Love Life (13 page)

Our final cast was: Kyle Chandler, Elizabeth Mitchell, David Krumholtz, Matt Craven and James Pickens Jr. Eventually they
would
carry their own hit shows,
Friday Night Lights
,
Lost
,
Numb3rs
,
Resurrection
and
Grey’s Anatomy
, respectively. It was a stellar group, and we were lucky to have them.

We shot the first script and all was well. The network liked it enough to give us the coveted ten
P.M.
Sunday slot, or “beachfront property,” as they say. The legendary former head of NBC Warren Littlefield stopped me at lunch one day and called
The Lyon’s Den
“the pride of the fleet.”

But so was the
Bismarck
.

Our airdate was set for September 28, 2003. By that time we would already have six episodes in the can. So there would be no ability to write to the audience’s interests or to minimize elements of the show that people were less interested in.

When I read our second script I knew we had trouble. The mystery of who killed my mentor at the firm was now even more confusing and muddled. The cases I was involved in were not as exciting as I had hoped and there was little tension in a show that professed to be a thriller. Desperate, I sat in the same chair for twenty-four straight hours and rewrote, gave thoughts and made suggestions, but neither the studio nor the network seemed as worried as I was about the writing. Each week, my instincts continued to catch fire. Soon, as one of the show’s executive producers, I urged my bosses at the studio to make a change before it was too late. They too thought the storytelling
could be improved but were unwilling to replace the head writer; it would be too expensive and send a message that this big, shiny new show was already in trouble.

Weeks later, they would finally act, but it would be too little too late. And it is a great lesson: Creative issues do not magically sort themselves out; nine times out of ten, they only get worse. If you feel like a change is necessary, do it early. No one gives you brownie points for patience, and you don’t get extra Nielsen ratings for misplaced loyalty.

As our premiere date approached, few appreciated that we were then in the final years of the era of big network ratings. The rise of cable series and the allure of the Internet and DVRs were just beginning to erode the giant numbers everyone was accustomed to. Unfortunately for
The Lyon’s Den
, NBC was still judging ratings by standards that had changed and expecting numbers that would never again be at the levels of the recent past.

On premiere night we drew ten million viewers for a 3.4/9 share in the coveted eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old demo. Today, that would make us a big top-ten hit, but then it was considered a “soft” opening.

On the day before our debut, I couldn’t get anyone to talk about improving our show. The day after, the studio and network were crawling all over us to “fix” the series.

Finally! I was all ears.

The brass wanted to write a four-episode arc about an opposing lawyer with whom I would fall in love. It sounded great to me. I wanted to cast someone unexpected, not just a “hot” actress. I had seen the Ang Lee movie
Ride with the Devil
and liked the performance of Jewel, the singer/songwriter.

The network and studio were dubious at best. Jewel’s personal narrative was well-known; she was a country gal from Alaska who grew up using an outhouse.

“Why would we believe her as an Ivy League, top-gun, big-city attorney?” I was asked by one of the executives.

“Trust me. She’s talented, she’s interesting, it’s a cool choice. And if she’s good enough for Ang Lee, she’s good enough for us!” Using all of my goodwill and capital with the studio and the network, I got Jewel the job.

But there was a hiccup.

Jewel, it turned out, wasn’t sure she wanted the part. I was enlisted to cajole her on a phone call.

“Do you really want to do more acting?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, this could be the type of part that people will notice
and
it’s outside of anything you’ve done. You will have complicated, sophisticated dialogue, play a Harvard grad, wear beautiful, classic, sexy, modern businesswoman wardrobe—it will be as far away from ‘country’ as it gets! And that’s what acting should be. Moving out of what you are known for.”

“Will there be an audience?”

“Um, no,” I explained, “this isn’t a sitcom. It’s a traditional drama, it’s not shot live or anything.”

“Oh, too bad. I like audiences.”

We had a nice chat and by the time she asked if she could read me some poetry, she seemed to be excited to do the part.

