The Garner Files: A Memoir (20 page)

But the warm glow didn’t last long: while I was still in the hospital, MCA/Universal filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against me for failing to complete the
Rockford
season.

I
became an actor by accident, but I’m a businessman by design. My company, Cherokee Productions, produced
The Rockford Files.
I took less money up front in return for a 37.5 percent share of the profits. I was personally paid about $30,000 per episode, which was and still is a
lot of money, but it could have been several times that. But I figured once
Rockford
went into syndication, the profit sharing would be my real reward, an annuity for my old age.

Early in 1979, someone at Universal mistakenly sent me an accounting sheet showing that
The Rockford Files
had lost $9.5 million in its first five years on the air. It shocked me. I thought we were doing well.

It’s demoralizing to break your neck bringing a show in on budget and on schedule only to find you’ve been wasting your time and effort because they’ve been bookkeeping you to death.

L
ew Wasserman was known as “the King of Hollywood” for good reason. As head of MCA/Universal, he was both feared and admired. As an agent with MCA, Wasserman had made groundbreaking deals for his clients. He incorporated Jack Benny and sold the entity to a radio network so Benny paid less than half the taxes he would have as a salaried employee. Wasserman somehow got Warner Bros. to pay a B actor named Ronald Reagan a million dollars a year in the 1940s. Reagan returned the favor when, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secured favorable treatment from the Guild for MCA. In the 1950s, Wasserman got Jimmy Stewart a percentage of the gross for
Winchester ’73
and made him rich. Before that even the biggest stars got only a percentage of the elusive net, not “points” off the top.

Wasserman’s hard bargains for his clients had helped bring down the studio system. As head of Universal, he created the thing that replaced it, a diversified entertainment company with tentacles in all areas of the business.

Wasserman was smarter and tougher than the original Hollywood moguls and he had more power. Say what you want about Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and Harry Cohn, they were moviemakers first and businessmen second. Wasserman never much cared for movies and never pretended otherwise. He was
fixated on the bottom line. He shunned publicity (other than for his art collection) and stayed in the background while cultivating connections with big labor unions, elected officials, and underworld bosses.

MCA bought the failing Universal Pictures and turned it into the industry’s biggest supplier of television programs. Universal independently produced television and radio series, pioneered made-for-TV movies, and bought the Paramount film library and rented the movies out to TV stations. In 1975, Universal invented the summer blockbuster by releasing
Jaws
in hundreds of theaters across the US while saturating the TV airwaves with commercials.

Wasserman sold Universal to Matsushita Electric in 1990 for $6.6 billion and walked away with $300 million for himself.

I
n the summer of ’79, Bill Saxon and I were in Thailand playing golf. When it came time to leave, we wanted to buy gifts for our girls—we both have two daughters—and we heard about a department store in downtown Bangkok where they sold a special pin made from an orchid dipped in gold, and we asked our driver to take us there. We’d no sooner entered the store when someone shouted, “Rockford! Rockford!” Before we knew it, we were swamped by people wanting autographs and trying to touch me or tear off a piece of my clothing. It took a police escort to get us out of there. When we were safely back in the car, I said to Billy Dee, “And Universal tells me that
Rockford
hasn’t paid out yet! If people in Thailand know me, how can the show be doing so poorly?”

Of course,
Rockford
wasn’t doing poorly; it was earning millions of dollars in syndication. It was playing all over the world, morning, noon, and night, dubbed or subtitled in dozens of languages.
The Rockford Files
was one of the most successful television series ever, yet I wasn’t getting a dime.

I can’t stand big people hurting little people. Especially me. So I
sued Universal for breach of contract and fraud for withholding my rightful share of the profits. I’d decided I wasn’t going to put any more paintings on Lew Wasserman’s wall.

As soon as the legal papers were filed, I began hearing the same things I’d heard when I sued Warner Bros. twenty years before: “You’ll never beat them,” “They’ll draw out the litigation until you’re bankrupt,” and, of course, “You’ll never work in this town again.”

