’s game.
So let’s not even go down that winding path where the merits of my writing may be bandied about. My body of work is damned good, and certainly imbued with far more scope and imagination than 95% of the pabulum served up on daily television.[6] When I have been able to “pitch” an idea to TV People, I usually get this creeping realization they don’t really understand what I’m talking about, or that I’ve been far more logical than they ever want to be. They want things to be simple, and I don’t usually write simple.
4.) The problem of originality is a big one. Most TV execs will tell you they want originality in programming. They want something nobody’s ever seen before and they want it from new talent, from writers with fresh ideas.
But that’s basically a shell game. They are scamming you. What they really want is for some Other TV Exec to take a risk at something New! and Original! so they can rip it off when it’s successful. It’s no accident that a piece of shit like Survivor spawned a dozen imitators and variations on the theme. If a smart comedy about lawyers (yeah, I know, lots of oxymorons there . . . ) is a hit, no one should ever ponder why the following television season will feature six more New! Improved! Funny! lawyer sit-coms.
Run away from the flops and imitate the boffos.
That’s the singular strategy in TV. So how do you get past that kind of thinking if you’ve written good stuff? The short answer is: most of the time, you don’t. Even if you have great representation, you will usually get shot down because the TV People will be afraid of any idea that is too fresh or too original and it’s not being pitched to them by a known quantity . . . which brings us to Reason Number
5.) which is: you’re not a member of the Lodge. Like with any other industry, there exists an Inner Circle of writers, producers, and Execs who have track records on TV and have established a certain amount of trust. TV is not cheap, and it’s tough to convince these guys to spend a lot of money on Unknowns. And even when you are one of the regulars, as a writer, let’s say, it remains almost impossible to create your own show or be a producer.[7]
The guys who Get It Done in TV are called Show-Runners. There are maybe 30 or 40 of them in the entire industry who are any good, and probably only half as many who can get a new show on the air with a two-minute phone call. And even for them, this obtains only during that brief time-window while their current show is cauterizing the ratings at the top of the charts.
I have no illusions of ever becoming a show-runner anytime soon. Besides, I don't really want to be a freeway cliché with my very own red Porsche, micro cell-phone, and blonde passenger-seat-warmer. Honest, I don't. What I would much prefer is to “partner” with one of these types, which essentially means you wheel the guy with a concept so good, he puts it on the air after penciling himself in as a “co-creator” with you. He can’t lose with this arrangement. If the show is a hit, his status as Genius-in-Residence continues and you are perceived as a coat-tail jockey; if the show tanks, he can get out of Dodge clean by saying he was doing you a favor by being the show’s “Rabbi.” He’s still a prince among men, and you slink out of Studio City with the rancid aroma of failure clinging to your clothes.
Yeah, some partner . . .
But that is just one scenario, albeit a familiar one.
Here’s another one:
About 25 years ago, Charlie Grant and I were both represented by an agent named Kirby McCauley, a decent and earnest guy out of Minneapolis, who came to NYC and did exceedingly well for himself. At one point, he hooked us up with a young woman who was establishing herself as a TV agent. She liked the work Chaz and I were doing and believed she could sell us to the Television People. She succeeded in getting us pitch-meetings with various Execs (who at the time still had some offices in New York),[8] and she helped us learn how the industry works, but she never sold any of out projects—which included ideas for MOWs (Movies of the Week), mini-series, and regular weekly shows.
One of the shows Charlie and I created was an hour drama called Raven’s Crossing, which was kind of a sex-power-money evening soap opera with a mystery/dark fantasy overlay. I won't go into the details of the concept or the main characters now—let me save it for later (and you will see why). But trust me when I tell you Raven’s Crossing was good stuff, high concept, and blisteringly original—none of the tired, familiar vapidity you see on TV all the time. No ghosts, no vampires, no zombies, no bullshit.
Onward: the show got some decent looks from the Execs here and there, and then got thumbed down by everybody (who, back in the mid-Seventies, consisted of three networks and a few independents . . . nothing like today, of course.) What happened next was that Charlie and I went on to other book projects, our TV agent eventually disappeared from the scene, and Raven’s Crossing went into the back of one of my file drawers—
—where it languished for twenty-five years with not much thought ever given to it. During the intervening time, I had come to be represented by the William Morris Agency, a venerable and well-respected bunch who had a powerful literary division along with a truly legendary reputation as a colossus astride the harbor of Film & TV Land. They were doing a nice job with my books as far as getting coverage, options, etc. And one day, while chatting with my then-television agent, he mentioned there was a lot of talk among the TV People for “something fresh” in the supernatural genre. He knew I had lots of original ideas in that general area, and thought he would ask me if I could give him something to show.
I told him I not only had an idea, but I had an entire Concept Package he might like, and it was called Raven’s Crossing. So I went to the file cabinet and yanked out the proposal, which was bigger and more impressive than even I had remembered. It was almost 90 pages of incredible stuff—not only did it have the Set-Up, or Concept, of the show; but there was also a detailed audience analysis; a show “bible” which consisted of highly detailed biographies of all the characters (more than 20) and their relationships to one another, plot lines which were developed and extrapolated over several seasons, a complete list of shooting locations, and even a full, scene-by-scene treatment of the script for the pilot episode.
