Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (21 page)

I would try to prebook celebs before award shows, calling publicists and saying that I
knew
their client was going to win and please don’t forget to stop by backstage to show off the new hardware. We also started pursuing up-and-coming talents who had no real name recognition yet but had gotten some critical acclaim. The hope was that they’d do our show in New York when nobody else knew who they were, and later they’d feel some loyalty to us as they started becoming famous and winning awards. It seemed like a good idea, but it didn’t really work. I remember one particular screaming match with Hilary Swank’s publicist, who’d screwed us in some painful way after we’d gotten behind Hilary when no one else (the
Today
show) cared.

While everyone who was anyone in Hollywood was out celebrating their wins and trying to work through their losses with the help of recreational consumables, I’d be at CBS Television City writing and editing the piece. We’d always finish and walk out as the sun was rising and I’d complain to Mark that we looked too good to waste ourselves on the war we’d just fought.

To say that morale on that show was at an all-time low is really saying something, but it was true. One day I came in to work and the poster on my office door—for the film
Life Is Beautiful—
had been ripped down the middle. “Who the fuck ripped my uplifting Holocaust poster?” I yelled. “FYI everybody: I called security and they’re pulling the camera footage from the hallway!” I had every intention of finding the culprit, and a day later one of the anchors came into my office and closed the door.

“I have a confession. I ripped your poster. It was five in the morning, no one was here, I was pissed about something stupid, and it was the first thing I saw. I’m so sorry.”

Life was not beautiful at the bottom of the ratings, and nearing the end of 1999, the anchor was put out of misery with another relaunch of the show. This time CBS had lured Bryant Gumbel, an Emmy-winning former star of the
Today
show, back to morning television. In a series of decisions meant to reflect the hugeness of this development, execs changed the name of
CBS This Morning
to
The Early Show
, built an expensive, state-of-the-art studio adjacent to Central Park, and then, for some reason, fumbled the coanchor hire. She was quite lovely and cute and nice and I have nothing against her, but she had a mild personality and was no match for Bryant Gumbel, who could turn sitting presidents into penitent schoolboys. We all crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.

It was imperative that I bring out the big guns to salute Gumbel’s return to morning television. I booked Mariah Carey to perform outside on our plaza, for her first-ever morning show concert. Mariah wanted it to be huge, and so did we. Within reason. I spent one month juggling her high hopes for the performance with our limited capabilities to meet them. Mariah suggested posing for the cover of
TV Guide
with Bryant, but CBS nixed it because they wanted to promote Bryant and his coanchor. Mariah took this in stride but upped the ante by demanding that the circle next to Central Park on Fifty-ninth Street be closed to traffic. I was sure that CBS could make this happen with the City and the Parks Department. Surely Mariah’s concert was on a par with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? I kept telling Mariah’s people not to sweat it.

But I was sweating the hell out of it. I felt more pressure associated with this booking than any before—or since. Mariah needed to launch her new album in a major way and CBS needed Mariah to launch this new show in a major way. But in the meantime, something else launched. This is as humiliating for me as it is gross for you: It was my first and only case of hemorrhoids. My bottom broke out in a mess of ’roids so terrible that I could barely walk, and it was all brought on by the stress surrounding the concert. (“Sit on one of those DONUTS,” my mom implored in e-mails. “Take a SALT BATH!”) The closer the date came, the more pressure I was getting from Mariah’s camp to show them the street-closure paperwork and I didn’t have it. The gears of municipal bureaucracy had chewed up our request but hadn’t spit out any permits yet, and we were running out of time. We’d already announced the concert when Team Butterfly called to tell me they were pulling the segment, to appear instead on
Today,
if I didn’t deliver the nonexistent paperwork. Mariah did cancel, and every newspaper in the country covered the “story.” Even my beloved Oprah asked Mariah about canceling on CBS. Meanwhile, my ass was, literally and figuratively, in trouble.

On the morning of our launch, I stood in our control room watching the number one female recording artist of the nineties sing two songs on the
Today
show plaza, beneath a giant rainbow of balloons and surrounded by a sea of fans, as one lone clown from the Big Apple Circus did the saddest, most depressing “routine” on our plaza for probably the same fifteen people who’d made up our studio audience back when I’d worked on this show the first time. The show was a bomb, and even as my Mimi-induced hemorrhoids began to shrink, the chorus of
no
’s coming from every celebrity publicist on the planet grew to a cacophony.

I didn’t know what to do. For all of the setbacks I’d been through in this career, I had never considered the possibility that it could all just end. And then what would I do? Go back to St. Louis and Allen Foods to resume my bottle-capping career? Luck intervened at exactly the right moment at exactly the right time, when I received an offer to run the programming department for a start-up cable channel, TRIO, helmed by the legendary Barry Diller. Cable was an entirely different world than network television, and I had no idea what the future would hold if I left it all behind to work for a channel that didn’t even exist yet. On the other hand, I had a good idea what the future might hold if I stayed where I was. So, after spending ten years with a front row seat (albeit the least desirable one) to every major event of the nineties—Clinton’s nominating convention, the Kerrigan-Harding Olympics in Lillehammer, the first
Vanity Fair
Oscar party, every award show, and Dan Rather almost biting it in Don Imus’s airplane—my career at CBS News was over.