L
ew Wasserman and Universal didn’t invent “creative accounting,” they just made it a science. Creative accounting is too polite a term for what Universal was doing, it was flat-out larceny. They systematically inflated the expenses to reduce—to
wipe out
—the net profit. They had all kinds of tricks. They double-dipped and triple-charged, they tacked on expenses unrelated to the actual production. It was a shell game with the net as the shell, a clever, intricate way of stealing money.

In one
Rockford
episode, we drove a car into a lake. Universal charged us full price for the car, and we had to repair it before we returned it to them. In another episode, there was a crash, and we had to buy the same damn car from them . . . and repair it again.

If the Universal set department bought something for us for $100, the studio arbitrarily multiplied it by 3.3, so it cost $330. After we used the item, they charged us another third of the stepped-up cost to take it away. Now we were at about $450. The studio added another third for its “generic account.” To this day, I don’t know what that means, but now we’re up to $600. Then they tacked on another 20 percent for “overhead.” In the end, a $100 item was charged to the series at over $700.

Universal also charged us a $50,000 “distribution fee” for each
Rockford
episode. We discovered that “distribution” consisted of having two Teamsters drive the film from Universal in North Hollywood to NBC in Burbank, a distance of five miles. Fifty
thousand dollars per episode amounted to more than $6 million over the life of the series. Universal also charged us interest on the pretext that they could have taken the money spent on production and invested it in certificates of deposit.

Universal tried to tell us that despite taking in $120 million in revenues from syndication and foreign sales, the show had earned less than $1 million in profits. And it wasn’t an isolated case. I didn’t know it then, but that was standard operating procedure for Universal. It had been happening to an awful lot of actors, writers, and producers for a long time, prompting Steve Cannell to joke that Universal’s definition of “net profit” was that “everyone in the universe gets something before you do.” In those days, the studios would rather steal than do it right. They might have made even
more
money if they’d played it straight, but it wasn’t in their nature.

If you had the nerve to complain, they pretended not to know what you were talking about. If you persisted, they shrugged their shoulders and told you to sue them. Few people did—it was too expensive. And if anybody had the money to hire a battery of lawyers and the guts to risk his career, Universal would drag out the litigation for years. It was like being in business with the Mafia, only Universal didn’t need a gun, just a pencil.

Well, I had the money in the bank—over $5 million. I’d put it there just in case, and I didn’t care about hurting my career. I was in it for the duration.

In December 1988, after seven years of filings and depositions, Universal sent me a check for $607,000. It was an insult. A few months later, they offered $6 million. I declined. We’d found out something Universal didn’t want us to know.

Universal’s salesmen went to TV stations and pitched reruns of popular series, those that had attained the magic number of one hundred episodes. My lawyers discovered that Universal was syndicating
The Rockford Files
as part of a package. Station managers were told they could have
Rockford
cheap, but only if they’d also take
the less popular
Quincy.
Universal would bill
Quincy
at twice the rate of
Rockford
. In other words, on paper,
Rockford
earned only a fraction of the income it should have commanded, cheating me out of millions of dollars in profits.

When we confronted Universal with this knowledge, they immediately offered to settle out of court if we would seal the record. They didn’t want this practice revealed, and they certainly didn’t want to open their books.

On the day we were scheduled for trial, Universal offered me a huge settlement. I didn’t want to take it. I wanted to tell my side of the story to a jury. And I wanted to expose Universal’s bookkeeping tricks.

My lawyer warned me that we’d be rolling the dice. “Anything can happen in a trial,” he said. “You could wind up with nothing, and you’ll be out millions in legal fees.”

I told him I was willing to take that chance.

Everybody around me told me I was crazy. Except Lois, who said she’d be fine with whatever I decided. But everyone else said, “Don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” My manager, Bill Robinson, told me, “Let it go; you’ve won!”

