Horizontal Hold: The Making and Breaking of a Network Television Pilot

By Daniel Paisner

Absurdly funny, trenchant, and provocative, this outside-looking-in account of the stillbirth of one particular television series is a must read for every serious and not-so-serious television viewer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504030656

Daniel Paisner

Daniel Paisner is a New York Times best-selling author who has written numerous books.

Book preview

One

IDEA

No one wants credit for this one.

The idea, simply, is this: presidential speechwriters. That is all there is to this series, at first. The rest follows naturally, and soon after. The setting, of course, is Washington, D.C. Specifically, the setting is the old Executive Office Building (or E.O.B.), which sits on the White House grounds at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. More specifically, it is the office of the speechwriters for the president of the United States.

The premise, also simply: A young, green Middle American kid—a novelist, perhaps—is tapped by the president to join his group of passionate, articulate, harried, hurried, and somewhat jaded speech-writers, reporting to a presidentially appointed and stuffed-shirted politocrat and working out of a run-down office managed by a lifetime civil servant with a barbed tongue and a ground-floor view of government doings. It will be a smart, occasionally political, adult situation comedy, written for people who read newspapers. It will be on the air forever: The Dick Van Dyke Show Goes to Washington, sort of.

John Tinker, the thirty-one-year-old child of television (and, not coincidentally, of television producer and executive Grant Tinker), is the one to whom credit for this series idea is most often given; he accepts it, reluctantly; he allows, also reluctantly, that if the idea for this still-unnamed show came to him at all it did so on its own, without any help from him. It happens that way sometimes.

I honest to God don’t remember who had the idea first, he says in talking about his latest germ for a situation comedy; it is fall 1989, and he is thinking ahead to the 1990–91 network television season. This is something he does a lot of these days. I really don’t remember, he continues, but it might have been me. It doesn’t matter. All of us, we’re always thinking of venues where we can set a show. At least I’m always thinking that way, all the time, and I’m always thinking about places that are understaffed, where people are overworked and underpaid. I’m always looking for a place to put a show.

One of the reasons Tinker is credited with the initial spark for this speechwriters idea is because he has a friend, Ed McNally, who works as a speechwriter for President George Bush. This coincidental friendship, Tinker guesses, was probably his inspiration, conscious or otherwise. After the idea had been shuttled between New York and Washington and after polling some of his speechwriter-colleagues, McNally wrote a memo to his television-producer friend suggesting possible titles for this possible show: Typewriter One (as in Air Force One, or Marine One), Writers Block (as in the block of rooms along the speechwriters’ hallway in the E.O.B.), West Exec (as in West Executive Avenue, the street on the White House grounds that separates the E.O.B. from the west wing), Gone to Cards (as in, the speech has been put on cue cards, or gone to cards), and Public Affairs (as in, the Office of Public Affairs, a branch of the White House Office of Communications). One of Tinker’s favorite titles is No Known Ranking, which McNally reports is how the current crop of speechwriters was recently described in a Washington Post article.

In network television, an idea for a series is only as good as its title. If you do not know what to call it, you do not know what you have. John Tinker still does not know what he has, but he is working on it. The idea, fleshed, suggests rich and endless fodder for intelligent, provocative situation comedy, peopled by likable, opinionated, and ethical characters. Even reduced to its high concept—presidential speechwriters—there is enough to get Tinker and his partners going.

Tinker is joined in his efforts and his enthusiasm by Tom Fontana, a thirty-eight-year-old would-rather-be playwright, and Bruce Paltrow, forty-six, a veteran television producer, writer, and director. Together, these three men represent one-half of the creative team behind NBC’s long-running hospital drama St. Elsewhere, one of the most critically acclaimed programs in television history. They are themselves smart adults who read newspapers. As the Paltrow Group, based in their raw, no-frills New York offices overlooking the Hudson River, they are trying to make television shows that they themselves might want to watch. And—harder, still—they are trying to make them in New York.

