The Next Best Thing (28 page)

“Did you ever read a script called
Scared White Girl
? By . . .” I flipped back to the title page. “Nancy Johnson?”

“Nope.” He sounded cheerful and distracted. Probably there was a game on—Dave was a big Red Sox fan. Maybe he had friends over. I pictured his movie-screen-size TV broadcasting the game in an image crisp enough to see the stubble on the players’ faces, aproned caterers in the kitchen, whipping up platters of sliders and wings. Shazia would be in the office, one hip perched on Dave’s sleek white desk, her long black hair loose, telephone pressed to her ear, her tanned legs and painted toes bare. “Why? Is it any good? And where are you, by the way?”

“Farmers’ market on Vermont. And the script’s kind of amazing. I can’t believe . . .” I paused.

“Oh, boy, here we go,” he said. “Somebody’s circling the drain.”

“What?”

“You’ve been reading scripts all week, right? And, oh, about ten minutes ago, you started losing your mind because you can’t see how your script’s any better than the thirty-seven spec scripts you just read, and your show’s going to bomb?”

I tugged my hair over my cheek. “More or less.”

“Here’s the truth, Ruthie. Nobody knows anything. William Goldman said that. He wrote
The Princess Bride.
Nobody knows anything. Repeat.”

“Nobody knows anything,” I said through numb lips. “But how can that be true? The network’s already spent”—I looked to make sure that Grandma was busy inspecting a basket of beets, so she wouldn’t hear and collapse on the spot—“two million dollars to shoot my pilot.” I’d known that figure since I’d signed off on the budget, but it still astounded and scared me, and I tried not to think about it any more than I’d gaze directly into the sun. “How can they not know if they’re going to spend that kind of money?”

“Nobody. Knows. Anything,” Dave said again. “Those scripts you’re reading might be perfectly fine, and have gotten passed over for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.”

“Nothing to do with quality?” My stomach lurched. I got to my feet and dumped my iced coffee, only half-empty, into the trash. At these prices, the fees studios paid for scripts, not to mention the actual cost of shooting something, shouldn’t the question of which scripts got picked up have everything to do with quality?

“For example, say you pitch a sitcom about a gynecologist who hates kids.” I nodded mutely. I’d read just such a show that morning. “Now, it could be that it’s a smart, well-written script, but maybe the network has one already, or maybe it’s got a show about a child psychologist who hates kids, and Jenna Elfman’s attached.”

“Ah.”

“Or,” Dave continued, “you turned in your show about vampire cop partners who can’t get along right after another network picked up a show about werewolf private detectives.”

“Got it,” I said. Grandma waved at me, beckoning me over. I tucked the phone under my chin, lifted her brimming bags over my shoulder—I could smell dill and leeks, and see a bouquet of sunflowers—and smiled as she introduced me to the farmer, a man about my age with weathered hands and an Amish-style beard.

“This is Ruthie, my granddaughter. She’s the creator and showrunner of
The Next Best Thing.
”

I covered the mouthpiece, narrowing my eyes at her. “We haven’t premiered yet,” I told the farmer.

Grandma ignored me. “I inspired the character of Daphne’s grandmother,” she said. “Be sure to watch for it!” She gave him a wave, and I followed her down the street.

“Hello? Dave, are you still there?”

“What was that?” he asked, sounding amused.

“That, evidently, was our PR department.” We waited at a red light. A bus went by with a poster for
Walk-up,
a new sitcom, on its side. Grandma pointed at the bus and then at me. “Soon it’s going to be you on that bus,” she stage-whispered.

“Better on it than under it,” I whispered back as Dave continued.

“Sometimes it’s just a question of what resonates with whoever’s calling the shots. Max Dubrov—you never knew him, he used to run comedy at Paragon—he had this thing about teachers. Any show with a teacher, any show that had anything to do a teacher, he’d just toss it.”

“Why? Was his mother a teacher or something?” Men in comedy, I had learned, tended to have mother issues.

