Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (29 page)

Our agent, Bob Broder, played the customer in the last scene. Bob wanted
Cheers
to go on with a revised cast. When no one went along with this idea, he became quite despondent and was required to go through a metal detector whenever he came on the lot. [Laughs] So his being turned away at the door in the last scene could be an apt metaphor for thwarted greed and ambition.

Is it true that the then president, Bill Clinton, was going to make an appearance on the final episode?

Yes, and we wrote a whole segment for him. This character, the president, would have learned that the bar was going to close, and he was going to stop by for one last drink. One of the customers would give him advice on how to run the country. We actually cleared the script with his people. But Clinton canceled at the last minute. He was meeting with [Soviet Union president, Boris] Yeltsin in Vancouver for a summit.

That lame excuse.

I wasn’t happy with the whole scenario. We stopped being
Cheers
, and we started to be a “thing.” It started to become, “This has got to be sensational. Let’s bring Diane back. Let’s bring the president on. What about the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions dancing in the bar?” I would like to have that final episode back. We were serving other masters.

We had an episode of
Cheers
that aired just before the final episode. It was called “The Guy Can’t Help It” [May 13, 1993]. It was written by David Angell, Peter Casey, David Lee; all three later went on to write and create
Frasier
. David Angell died on Flight 11 on 9/11. But this penultimate episode should have been our final episode. It was a half hour. Sam goes to a sex addiction group. Everybody at the group stands and tells their story. This very attractive lady gets up and talks about how addicted she was to sex: “Going from man to man, not caring, just wanting him.” Everybody’s shaking their head. She sits down. Sam has been frowning in sympathy and has been expressing understanding throughout her story, but when she finishes he sits next to her and quietly asks, “Do you like Chinese food?”

I think that should’ve been the end. He’s still the same Sam from the beginning. A lecher throughout television eternity. And that’s where we should have left him.

I suppose the pressure not to put a halt to a runaway hit show is huge. There’s just so much money involved that the network would do anything to keep it going.

The money involved is incredible. It’s difficult to stop. In fact, we received overtures from the network to continue
Cheers
with Woody as the head bartender. Both Les and I said, “That’s not
Cheers
anymore.” It was time to move on. But I think that if Woody had been agreeable—which he wasn’t—the network would have brought in another producing team. It was just too big for the network to ever want to stop.

The final episode of
Cheers
was shown on two giant Jumbotron screens outside the Bull & Finch Pub in Boston. After the show, at 11:30,
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
broadcast a live feed from the bar, which was filled with the show’s cast, as well as celebrities, athletes, actors, politicians. The evening has become infamous for how out of control it became. Were you there that night?

I was. It became a circus. The entire cast was upstairs in the restaurant above the bar. We were in a room by ourselves, and they had set up refreshments and, of course, a television to watch the show. There were bleachers outside for fans. Jay Leno was going to shoot live for
The Tonight Show
after the episode ended. This was his first year. The evening progressed and I could see everybody getting tipsier and tipsier. I thought, Wow, this is going to be strange. Two hours from now these people are going to be live on
The Tonight Show
. They’re going to have to make some kind of sense.

Well, they didn’t. Jay began the interviews at around 11:30 [on the East Coast], and by then everyone was beyond drunk. It was a disaster. I’m not a teetotaler by any measure, but I didn’t want to be a part of that. It was chaos. There were spitballs going back and forth. Woody Harrelson was literally trying to shoot spitballs into Jay Leno’s mouth. People were cursing, stumbling. I remember Jay telling someone, “These people are drunk off their asses.” The cast was all schnockered. So were the VIP guests. It was madness, and all broadcast live.

In your opinion, how would you say
Cheers
influenced the sitcoms that followed it?

It’s interesting. I’ve heard lately that we had an influence that I wasn’t aware of. Tina Fey said some very nice things about us, as did Amy Poehler. Actually, we had our thirtieth anniversary of the broadcast of the first
Cheers
episode recently, and people who had been on staff came up and said they worked on a lot of shows and still regard this as their best experience. It’s hard for me to say. I see kind of an influence on
Friends
,
Seinfeld
, and other shows with the gang comedy concept. People who hang around each other outside of a work environment.

Another legacy is that sitcoms now have large plot arcs. I’ve noticed, too, that sitcoms will now end their seasons with cliff-hangers. We would do that on
Cheers
. We wanted to have people talking about the show over the summer, wondering about it, thinking about it.

What advice would you have for those hoping to get into writing for sitcoms?

The common fault I see is that a lot of writers don’t hear the show. Every show has a voice. The better the show, the better the voice. I remember when Les and I got our first job with
M*A*S*H
. At the time, the two of us had been writing and sending out spec scripts. [
M*A*S*H
producer] Larry Gelbart told us we’d written a good script. He said: “You
hear
the show. Most spec scripts don’t.” There’s a quality that’s missing, almost apart from the comedy. Maybe it’s our radio background rearing its head. With really good comedy writing, you can hear the characters say the lines on paper. It’s tough to tell anybody what to do about that.