"We’re not always going to do St. Elsewhere, Tinker explains. This show will be a little different. Its hard to say the White House is a second-rate institution with first-rate people. It’s not like WKRP in Cincinnati, which was about a second-rate radio station with first-rate people. It’s not Korea. It’s not a tiny little news station in Minneapolis or a crappy little jail."

It’s a great setting, says Fontana, who instantly warmed to the speechwriters idea. "You can do the presidency and national and international issues. The reason a show like M*A*S*H was so funny was because what they were doing was important and it was serious. You don’t find that in most comedy shows. When people can be funny in a bad situation, or in a serious situation, that’s wonderful. That’s funny. When people are funny and they work in a pizza parlor, I think, well, who the fuck cares? Then it’s just jokes about dough and stuff."

For Paltrow, the presidential premise promises great and lasting things. You look at the great television shows, he says, "the classic shows, and all of them are about a group of people, good people, a few of them or a lot of them, who band together to do the best they can in an honorable way, to do well against overwhelming odds. The Honeymooners, Taxi, the doctors at the shitty hospital in Boston. The shitty Hill Street station. They’re all about people who have less and want more. This seems a natural."

This, for now, will be called E.O.B., named for the Executive Office Building that will provide its setting. (The title, incidentally, is at the top of McNally’s short list; it is also at the top of everyone else’s.) It will also be one of the half-dozen or so series ideas the Paltrow Group will seek to put on the air during the next television season. This season’s development strategy seems to be to try everything and hope for one thing. Last season’s seemed to be to try for one thing and put everything into it. The Paltrow Group’s sole entry in last season’s prime-time sweepstakes, the hour-long comedy/drama Tattinger’s, debuted on NBC with considerable fanfare but fizzled after only a few episodes. The company, backed by MTM Studios, lost a good deal of money on the project. Expecting a long run, they converted warehouse space on New York’s Pier 62 into a full-fledged film production studio. They also lost a great deal of momentum, following hard on their St. Elsewhere success. And, most significantly, they lost MTM in the fallout. The relationship between the two companies soured and severed, leaving the Paltrow Group without studio backing, at least for the moment.

On of the lessons learned seems to be that if you keep as many balls in the air at one time as you possibly can, you might be able to keep at least one of them from hitting the floor. And so, this time out, the balls in the air include:

High, an hour-long high school drama set in the fictional New Jersey town of Hackneyville, a New York City suburb. The high school of the title, according to the show’s working legend, was once named to honor the explorer Henry Hudson and later renamed to honor the late founder of McDonald’s, Ray Kroc. No one knows why. The school newspaper is called the Pluvianus, named for the plover-like bird (Pluvianus aegypticus) that is fond of sitting on the backs of crocodiles. The pilot script, as it is being written, features a hip, young ensemble cast, given to hip, young arcana and adolescent extremes.

Modern Marriage, a half-hour domestic sitcom that seems to borrow from Family Ties, Married … With Children, and Father Knows Best, in strangely equal measure. Dad, Mom, and the two teenage kids are loosely based on Bruce Paltrow and his own family. So says nearly everyone in the Paltrow Group offices, except Bruce Paltrow. Dad wears a ponytail; Mom recycles; Junior wants to race at the Indy 500; Sis wants to sleep with her boyfriend under her parents’ roof; they are all in therapy.

A period drama, 1761, set, neatly, in 1761. A kind of play on manners, it is about an American boy sent to live with relatives in London, where he is expected to learn to become a gentleman. Prospects for this show appear hobbled by the unavoidably steep production costs for a period piece such as this, although interest in the chance to explore the mores and manners of eighteenth-century England continues to run high.

Black Tie Affair, a half-hour comedy about a Trump-like tycoon, and his wife, and his lover, and his wife’s lover, and his wife’s lover’s lover.

An untitled hour-long international espionage drama about two brothers who find themselves, and their families, in a tangle of global intrigue and deception. The idea, in-house, is known alternatingly as The European Show and The Expensive Show, this last probably foretelling why it may never get made.