“No clue,” Dave said. One network head had it in for a certain type of long-legged brunette who reminded him of his first ex-wife; another had been burned so badly by a show starring three children that he hadn’t green-lit a single project involving an actor under eighteen in six years.

We crossed Vermont Avenue and stopped in the vestibule of a French café. The hostess walked us to a table on the sidewalk that was shaded by an umbrella. “Coffee?” she asked.

“Orange juice,” I whispered, settling the bags underneath the table. Grandma pointed at the phone, eyebrows raised.

“Work,” I whispered. She nodded, reached into her purse, pulled out a script, a red pen, and a coil of gold star stickers, and began to read as Dave talked about the question of trends.

“One year, something dark and edgy does well, so it’s
I want comedies about cancer! I want to do a show about a support group for men with erectile dysfunction! I want a show about two kids switched at birth who meet their biological families right before they start high school!
” Dave said. “Then, when all those dark, edgy, ironic shows fail—and most of them will, because they’re derivative
copycats—the executives decide they want family comedies, with moms and dads and two cute kids . . .”

“Where Dad’s a stay-at-home goofball, and the mom’s a type-A stress-muffin, and one of the kids is a hot girl or guy, so you can appeal to the thirteen-to-eighteens, and everyone talks to the camera.”

“Right,” said Dave. The waitress put a menu in my hands. I pointed at the brioche French toast. She nodded and took the menu away and noticed Grandma’s script.

“Are you a writer?” she asked.

“Oh, no, my granddaughter Ruthie is,” Grandma announced, loudly enough for all the patrons at the other outdoor tables to hear. “Her show was just picked up by ABS. She’s staffing her writers’ room.”

I cringed, praying that the waitress wouldn’t have a brother or a boyfriend or a dad who was a screenwriter or, even worse, a script of her own tucked into her locker in the restaurant’s back room. I thought about the stack of pages, two feet high, waiting for me back home, and realized again how lucky I was that all the variables—the whims of the executives, the desires of the viewers, and the availability of the actors—had aligned, for one brief moment, in my favor.

Dave’s voice softened. “If you’re worried that the people you’ll be meeting with are going to resent you because they think their script should have been picked up, that they should have been the one doing the hiring, I’m not going to say you’re wrong. But everyone knows the deal out here, and how much of it is luck. And honestly, writing for someone else’s show isn’t like a prison sentence.”

“I know.” I’d loved my time in the writers’ room for
The Girls’ Room,
and had occasionally felt guilty that I was actually being paid to spend my days with funny people who basically sat
around telling jokes. It didn’t feel like a real job. A real job was being a teacher or a nurse, or selling furniture, like my grandma had. Scrubbing floors, growing food, helping the sick, all of that was real work, and I’d endure pangs of guilt, or a sense that I was getting away with something, every time I got paid.

“You sound like you need a break. Want to come over?” Dave asked. Before I had time to get my hopes up, he said, “Pool’s all yours. Shazia and I are going to Malibu this afternoon.”

Of course they were, I thought, with my insides crumpling. I pictured them driving on curving roads along the cliffs, the top down, Shazia’s hair in the wind, her short skirt riding up her long legs.

“I’ve got to keep reading,” I said.

“Good luck,” he told me. “And don’t worry, you’re going to pick a great room.”

“I am?” I asked.

“People like you. They want to be around you. You’ll do fine.” Then as if he was worried he’d said too much, he gave me a quick “Gotta go” and hung up just as the brunch arrived.

My grandmother watched me as I put the phone back in my purse and then spread my napkin on my lap.

“You like him,” she said. Lifting her knife, she sliced off a bite of poached egg and smoked salmon. She was dressed in what, for her, were casual clothes—white cotton capris, a loose linen blouse in lemon yellow, pale-blue laced-up Converse sneakers.

“Dave’s a good boss,” I said, taking a bite of my own breakfast and then quickly reaching into my own bag to retrieve a script before she could ask me anything else.