Easier said than done.

Right. I’d advise anyone interested in screenwriting of any kind to do some acting, maybe take an acting class. It’ll help you understand that the words you write on paper are meant to be spoken. You’ll
hear
your writing.

Sitcom writing is still writing after all. When I was in college, I met [fantasy and sci-fi writer] Ray Bradbury. I mentioned that I’d like to somehow write for a living, although I didn’t know what form that would take. I asked him for recommendations on how to proceed. He immediately said, “Well, first get out of college. You can read everything you need to read on your own, but you can’t experience in college what you need to write.”

His point—and I later came to agree with it, even though I ended up graduating—is that, yes, it’s important to be exposed to great literature. At a certain point, though, you have to get out and see things, go to strange places, meet weird people, maybe fall in love with one of them, get hurt, and even act in a play that will allow you to wear tights in public. I think life experience for too many of us is very limited. So much literature, film, and television is self-referential and insular. It’s a world of sequels, remakes, and homages.

Another thing is, you can teach specifics. Things like story construction, joke structure, and character delineation can be picked up from watching and reading good things. But, overall, this is not a science, and I’ve never worked with any comedy writer—and I’ve worked with great ones—who hasn’t been wrong on occasion. I mean,
really
wrong.

The last piece of advice I’d give to any writer would be to avoid envy of your peers and joy at their misfortune. Keep your overheated ego and ambition well-concealed around those less powerful than yourself, and don’t carry a grudge in this business, no matter how great the slight. Actually, wait, I’m wrong. All these things can be great sources of inspiration. Set them free. Let them run wild.

Agent, UTA

How does a young writer acquire an agent if he or she wants to write comedy for television?

There are a couple ways to do it. The first is to graduate from one of the writing programs. Warner Brothers, Fox, and CBS productions all have their own internal grooming programs where they take writers who have never been on staff and put them through a six- or eight-month-long program in which they write original material and spec scripts. The writer comes out the other side with a stamp of approval from those studios. Warner Brothers is definitively the most successful of them.

After you graduate, the heads of those programs will call agencies and say, “We’ve got a live one here. This guy or woman just came through and they’re exceptional and you should think about hiring them.” There are incentives then in place for these studios to hire the writers who have just gone through their programs. So your odds of getting a job are significantly higher than the odds of almost anybody else at your level around town. That’s one way to do it.

The other way is to be referred by a writer who’s already signed. These clients will call their agents and say, “I work with this guy, or I know this guy, and he’s incredible, and you should check out his material.” It’s an assurance that this writer is employable. That’s basically saying, “If I had my own show and I was in charge, I’d hire this guy.” That’s the second way.

The third way, the most difficult way, is to blindly submit your material to an agent. This is especially difficult in television. The material would have to be absolutely, spectacularly exceptional to be taken on by one of the major agencies without any kind of other connection to the industry already in place.

Is the process different if one wants to write for a sitcom versus wanting to write for late night?

The process is definitely different. For late night, it mostly comes down to referral. Head writers for each of the late shows have a full staff of joke writers, and those people have friends, and they refer their friends. Late-night shows generally take packets as submissions. Each show will put out a set of guidelines and say, “Okay, we need you to write three Top 10 lists in the style of David Letterman, and twenty monologue jokes, and then three desk pieces.” They’ll then take those submissions, look through them, and bring the funniest people in for interviews and hire them. I think it’s easier to get one of those gigs on pure merit than it is to get a traditional sitcom writing job.

Is an agent even a necessity for late night?

I don’t think it hurts. It certainly helps in the sense that you are made aware of when these shows have a writing opportunity opening up. Unless you already have friends working on these shows—someone who can give you a heads up every time they are hiring—it will be much more difficult without an agent. I don’t know how you’d have the information to know when and where to send your packet.

Now, does having an agent help push you through the door of these shows? Not particularly, in my opinion. It’s more based on your writing material. But it certainly helps to have an agent because we do a good job tracking when new openings pop up.

As far as your clients, what’s the percentage of those who write for sitcoms compared with those who write for late night?

Ninety-five percent of the people I represent work for sitcoms, and 5 percent of them work for late night. I think that that percentage would probably be relatively identical across the board at all agencies.

What are some of the common mistakes you see writers making who submit material to you?

Some mistakes are very basic. When I open a script, and within the first five pages of that script there are three typos, that tells me how little effort that writer put into this piece. It’s an easy way to discourage somebody from reading it. It’s a really basic turnoff, but it happens all the time.