And, in its nascent stages, New Year, an hour-long serial set sometime in the near future, in New York, in and around the high-stakes pharmaceutical-industry. No one can remember the last time they watched a really good pharmaceutical industry drama. The lead character, Danny Hartman, a fifty-something CEO and board chairman, keeps a charred Fender Stratocaster guitar in a glass coffee table in his power office; he’s got a kid named Jimi; he works out his frustrations at the virtual-reality-based A-Mazing Center Playing Area, an intra-active video-game center. He has something to hide, and to run from.

Paltrow, Tinker, and Fontana are really, really, excited about all of these shows—their babies. This is a good thing, but it is also to be expected. Series television producers become really, really, excited when these things happen, in confluence: An idea emerges that is simple, viable, and malleable (it helps if it is also new, or at least improved); characters spring, fully realized, from the imagined setting, as if they actually exist; story lines and plot twists unravel without effort; real-world events begin to mirror, shadow, or foretell their pretend ones; the entire enterprise generates a rhythm and energy all its own; casting possibilities, scheduling possibilities, and possible Emmy acceptance speeches begin to infect nearly every waking moment. When only one or two of these things happen, television producers are just plain excited. And when there is nothing to get excited about, they keep looking, or they move on to the next thing.

The idea behind E.O.B. has been lent serendipitous steam by a soon-to-be-published, sure-to-be-best-selling book called What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era, by former presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Noonan wrote President Ronald Reagan’s famous speech delivered on the night of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster. She also wrote the kinder and gentler nation and thousand points of light speeches for then-presidential-candidate George Bush. She also wrote this book, an affectionately acerbic account of a speechwriter’s lot in the age of spin control. The book was excerpted in a New York Times Magazine cover story on October 15 and has since generated a good deal of media heat, from Washington to Hollywood.

No one at the Paltrow Group has read Noonan’s book (or no one admits to it), and none plan to, at least not until after they shoot the E.O.B. pilot. It is far from certain they will ever get to shoot the E.O.B. pilot, but these are their plans. Still, they are all aware of the book and its author. These subjects are unavoidable. They come up every time someone hears the idea for the show.

Ah, the someones will say. Speechwriters? You mean like Peggy Noonan?

Well … um … er … yes. And no.

Oh.

To the Paltrow Group, Peggy Noonan and her book must appear as assets and liabilities, both. They are assets because, as a kind of cognoscente flavor of the month, they will help to push the hot buttons of the television community; they are liabilities because they leave the project smelling familiar, derivative, tired. Also, they present the very real possibility that E.O.B. will be beaten to the small screen by a made-for-television movie based on the book; worst of all is the unspoken fear that once Noonan and her speechwriter-colleagues are out there, and talked about, this natural, simple idea for a sitcom might occur to someone else. The possibility of this last is almost too horrifying to consider.

For now, though, E.O.B. is a high concept worth pursuing. Aggressively. And so, in pursuit, Paltrow, Tinker, and Fontana spend a generous amount of time thinking about politics, consulting texts on the various branches of government, scanning the newspapers for salient, speechworthy topics, visiting Washington and studying its ways and means, and creating the characters on whose shoulders their premise will live or die.

This green kid, from the Midwest, the one who may or may not be a novelist, he should be naive and idealistic, someone suggests. But it’s not his show. It’s not Mary Tyler Moore. It’s not about him, it’s about this place. It’s an ensemble show. It’s about what these people do, and who they are, and how they are together.

This civil servant, the office secretary, she should be a kind of fulcrum, a locus, Yeah, she knows everything that’s going on in the whole town. Everyone can interact around her. And this chief of communications, the appointee, he should be the authority figure, the voice of unreason. And what about the president? Should he be introduced as a character? Or should he just be heard, through the speeches? Yes, yes, that’s it. Keep him off-camera. Just the voice. Maybe make him a Bush soundalike? or a Reagan soundalike? or, better, just presidential-seeming? Yeah, great. And the other speech-writers, what about them?

They’re making it up as they go along.