But there were problems with it.
Remember, it was around 25 years old. A lot of the references to then-current programming mentioned shows off the air for so long I didn't even remember them. More than a few of the actors we had suggested to play specific characters were dead. And most important of all, the entire package had been created on this instrument called a “typewriter”—which meant it existed in a single, unalterable state on paper crispy, yellow, and edge-curled. It looked like it had been exhumed from a tomb.
I had to scan it all into my computer, spell-check and correct it, find all the now-embarrassing temporal and cultural references, then update everything and print it out with some nice looking fonts. This took some time but Charlie and I decided it was worth it. Once it was jacketed up in modern attire, we sent it off to the William Morris Agency.
When my TV agent had a look at it, he called me all full of excitement. “This is incredible,” he said. “Nobody bothers to put this much thought and detail into a proposal anymore . . . this is great stuff!”
Chaz and I were pleased that our ideas possessed a certain timelessness, if you will, and oh, did I mention I neglected to tell my agent it was only 25 years new?
But I digress . . . .
He shopped it around, and word was it created quite a few very favorable reactions among producers and studios. The only problem was nobody knew who these guys Grant and Monteleone might be . . . and the Execs all needed somebody familiar “attached”[9] to it.
Like who? says I.
Like a Show-runner, says my agent. Of course, he’s going to want to get a piece for himself . . .
Of course, I agree, because I have learned a long time ago that in L.A., if you present the Execs with something they like, they will want to make like those cheesy, barometric, glass weather-birds that swing down into a bowl of water—they will want to “dip their beaks” as my grandfather used to say.
So how does this happen, you might ask.
Like this: The Morris Agency reps all kinds of talent—actors, directors, writers, producers, and aha!, show-runners. In the best of all possible worlds, an agent at a house like WMA will try to get its own actors, directors and show-runners all attached to the same project. More commissions on the same show—a nice deal if you can swing it. So when you have a hot property, you “in-house” it first, and get it into the hands of the right people, all of whom, by good fortune, are repped by your agency—in this case, WMA.
So long story short: a very successful show-runner (who currently had three shows on the air) agreed to dip his beak in Raven’s Crossing, and he made things happen in a hurry. He cut a deal with Columbia-TriStar to be the producers of the series and they geared up to find a network and a time-slot. A ton of paper-work was soon generated by TriStar for Charlie and I to sign, and we were getting calls from the TriStar’s contracts flunkies asking us very weird questions about our screen credits—Do you want to be Executive Producers or Creative Consultants? Do want “Written by” or “Created by”? Do you want your credit at beginning of the show? Or at the end? Do you want it before the Producer or after? Do want it with fries? Hey, how ‘bout some cheese on it?
Yeah, very odd indeed. But I soon learned that the answers to those questions would have very specific outcomes when it came to carving up the vast amounts of money that could be made. I deferred and deflected most of the queries to my agent, who quickly schooled me on what was going on. I won't bore you with the details, but just remember your Padrone’s warnings if you ever sell anything to the TV People.
It was getting pretty crazy, and Charlie and I cashed some very nice checks from Columbia-TriStar for the option and the pick-up, and that was just the beginning. There were future paydays based on our screen credits (see, I told you it was important . . . ), on the number of episodes shot in the first season, based on scripts we might write, renewals, residuals, and even that back-up-the-money-truck-right-here dream of SYNDICATION.
In fact, things had heated up so much in TVLand that our show, my agent said, had created a “buzz” on the street, and lots of people in the know were talking about a hot, new hour-series with a wildly original premise. The buzz became so intense, in fact, that CBS launched a pre-emptive strike and called my agent with a Deal. They wanted Raven’s Crossing, and as a special bonus, they would throw in two of their favorite CBS Movie of the Week writers to do the pilot.[10] It was contingent on my agency, TriStar and our show-runner NOT shopping it to the rest of the network and cable venues. If we did that, the Deal was a deader.
My agent wasn't sure if this was a great idea or not, but he told us that since this was our first major foray into the money vaults of the TV People, we should take the deal in our hands instead of a possible future set-up somewhere else. Columbia TriStar was a only a little less cautious and said okay, but reserved the right to “un-attach” itself if they didn't like what CBS came up with in the pilot. Now this was not a bad position to take—TriStar was putting up the cash, and they didn't want to fund a stinker.
What happened next is that CBS pays its favorite writing team to write the pilot. They did, and they managed to turn our concept into something barely recognizable. While we had sold TriStar and the show-runner on a series edgy and mysterious and full of dark secrets that may or may not get unraveled by strange and unpredictable characters, these two industry hacks (who had made extremely good livings writing plot-by-the-numbers, Movie of the Week tripe-fests) delivered a script that made Murder She Wrote look like Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Friends, it was an execrable and turgid piece shit. A howler. A stiff of the First Order.
My agent hated it. The show-runner hated it. Columbia-TriStar hated it. Even the reprehensible green-lighters at CBS hated it.