Aside from that, I think the only real mistake is not honing the material, not submitting a script that is your best work; just submitting something that has not been vetted by twenty or thirty other people who will be honest about whether it’s good or not. This happens a lot. One of my clients will call me and say, “Hey, you should check this stuff out. He’s my friend. I think he’s great. Will you read his stuff?” And I read it and it’s not very good and I call the client back to say, “Listen, unfortunately, this is going to be a pass. Would you like me to reach out to your friend directly to save you from the pain of having to pass on my behalf?”

The answer is never, “Really? I loved it. It’s really surprising that you didn’t love it.” It’s usually, like, “Okay, great. Thanks. Talk to you later.” And you can tell that they didn’t love it either, and they’re sort of embarrassed that they had to send it to you. There definitely have been occasions when I have passed on something and the client has fought for it and said, “I think you’re wrong about this.” But when you get that other immediate response from the client, you know you were right and they were just doing a favor for a friend.

How important is the cover letter?

The cover letter is largely irrelevant. A letter is mostly for writers who are submitting to someone who is not expecting their material. We all receive SPAM e-mails all day long at the major agencies from writers who have bought e-mail address lists. They are deleted immediately. There’s not even the slightest consideration. I don’t read the letters. When a client has referred a friend of theirs, the letter is not necessary.

Do you prefer original material or scripts based on existing shows?

Definitely original material. I think there was a period more than ten years ago when everybody needed to have material based on pre-existing shows. And that day has largely gone away. It is impossible to work in television without having a piece of original material.

Why did it change?

I think it changed because the industry became significantly more competitive. Reality television happened.
Survivor
happened. Suddenly all the hours on prime time that had been devoted to scripted television shows disappeared. Those hours got eaten up by reality shows. So there are fewer shows and it became more competitive to get onto those shows. You get to a point where you can only read so many
Parks and Rec
s,
30 Rock
s, and
Office
s. So how do you differentiate yourself?

Let’s say there’s a new show that they’re staffing and they’re accepting submissions from writers. The number of scripts they’re sifting through is probably four hundred, five hundred scripts. There has to be a way to differentiate yourself from the pile. The idea of having an original voice has become something of a premium. Everybody feels like the bar has been raised. So you have to be able to prove that you can write something original and unique.

How much material does a writer need to submit? How many scripts?

You need at least one great sample script. But if you are an aspiring writer, you should always be writing. One of the greatest frustrations I have with my clients is that they get staffed on a television show, and then, three years later, the television show goes down and they don’t have a piece of new material. And you just want to say, “What the fuck have you been doing for the last three years?” So to get that first job, you need one great piece of material. It doesn’t hurt to have a second piece. There are writers and showrunners who ask to read two things, but one great piece can get it done. But the next time out, you’ve got to have something new. You can’t just send the same great script to all the same people again. They’ve already read it.

Can you submit other forms of humor writing? Say, funny print pieces?

It depends. It depends on the showrunner who’s hiring. If you look at animated shows like
Bob’s Burgers
or
Family Guy
, those are shows that have hired writers based upon alternative format comedy. Their interest was not generated by a writer’s spec half hour. So, you know, it depends entirely on the showrunner. Writers have been hired from Twitter streams or short films they’ve made for Channel 101 or books that they’ve written. This can all pique a showrunner’s interest. But ultimately most showrunners want to read something structured and narrative before they make a hire.

How do you, as an agent, differ from a manager?

I differ enormously from a manager. Managers are not able to negotiate employment for their clients. Lawyers are. Agents are. Managers are technically not. This is a line that is crossed all the time, every day. It’s not upheld, generally. But I view a manager’s job as sort of holding the hand of the client and working on a piece of material over a long period of time before it goes out to the world to be judged. And to help a client with long-term career goals.

I view my job of an agent as securing work. But it’s become much more than that. It’s not just about staffing people, securing people’s jobs. It’s also about when writers are selling their development deals. It’s my job to help put together the right pieces that can make those deals attractive to a network.

Is it virtually impossible to get hired as a television writer without an agent?

It is not impossible. It does happen now and again, but rarely.

It always tends to be one of those chicken-and-the-egg things. You can’t get an agent without having the possibility of getting a job because agents are animals who want people who pay commission. On the other hand, you can’t get a job without having an agent. So how do you break through that? The most organic way is to move out to Los Angeles immediately after college. You have to move out to LA. New York just doesn’t have that many television writing jobs.

Once you get out to LA, try to get a job as a production assistant on a show, and start to get to know writers. Then work your way up and eventually become a writer’s assistant. You have to become a known commodity. That’s the real way to do it without going through a program. If you work your way up to writer’s assistant, eventually you’ll get hired on a show that works. And then you start getting promoted. The minute anybody in Hollywood sniffs that you’re getting promoted, you’ll start to receive phone calls from UTA, William Morris, ICM, and all the rest of the talent agencies, with all of them saying, “Hey, man, I hear you’re great. I’d like to read your stuff.” And then you’ll get an agent.