Two

BACK-STORIES, REAL

Bruce Paltrow, co-executive producer of E.O.B., loves making television shows. It is what he does. He has made some very good ones and some not so good ones. He has made some that have never been seen, and developed others that have never been made. Right now, he is trying to make some good ones in New York, three thousand miles away from his industry’s core. He likes his chances, even if the edge is against him.

It’s a little harder here, he admits one afternoon in his Pier 62 production office. He is wearing blue jeans, a turtleneck shirt, and a ponytail. He looks like New York trying to do business with California. We’re a parts manufacturer, away from the GM plants. Everything’s just a little off. We miss out on a lot of the fallout, a lot of accidental stuff that you could take care of out there, socially, easily. Gaps get created where there shouldn’t be gaps, or there are communications problems. It’s just a little harder.

There is some David Brenner to Bruce Paltrow, in voice and manner. He even looks like the Philadelphia comedian, in the face, a little bit, particularly when he smiles. He does this often. Also, he likes to move around a lot when he talks. He fidgets, pantomimes, paces. He sound-effects his speech with relevant exclamations: Boom! Bravo! Bam! Bang! He appears, on first and subsequent meetings, to be a bundle of various energies. He does not sit still. His sneakered feet are at first kicked casually onto a coffee table, then folded under him, then flitting about the room. There is so much going on—in his office, in his life—he has to keep moving to keep up with it.

There is a lot going on in Paltrow’s head, too. He talks fast, but not fast enough. He solves problems before they have a chance to arise. He answers his own questions before they occur to him. Jokes alight on his face before he can tell them; sometimes he doesn’t seem to bother; it is enough that he thought of them. Sometimes, when he is racing to keep up with his thoughts, he appears to be willing the right words directly from his brain and out into the room. Come on, come on, come on. He seems to want to think of something and then have it be known.

Paltrow has been working in television for nearly twenty-five years. He has been successful for about the last seventeen. Somewhere in there he was even ridiculously successful, as he hopes to be again. It was not easy for Paltrow, getting started. He sort of backwarded himself into the business. He studied fine arts in school, but it slowly dawned on him he did not have the talent to be a fine artist, so he hit on the idea of becoming an art director. For television. He had always been fascinated by the entertainment industry. He watched a lot of television as a kid, growing up in Great Neck, New York, on the north shore of Long Island. He had a good eye. He figured he could get a job as a set decorator, or a scenic designer, without too much trouble. He figured wrong. He had no contacts, no prospects. Not only could he not get a job; he could not get into the guilds. He could not even get anyone to talk to him.

Finally, in January 1966, he landed an entry-level gofer position at Screen Gems, in New York. Screen Gems was then the television branch of Columbia Pictures. I was a lackey, he recalls, a carrier. I took home like sixty-five dollars a week. I was just kind of around, trying to learn the business, trying to get some direction. I wasn’t very happy. It was a job, but I wasn’t very happy.

At the time, Screen Gems was cranking out small-screen fare like Love on a Rooftop, Bewitched, Gidget, and The Monkees. For the most part, Screen Gems was not about quality television as much as it was about quantity television. Most of the company’s shows were produced in Los Angeles, but the scripts and the rough cuts of each episode regularly flowed through its New York offices. Paltrow, bored and hungry for an inside track, developed sticky fingers. He started to read every script and interoffice memo he could get his hands on. He watched everything. He found ways to attend meetings or to listen in. The assorted eavesdroppings told him something about how the business worked and how it did not. From the left-about phone messages, he tried to learn who was calling the office and what they were calling about. He monitored the evolution of each script as it passed from draft to rehearsal to shooting form. He was trying to soak up as much as he could, to gain whatever advantage he could, as quickly as he could.

As I started to read these scripts, I realized how awful they were, he says. They were really and truly terrible. I mean, why would anybody write this stuff? It was just terrible. And I thought, I could do that. That’s exactly what I said. I could write these terrible scripts. And it was true. Anybody could do this.