As an attempt to be closer to my family, I had, as part of my contract, a stipulation that the show would be shot at a studio in the San Fernando Valley, a good forty-five minutes closer than the studios in Hollywood proper. But to save costs, instead of shooting at Warner Bros., Universal or any of the other lots, a paint-thinning plant in an industrial area of the Valley was retrofitted for us. Sometimes in the late-fall San Fernando heat, it would be one hundred degrees on our jerry-rigged “soundstage,” and people would faint from the paint
fumes. Pornos were shot in the same industrial park and directly next door was a bustling dildo factory. As our ratings continued to slip, shooting in this porno-paint hinterland didn’t help anyone’s confidence or mood.

Each day, in spite of being in almost every scene, I found myself in an emergency triage of some sort: meetings on future stories, casting sessions, talking to local affiliates and doing the press that drives a show. It got to the point where acting in the show was considered an afterthought, and I hated that. On most series, the head writer, or “show runner,” would handle these tasks, but not on this one. He was a first-timer, timid by nature, probably overwhelmed. He was also very involved in a drastic diet, which, he proudly told anyone who would listen, was “for the Emmys.” Having been to the Emmys, and won, four years in a row with my last show, I didn’t know how to tell him that we were not likely to need our tuxedos. At least not yet.

I began to understand that our show was not “bad” by any standard; in fact, it was among the smarter and more well-made dramas on any network. But it lacked a constant point of view, moved too slowly, was good-but-not-great and was damned by that. If it had been clearly inferior, there would have been a will to fix it.

Back at the paint-thinning plant, the Jewel experiment had promising early results. She was, as I had hoped, sort of extraordinary in her pencil skirts, rattling off sassy legalese in our scenes where we would spar and flirt. Everyone was optimistic and for a moment, our show felt ascendant.

Then came the love scene.

The sequence seemed to surprise her, which made little sense since the scene wasn’t new or a rewrite; it had always been in the script, which I could only hope and assume she had actually read previously.

But for whatever reason, on the day of the shoot, things were different.
For the first time, she brought her boyfriend to the set. It was great for me; I’m a huge sports fan and he was an iconic rodeo champion and a really nice guy. I got him a seat at the monitor next to her chair, but she elected to sit on his lap.

By the way, when I say “love scene,” I’m not talking about her and I being totally naked like Demi Moore and me in
About Last
Night . . . , or Kim Cattrall in
Masquerade
, or Jodie Foster or Nastassja Kinski in
Hotel New Hampshire
. Those were movies; this was television, and not even cable! How steamy can you be with no nudity and a network censor editing your story lines? In fact, the “love scene” was really just a moment where, fully clothed, in a deserted office late at night, we kissed, then lay down on a desk. And even that part was out of frame.

Jewel didn’t want to kiss me. She asked if we could restage the scene without it. We tried it, because you never know what good might come out of another actor’s instinct, however bad it may seem. Not surprisingly, it turned out that we needed to kiss to make the scene a “love” scene. Jewel balked and ran to the monitor, where she jumped onto her boyfriend’s lap. She began kissing him instead.

I was beginning to take it personally. I checked my breath; it seemed okay to me, but I popped an Altoid just to be safe. The director huddled with both Jewel and her man, trying to get us back on track.

I gave them their space as the crew watched this little drama play out. My mind took the opportunity to work through the laundry list of challenges of the day. There were story pitches to go over, edited footage to look at, an international press junket during lunch and a meeting with our director of photography about tweaking the show’s visuals. I checked my watch, worrying about staying on schedule. Someone opened a door somewhere and I smelled the eye-watering, headache-inducing aroma of what I assumed to be the color magenta.

Finally, Jewel and the director made their way back to the set. She didn’t seem pleased.

“Let’s just do this,” she said.

We did the scene and it went well. But as we approached the kissing moment it became strained, and it’s never good when you can’t trust that your fellow actor is on the same page. I had no idea what this woman would do when I had to kiss her.

The moment arrived.