I
’m sorry,” said the patient voice from the speakerphone in the center of the table in the writers’ room. The voice belonged to Eric Fein, the Standards and Practices lawyer who’d been assigned to
The Next Best Thing.
In our three weeks of work, I’d gotten familiar with his voice, and with his opinions on what was encouraged and permissible on network TV. “You can’t say
ass-munch.
”

There was silence as six writers absorbed this. “Ass snack?” offered Sam, brushing his long hair out of his eyes. Sam was one of my baby writers. He’d had one job so far, on an MTV show that had lasted a single season, and he supported himself by tweeting in the persona of Softie, the anthropomorphized roll of toilet paper who was the brand ambassador for SilkSoft toilet tissue. “We love your ass” was SilkSoft’s slogan. During his job interview, Sam had told me, with a mixture of pride and embarrassment, that he’d thought of it all by himself.

“We’d prefer no
ass
at all,” Eric replied.

“I don’t get it,” said Ginger Fairfax, the most senior of the writers. “Didn’t they say ‘douche juice’ on
Cougar Town
last night?”

“I definitely heard ‘bitch, please’ on
Two Broke Girls,
” offered George, my Harvard guy. George was African-American,
which meant that the network was paying his salary as part of its diversity initiative. This, in my opinion, made no sense. George’s mother was a surgeon, his father was a professor, both of his sisters were doctors, and George, who’d attended boarding school in New Hampshire before following both sisters to Cambridge, had grown up wealthy and well educated, in an atmosphere where racism and discrimination were the worst sins another kid could commit. I was glad to have him, even if he was funny in more or less the same way the privileged white Ivy Leaguers I’d known were funny, with his riffs about how his high-achieving relatives were scandalized by his decision to spurn the world of medicine and write jokes instead. “I’m the black sheep,” he’d told me during our interview. “Pun intended.”

“There were dingleberries on
Whitney,
” said Nancy, who then covered her mouth with her fingers, like she was embarrassed to have even uttered the word. Nancy was my other baby writer, and I’d been thrilled to hire her and rescue her from Lanny Drew’s clutches. For the past two years, she’d been toiling as Mr. I-Wouldn’t-Fuck-Her’s assistant, and while she was far too discreet to bad-mouth a former boss, my guess was that she was as relieved to be out of there as I’d been happy to have her.

The speakerphone sighed. “Guys, listen. I’m not responsible for those shows. I’m only responsible for you. And also, the action line on page three?” Thumbs flicked over iPads as we all flipped to page three. “Nana cocks her finger?” Eric read. “We need to make sure that doesn’t resemble oral sex.”

I frowned at the script. “‘Cocks her finger’ just means pointing.”

“Ah,” said Eric. “Oh, okay. Got it. Sorry. Our software’s a little sensitive about the word
cock.
Moving on,” he said before we could start teasing him about his software’s sensitivity. “When Veronica’s standing over the heating vent and her skirt blows up,
make sure we can’t see anything.” He cleared his throat. “We’d like it if she could be wearing shorts under her skirt.”

“Who does that?” asked Claire. Claire and her husband, Paul, were my writing team, married with a two-year-old daughter. They’d met in college and moved to Los Angeles right after they graduated. As a writing team, they counted as one entity and would be splitting one paycheck, which made them a bargain: two bodies for the price of one.

“Sorry?” asked Eric.

“No adult woman wears shorts underneath her skirts,” said Ginger. Ginger was the daughter of a television actress and her onetime director of photography, and, at forty, the most senior writer in the room. Friendly and easygoing, she’d been working for years and knew all of the executives and lots of the other writers on the lot, and what was worth eating at the commissary. “That’s more of a second-grade-girl-on-the-playground thing.”

“Fine. No shorts. Just make sure we can’t see anything.”

“No problem,” I told him, and wrote myself a note to call the stunt coordinator and be sure that Veronica’s underpants would remain invisible.

“Okay, then, I think that’s it. Oh, one more thing,” said Eric. I braced myself. This was how Eric operated, with his “one more thing” usually being the problem that would demand the most effort and time to solve. “The scene where Nana’s joking about Barbra Streisand buying James Brolin from human traffickers?”