To do this, Paltrow actually sat down with a ruler and measured the margins on each script. He learned to center the dialogue on the page. He learned to put the stage directions in parentheses and the character names in capital letters. He literally copied the format. That was all he needed to know. The actual scripts were so bad, he thought all he had to do was get his efforts to look professional and he would be in business. Once he got the grid down, he felt sure the rest would come. And then he sat down and started writing.

He made a conscious (although not entirely practical) decision not to write for up-and-running Screen Gems shows; instead, he started with blank pages. He had lots of ideas for series and for movies, and he wanted to put them down on paper as fast as he thought of them. Let these other hacks write for Gidget, he figured I’ve got my own stuff to do. And that’s what he did. Trouble was, Paltrow could not get anyone at Screen Gems to consider his stuff. They would not even look at it to offer advice or an opinion. He knew his margins were correct, but he was unsure about what he was putting between them. He also knew he did not need any talent to succeed in this business, at least not judging from the Screen Gems productions that passed through New York, but he thought some small measure of it might one day come in handy.

Eventually, Paltrow grew so frustrated in his going-nowhere job that he quit. He had nothing else lined up, but he knew he could not get anywhere from where he was. Unemployment was not much worse than sixty-five dollars a week, he reasoned. By this time, he had found a writing partner, and the two of them had an idea for a screenplay. He also had a play he wanted to write, on his own. He started to do research for his play. He and his partner tried to sell their screenplay. No one was interested. Paltrow spent most of his days writing, or standing on line for his unemployment check, or researching his play, or kicking around some ideas, or looking for another, more creative job in television.

When I was a kid, I didn’t know that these were jobs you could have, he recalls of this stalled period, trying to find a place for himself in the entertainment business. Once I found out these were jobs you could have, I wanted them, I really, really, wanted them, but nobody would hire me. He wanted to stay in New York, but he began to realize that most of the jobs he was looking for were in Los Angeles.

During this career downtime, Paltrow met and married Blythe Danner, the actress. She was his first big break, and she supported him while he tried to catch a second. I had no career, he allows, I had no money. I was dying. My wife was the queen of New York. She burst onto Broadway. He punctuates himself with applause, yells Bravo!, and then continues: She won a Tony Award. She was offered everything. She never wanted to go to California, but finally I just said to her, ‘Look, I can’t make it in New York. There is no television here. I have no shot here. We’ve got to go to California.’ She said okay, but she wanted to come back. She made me promise we’d come back. And I did. There was no timetable, it was just, when we can come back, we will come back.

Once in Los Angeles, Paltrow hit pay dirt, or at least exploitable soil. He sold a screenplay to the independent movie producers Tony Bill and Julia Phillips. Phillips had gone to high school with Paltrow, in Great Neck, and she liked what he had done with an idea about six young professional men who settle their considerable differences on a basketball court, in a regular game at the Y. She and Bill optioned Paltrow’s Shirts/Skins for one thousand dollars and then offered Paltrow another thousand to rewrite it. It was not a lot of money—two thousand dollars for two years’ work—but it was a lot more than he had been making, and Paltrow jumped into the rewriting with eagerness, and hope. Unfortunately, one of the other projects on the Bill-Phillips plate was a period shyster piece called The Sting, which at this point was just a notion, but by the time Paltrow wrapped his revisions it was a full-fledged star vehicle for Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It would soon consume all of the producers’ time, money, and enthusiasm, and the option on Shirts/Skins was allowed to lapse.

Paltrow was back where he started. The rights to the movie reverted to him. This turned out not to be a bad thing. In Hollywood, Paltrow was soon to learn, there is nothing like a project in turnaround; if it was good enough for someone once, then it would be good enough for someone else again. And soon. M-G-M expressed sudden interest in Shirts/Skins on the rebound. The only hitch was they wanted Paltrow to cut the script down for television. It was too long, they felt, the language too strong. They offered him four thousand dollars to make the cuts.

That was just to cut it, he says, smiling at the easy-money memory. It took me four days. Out, out, get it out. He pantomimes flipping through imagined pages, discarding. "So I made in four days