The script called for a heated, passionate coming together. But it ended up being less
Fifty Shades of Grey
and more
Grey Gardens
. And by that I mean confusing, a little scary and very slow. I pecked her on the lips; her mouth scrunched closed like you would do if someone was going to stick something unwanted into it, which I was not intending.

I sort of moved my head from side to side to make it look real, like there was at least a dollop of energy or passion.

“Cut,” said the director.

Jewel looked at me and wiped the back of her hand across her lips like an American Sign Language version of “Yuck.”

But at that point it was just another in a long series of breaks that just weren’t going my way. The scene, and her whole story line, ended up being a nonevent. And although we had planned to have one of Jewel’s beautiful ballads under our love scene, in the end, I used one from Dido instead.

I am an eternal, never-say-die optimist. I will fight to the last man. But I also would never have gotten from the bad neighborhoods of Dayton, Ohio, to where I am now without being able to delude myself when needed. As our ratings failed to improve and signals of our demise
were everywhere, I woke up every day convinced that we could turn it around.

My old pal from the eighties, Michael J. Fox, had not done television in over a decade. But one of our best writers, Kevin Falls, whom I imported from
The West Wing
, had pitched a character that was extraordinary. We hoped it might lure Mike to do our show. Now
that
would be a game changer. To my delight, Mike didn’t dismiss it out of hand. He had only one request. He wanted to read it by the following week, as he was going out of town and needed to reschedule if he liked the part.

“That’s plenty of time. We will write you something great,” I said.

A week later there were still no scenes to show Mike. Kevin Falls and I were pulling our hair out, but our head writer was behind closed doors.

“Why don’t
you
just write the scenes?” I asked Kevin.

“Can’t, that’s the head writer’s area.”

On the last day to get the script to Mike, I went to the production office.

“I need the scene.”

“Sorry, he’s behind closed doors,” said the writer’s assistant.

“He’s been working on this for
days
!”

“I’m sorry, he can’t be disturbed.”

I grabbed the door and burst into the office.

The head writer didn’t look up from his computer screen; he was wearing headphones. I was stunned to see that instead of dialogue on his screen, there were video images of his kids playing basketball. I realized he was editing home movies.

Michael J. Fox never got his scenes and didn’t do our show. But Kevin Falls got promoted to take over all writing duties and overnight, I had hope again. Our stories became crisper; the show’s dramatic narrative was refined (we finally got rid of the endless “who killed the
mentor” plot) and we made at least one or two episodes that were as good as anything I’d been a part of.

By Halloween, I was so exhausted from the fifteen-hour days, five days a week, plus the long commute from Santa Barbara, that I had a mattress installed in the back of the Suburban that brought me to work. I would crawl in in the morning darkness, still in my pajamas; arrive at sunrise; be plied with three shots of espresso and shower before makeup in my trailer. On the way home I watched the week’s footage on a DVD player and caught up on paperwork. I had no time for anything else; I barely saw my family, I left before dawn and I got home as the kids went to sleep. I was a shell.

One day, our route to work was cut off by a giant, raging wildfire that was causing the evacuation of the entire northwestern Valley. All around the hillside of the 118 freeway I could see fifty-foot flames shooting into the graying dawn. It was already hot as hell. It was five thirty in the morning and eighty degrees.

Pulling up to our industrial complex, there was chaos at the dildo factory. An unsettling-looking group scurried to prepare for what I was now told was “imminent evacuations.” But at
The Lyon’s Den
, we knew we had no such option. We would shoot regardless. The guys who make dildos may get to run for safety, but those who make television do not.

Due to the extreme heat, our air conditioners, which were rudimentary anyway, failed by noon. The temperature on the set stood at 103 degrees. The paint fumes in that kind of heat were making some on the crew faint. The noise of firefighting helicopters and fire engines made shooting almost impossible.

Around three o’clock, I received an urgent summons to the production offices. I put the cast and crew on a ten-minute break and weaved my way through the prefab hallways and other elements of the set to the main offices. Stepping outside, I saw that the fire was
roaring down from the hills a few miles away. “Perfect metaphor for this show,” I remember thinking.