Once, during a long, hot-tempered pilot-production week—making the sample episode for a series I hoped would be picked up by the network that had paid for it and put it on the fall schedule—I was hanging out backstage, waiting for the fresh cookies to appear on the craft-services table, when I overheard one of the set decorators ask the director of photography if a certain set decoration looked right.
“Who cares?” the DP shrugged. “This thing is never going to see the light of day.” And then they both chuckled in a distinctly show-business way, the kind that says, This thing is a real stinker, but I’m getting paid anyway.
At which point, they both suddenly saw that I wasn’t back in my office where I usually was, getting script notes from the network, which I usually did, but I was instead just a few steps away. The writer and executive producer of the stinker, they realized, had overheard the whole thing.
It was awkward—worse, I think, for me—because I sort of saw the DP’s point. The week had been rocky going, we’d made some midweek casting changes, the script hadn’t gelled yet, no one seemed happy. In many ways, it was a typical pilot-production week. But we had only three days left to get it right. This thing, I silently agreed, was probably never going to see the light of day.
It turns out we were both wrong. Somehow, we managed to pull the show together in the following three days, and the pilot shoot went well. There were smiles all around the soundstage, and as we were all enjoying a post-show drink, the DP came up to me and said, “Great show!” Part of him, I know, was saying, Please don’t fire me if this thing goes just because I said that thing when you were waiting for your cookies, but a bigger part of him was just saying, Great show, and that carried a lot of weight.
Still, his original comment rattled me because it revealed the complicated relationship between those of us who write or direct or produce or act—we call these jobs above the line because that’s where they appear on a production budget—and the people who do the real work in Hollywood—the lighting and the building and the sound and all of the stuff that keeps the production moving along. We call those jobs below the line, and yes, there is an actual line in the production budget that divides these two cost centers. There are fewer names above the line, but they often add up to a lot more money than all the below the line costs combined. But what the below-the-line crew thinks about a project matters a lot.
For most of us, the production crew is about as close as we get to real people—people, that is, who don’t live in the fancy parts of town. They have long commutes to the studio from faraway places like Diamond Bar and Thousand Oaks. They often drive pick-up trucks unironically. They vote differently, for the most part, from the way the above-the-line crowd does. They represent the mysterious, unknowable audience out there. When we overhear them at the craft-services table, it’s always a little unsettling. Below the line is a lot closer to the ground.
When the DP tells the set decorator that “this thing will never see the light of day,” well, it’s something you think about and carry with you all week. Who cares what network execs think of it? They’re always wrong. They live in a haze of self-delusion, a world of pointless meetings and pompous bosses and ludicrous market research. Studio executives are above-the-line kind of people. They have an enormous financial incentive to sing themselves to sleep with sweet lullabies about how great their shows are and how successful they’re going to be. But the crew sees a lot of shows and a lot of productions. They go from gig to gig. They don’t get paid to like the show. They get paid to light it.
In the end, the DP was only half wrong. The show did see the light of day, but not many days after that. It was cancelled after one season.
And that taught me another lesson about self-delusion. That show was my first, and it was a comedy about five friends who lived in New York City, and the most memorable thing about it was that it wasn’t the international monster-hit Friends, which had premiered that same season.
To my lingering shame, just because Friends was a hit and my show was not, it was impossible for me to see Friends clearly, without being curdled by jealousy. I watched its first year of episodes with a permanent sneer on my face, refusing to see what was funny and charming and appealing about a show that everyone else was raving about.
The truth—as we and 1 billion other television viewers know—is that Friends was a delightfully funny and smart show, written by talented and creative writers, and acted by brilliantly inventive actors. It was a giant success, and it deserved to be. And I was just being a petty, jealous pain in the ass.
“This is interesting to you?” I’d ask my friends, incredulously. “You don’t find it derivative and boring?” I’d ask anyone who’d listen. “How can people choose this?” And: “What’s wrong with them?”
What’s wrong with them?
This is what everyone in Hollywood asks, petulantly, when audiences turn to someone else’s film or television show, when the great mob of unpersuadable people chooses to make someone else rich and successful. For every Oscar that’s handed out—or, more usually, every multi-million-dollar studio deal signed—there are dozens of people sneering and caviling on the sidelines, angry and peevish that they were left out of the goodies.
That’s normal human behavior of course. When people lose something—a TV show, an audience, market share, an election—the first thing they ask themselves is, Did I lose it or was it stolen? And everyone wants it to be stolen because then it’s someone else’s fault.
But if you’re having a hard year in the entertainment business, or if you’re a loser in the marketplace or the polling place, as tempting as it is to think that it’s all unfair, it’s all a mistake, you were robbed, the audience was duped or maybe just plain stupid, try to remember that it’s none of those. It’s much simpler. There was a better show on the air. And the DP and the set decorator knew it way before you did.
Years later, I was visiting a writer friend of mine who had a show on the air. And as I wandered over to the craft-services table—you’re beginning to see why I’m on Mounjaro, aren’t you?—I bumped into that same DP from years before. We reminisced a bit, and then, because I knew that I would get a truthful answer, I asked, “How is this show doing?”
“This show is great,” he said. “Really. Probably the best show I’ve ever worked on.”
I laughed—because I thought he was kidding—and said something like, “You mean it’s one of the best shows you’ve worked on, right?”
And he said in a cheerful, honest, perfectly friendly voice, “No, I think it’s better than the shows you’ve done.”
Which is something he could have kept to himself. But that’s the problem with people who do honest work. They’re honest.
Photo: iStock / Getty Images Plus
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