TRIO was to focus on popular culture and the arts with lots of original documentaries and live entertainment events, two things I loved. When I got there, I knew a good deal about how to produce programming but had no clue about marketing, promotion, ad sales, budgets, contracts, scheduling, distribution, and all the other intricacies that were part of the gig at a small newborn network. Crash course time!

I went from haggling with publicists to meetings with Barry Diller. Remembering the advice I’d been given as a CBS intern, I tried to listen more than I spoke, and only to speak about that which I was confident I knew. Which was often problematic, because a lot of what I was supposed to be speaking about was numbers, and my brain has a tendency to go blank when I see an Excel spreadsheet.

TRIO launched softly and quietly, with limited distribution and not a ton of original programming. After a couple of years, a new president was brought in to lead the network, and I began working directly for her. In Lauren Zalaznick, I found a mentor with an almost supernatural sense of creativity, who shared my love of pop culture and appreciation for weird and wonderful people. We organized our schedule into three or four tent-pole programming events, and the channel became best associated with one called
Brilliant but Canceled
, about shows that had been critically acclaimed but canceled before their time. We produced an original documentary and series about the subject and ran cult-favorite shows like
Freaks and Geeks
,
EZ Streets
, and
Action
. As part of “TRIO Uncensored” we produced a documentary called
The N-Word
(yes,
that
N-word) that went on to win a Peabody, which is an award that does not come with a red carpet but is very coveted among those who work in television.

Oh, and maybe best of all, Lauren shared my enthusiasm for
Battle of the Network Stars
, which we quickly acquired and reran in its entirety. If you happened to watch it, you will undoubtedly be amazed by Howard Cosell’s commentary, which ran from racist (“Tim Reid can’t swim because he’s black”) to sexist (“Just look at Joyce DeWitt’s chest!”).

TRIO was barely available outside of DirecTV and not even big enough to receive Nielsen ratings, but we generated enviable amounts of press due to our quirky mix of programming, and we tried our damnedest to convert it into ad dollars and distribution. I didn’t know it then, but I was in something of a boutique Bravo boot camp. When Universal—our parent company—merged with NBC, I heard rumblings that TRIO was headed for the dumpster. Those rumblings were confirmed when Lauren got the job running Bravo and TRIO became a victim of its own making: brilliant, but canceled.

Lauren told me she wanted me to come with her and run current programming at Bravo, a network I’d never really watched but was having a major moment with the success of a show I’d desperately wanted to buy for TRIO,
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
. Bravo was seriously gay-friendly, with shows like
Boy Meets Boy
and
Gay Weddings
. I guess that didn’t make it gay enough for me, though, because I had my heart set on running programming for Viacom’s new gay start-up channel, Logo. I was amazed that times had changed so much that I would be considering two jobs involving gay TV. I got an interview at Logo, but no callback. I was disappointed at the time but, in retrospect, I haven’t been so glad of anything not happening since not taking that internship at KSDK in St. Louis. Had I gotten that job, my life would certainly have taken an entirely different direction. I don’t think I would ever have gotten my own show, and I probably wouldn’t be writing this book. So now you know who to thank. Or blame.

PERFECT PITCH

There’s no such thing as a perfect pitch. This is a law of the universe that holds true whether you’re a bewildered Little Leaguer on the baseball field or an at times even more bewildered broadcast executive in a network boardroom. At least at the network there’s no dirt and no tears, or at least not as many.

There’s a perception that TV shows are born in a brilliant flash, that an idea becomes a show in a nanosecond. But after twenty-two years in the business listening to thousands of pitches, I can say that the opposite is usually true. There are a lot of cooks in the TV kitchen and everybody wants to add a spice. Or a pile of weird ingredients they grabbed in a frantic quest to appear more cooklike. I have spent an upsetting amount of time (I could’ve been getting tan during that time!) in rooms with producers explaining show ideas to me and I can’t say there’s been one singular moment that felt like finding nirvana. Hearing the pitch for
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
was probably as close as I ever came, but I knew that the show would only go somewhere at a place with more money and more resources. Little did I know that
Queer Eye
would land at Bravo and I’d wind up supervising it when I took over their current programming.

At TRIO and later at Bravo, I’ve run not only all shows in production, but everything in development as well. “Development” is what happens to 99 percent of pitches that aren’t passed on outright. For example,
Flipping Out
was originally pitched as a show called
The WannaBees
about Jenni Pulos and her then husband Chris, two part-time actors who also worked for an obsessive-compulsive house flipper. When that OCD house flipper, Jeff Lewis, appeared on their demo reel, our development team said, “Who’s
that
guy!?” and
Flipping Out
was born.

Here’s what usually happens during a pitch: People come into your office or a conference room with a document or a DVD or a wannabe star and perform a sort of show-and-tell that’s either funny or desperate or brilliant or completely off the mark. Sometimes you know right off the bat that the show they’re pitching would never in a million years fit in at the network. In the biz we call that “off-brand.” (Though we don’t actually call it “the biz.”) Sometimes we get pitched things we are already doing, with a slight and often awful twist (e.g.,
Real Housewives of the Trailer Park
,
Real Housewives of Appalachia
,
Real Housewives of Compton
,
Real Housewives of the Bayou
…). But even recognizing the great possibility that on any given day I may be about to listen to yet another
Real Housewives of Somewhere
presentation, I still live for that gut feeling of excitement I get when I hear something that is fresh, unique, and on-brand.