And suddenly, everything started to fall apart. TriStar exercised their contingency and backed out until we came up with a suitable pilot (which meant, to them, some geologic era after Never . . . ). CBS went as dark a dwarf star, and our show-runner was suddenly busy developing another show about — hey, here’s a High Concept! — lawyers. My agent said everybody heard the pilot was a hideous miscarriage of the written word, and that allowed them to make the erroneous, conclusionary leap—the series itself was a stink-bomb as well. Raven’s Crossing was dead as fast as it had been shocked into life after a quarter-century of interment.
End of story.
Well just about. There are a few interesting codae to this tale.
(1) the buzz our series had created had inspired the Execs at ABC to egregiously rip-off our title (since, as my agent said he heard them say, we wouldn’t be using it . . . ) and apply it to their new medical (add more High Concept here . . . ) drama, Gideon’s Crossing.[11]
(2) and far more outrageous was the wholesale mutilation of our concept by CBS, who fell all over themselves to get their “supernatural” series on the air that Fall called Wolf Lake. Let’s see how they did that . . .
Raven’s Crossing was set in a small town in New England.
Wolf Lake was set in a small town in the Pacific Northwest.
RC featured three prominent families who basically ran the town.
WL featured three prominent families who basically ran the town.
The three families in RC are immortal; they are Druid Sorcerers who continue their immortality by possessing the younger bodies of their children. They have been doing this for hundred of generations.
Now CBS had a problem here: they couldn’t just rip us and gut us and dress so thoroughly with the Sorcerer-thing, so some producer pinhead came-up with a brilliant replacement, a wildly original concept—let’s make them werewolves!
Yeah, Chaz and I give them something they’ve never seen before and they counter with another tired cliché. Great move, guys.
One of the major plot-engines in RC involved a kind of eugenics program in which the three sorcerers were trying breed/create a fourth immortal who could exercise his/her powers outside the geological limits of the town of Raven’s Crossing (located at an intersection of ley-lines, thus making it a kind feng-shui power-center or some such mystical stuff). Of course, the latest offspring of this breeding experiment gets wise, and escapes, which kicks one of subplots into gear: find the renegade mutant. Which gives you location shooting just about anywhere.
WL stole the idea too, but of course, Got It Wrong. They have everybody else looking for werewolves and they all come into the restrictive confines of a town where gee, honey, how come all these folks have pointy ears and like to howl at the moon? Brighter than a thousand suns, these producers, yes?
There were more examples of CBS’s shameless theft of our concept, but I think I’ve hammered enough of it out here—flatter than a cheap sheet of tin. Let's just put a bullet in its brain with the satisfaction that Wolf Lake quickly exposed itself for the squawking turkey that it was—lasting only four wretched episodes and thus establishing a new low for the corpus of work which defines Lou Diamond Phillips.
A heinous tale, I know. But it needed be told, my friends. If I can save just one of you from the horrors I endured, then I’ve done my job. But wait! Don't say yes . . . there’s more!
That’s right. My tale of TV Terror has yet another chapter . . . that must wait for a future Substack. Till then, I wish you great reading and someone to love you. Two of life’s good things.
In closing: if you have any friends, enemies, or relatives that might dig what I’m doing here, please give me a rec. Grazie millie!
[1]That being the one of intelligence, erudition, and style.
[2]It was called Darksides, which is not to be confused with George (Night of the Living Dead) Romero’s Laurel Productions series Tales from the Darkside. The story was called “Spare the Child.”
[3]Entitled “Mister Magister,” the script eventually won a Bronze Award (third place, in case you are somewhat opaque) at the New York International Film Festival and the Gabriel Award (which I never received and have no idea what it is . . . I got a letter in the mail telling me I won, and that was IT.).
[4]”The Cutty Black Sow” for those of you who care, and my eventual biographer, whomever you might be . . .
[5]Hollywood-ese for a synopsis of the book’s plot in terms of how it fits into classic 3-Act screenplay format.
[6]I have this digital cable system with 200 channels and there are many nights when Elizabeth and I will finally settle in for some acerebric entertainment and there is STILL nothing worth watching. Good things we have bookshelves long and deep . . ..
[7]I have a friend of more than 20 years, author of many fine novels and science books, who has been a very successful television writer—working on a ton of successful and unsuccessful shows for most of the time I’ve known him, and he has been almost totally stonewalled out of the producer/creator side of the business. He has great ideas for new programming, and they just don't get a shot.
[8]As far as I can figure these days, all TV programming decisions are now made entirely in L. A. I have no idea what’s going on in the NYC offices.
[9]yeah, that’s the word they use a lot. Somebody or some entity gets “attached” to your property—kinda like a piece of stray toilet paper that gets stuck to the bottom of your shoe when you’re exiting one of the stalls.
[10]This was at a time when CBS was bottom feeding in the Ratings tank and had a reputation as the fuddy-duddy network, carrying many shows with appeal only to the old cockers.
[11]The series only lasted one season. I never saw it, but I heard it was mediocre. Fuck’em. They got what they deserved.