I chewed on it, and I finally realized they were right.

On March 23, 1989, we settled the case “on the courthouse steps.” As part of the settlement agreement, I promised not to reveal the amount Universal paid me. I’d sued them for $22.5 million—$7.5 million in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitives. My legal fees were about $2.2 million. It’s been reported that I walked away with anywhere from $9 million to $20 million. I can’t legally comment on that, but I can say that for a week or two afterward, Lois had to keep telling me to wipe the grin off my face, and that she drew a big “V” for victory in lipstick on our front door that stayed there for a year.

The studios have always tried to get whatever they can by any means necessary. Their attitude is, if you want what’s yours, you’ll
have to come and take it from them. They get away with it because people don’t complain. If more actors and independent producers fought them, I think the practice of creative bookkeeping would be far less pervasive. So my advice to anyone in a similar position is to
fight them
. What’s yours is yours, and you should go after it. My lawsuit proved that you
can
beat the system if you’re determined enough. I think it also sent a message to future business partners that I will not be diddled, and to that extent it may have discouraged some people from doing business with me. They figured, “I don’t want to get with him because if we try to steal, he’s going to catch us.” Well, good riddance.

I’ll tell you something funny, though: not two weeks after we settled, a messenger arrived at the house with two scripts, and one of them was from Universal.

No hard feelings, I guess.

W
hen I was making
Rockford
episodes, I used to love to get up and go to work every day. I was awake before the alarm went off. I was always the first one on the set in the morning and the last one to leave at night because I enjoyed it so much. And I wanted to experience that again.

Making TV movies is a little like formula car racing, where you have strict limits on the engine, transmission, suspension, aerodynamics, even the tires. The idea is to get everybody competing on a level playing field and then see who’s smart enough to develop a winning formula. Compared to feature films, TV movies have lots of restrictions, too. They run as long on the screen as features, but you have to make them in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. I loved that challenge. I wanted to see if I could shuffle all the elements and produce good films under the circumstances. That’s why I decided to make the two-hour
Rockford
movies.

And for the money.

Beginning in 1994, we made eight
Rockford
movies. I tried to keep my production company as far away from Universal as possible. I told the studio people when we were negotiating that if I had to drive onto that lot every day, it would be like sticking a knife in my ribs. There were no accounting problems because it was cash and carry: they gave me the money, I gave them the film. In that order.

We chose CBS over NBC because CBS promised us the time slot after
Murder, She Wrote
on Sunday nights. We figured Angela Lansbury’s audience would stick around for us, and we were right: the first
Rockford
movie,
I Still Love LA,
was the highest-rated TV movie of the 1994–95 season.

Rockford
did to the television detective what
Maverick
did to the TV cowboy: back in the 1950s, there were fifteen cowboy shows and Bret Maverick knocked them all off. Then Jim Rockford came along in the ’70s with his tongue in his cheek and wiped out all the detective series.

I guess I have a knack for killing genres.

T
he Polaroid instant camera was invented in the 1950s by Edwin Land, a physicist who was inspired when his three-year-old daughter asked him why she couldn’t instantly see a photo he had taken of her. The camera was popular all through the 1960s and ’70s. In 1977, Polaroid introduced the One Step, the latest in a line of cameras with self-developing film. In those days, it was a big deal to get a photo in sixty seconds rather than waiting days to get film developed.

I was doing
Rockford
when Polaroid approached me. I’d had several offers to do commercials, some for more money, but I chose Polaroid because they did things right and weren’t stingy with production dollars. And I wanted to see if, later in life, I could have a hit television series, do the occasional movie, and make commercials as well.

And for the money.

I had a lot of fun doing them.

I’ve been asked a hundred times about the “stigma” of doing commercials. Well, I’m an actor. I hire out. I’m not afraid of hurting my
image
. I figured if Henry Fonda, Laurence Olivier, John Wayne, and Orson Welles could do commercials, so could I.