B004YENES8 EBOK (19 page)

There was no way I could write to each of these people individually. I made the decision to construct a form letter. Adam would take the addresses off each of the envelopes, and we would respond. It was going to cost more than a few hundred dollars in postage. I decided not to inform Orion, who I knew would not approve the expense. We used up the stamps we had in the office, and I bought the rest myself.

I drafted the letter in longhand on a legal pad. I began by apologizing for the fact that what they were receiving was a form letter, then went on to explain that there was simply too much mail for me to answer individually. I thanked them for their interest and did the best I could to point out that a cancellation by a network was very final and not something an executive producer could do an awful lot about.

I then began the final paragraph. I can, to this day, see myself as if by way of an out-of-body experience. I prepared to reapply pen to paper to close out this correspondence, when I grinned mischievously, then wrote: “
It is my perception that no one in power at CBS even read your letter. My suggestion, should you still be agitated about this matter, is to write your local newspaper as well as The Los Angeles Times
and
The New York Times
,
on the theory that network executives may not read their mail, but they do read their newspapers.
”

That was pretty much it. It took Adam over a week to get all the envelopes addressed and out. By mid-July, Lee Margulies in
The Los Angeles Times
and John J. O’Connor of
The New York Times
wrote individual articles about the incredible volume of mail they had received on the cancellation of
Cagney & Lacey
. New York’s O’Connor was quick to observe that this “was clearly orchestrated by executive producer Barney Rosenzweig” but went on to write that this fact did not negate the grassroots essence of the campaign, in that letters came from all over the country, and that in most cases the authors had to have written at least two separate letters. The campaign to save
Cagney & Lacey
was unofficially launched.

The gang is gathered on the Lacy Street squad room set. From left, in the rear, Carl Lumbly, Sidney Clute, Al Waxman, John Karlen, and Martin Kove. Sharon and Tyne flank their grateful producer.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

Chapter 21 

WHO WOULDA THUNK IT? 

Weeks before John J. O’Connor’s story in
The New York Times
, at the very beginning of the summer of 1983, Lee Rosenberg convinced me to make a studio deal. My fantasy of just stopping work for an extended period of time would have to wait. There was a substantial offer in place from Herman Rush at Columbia, and it would be criminal, in Lee’s eyes, to watch me dissipate the heat from
Cagney & Lacey
and
This Girl for Hire
.

Before accepting the Columbia deal, I insisted that Orion be given the opportunity to match the offer. They had been fair with me and pleasant to work with throughout
Cagney & Lacey
. They had been there for me when I (incorrectly) thought I needed help on
This Girl for Hire
.

Lee did not believe that Orion, basically a small motion picture company uncommitted to television, would step up to such a heavyweight deal. I agreed and assured him he would not have to waste time in negotiations. “Just give them the Columbia deal and say, if you can match it comma for comma, point for point, dollar for dollar, then Barney would prefer to be in business with you. Let them know there will be no negotiating down from that deal.” Lee did just that, and Dick Rosenbloom asked for three days to respond. That gave him time to fly to New York to pitch the proposal to his management.

That was in June of 1983. To our amazement, Orion did step up, and I was now theirs, exclusive in television for two years, commencing September 6, immediately after finalizing and delivery of
This Girl for Hire
and my well-earned summer vacation. The deal was for megabucks in advance of fees I might earn on future productions and made me a major participant in profits and a hefty partner in gross receipts.

Meanwhile, as the letters from the
Cagney & Lacey
fans generated more publicity and, as a consequence, more letters, another predictable phenomenon was taking place.

It was summer, and the networks launched their rerun-dominated schedule.
Cagney & Lacey
, no longer confronting first-run movies on ABC and competing against a particularly dull baseball season on NBC, began to soar in the summer Nielsen’s.

To this day, summer ratings do not count for much with the networks; that was even truer in the early eighties. Still, it did give TV editors and their newspapers something to speculate about during those slow news days of July and August 1983.

I went to Shephard with the latest Nielsen’s and a plea to make a
Cagney & Lacey
M.O.W. He turned me down. When ABC’s Stu Samuels also passed, I considered it the final nail in the coffin. NBC’s Steve White had rejected the idea earlier with a not-so-nice note. I think it was W.C. Fields who said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again … then give up. After all, nobody should think you’re crazy.”

The mail continued to pour in, and the Nielsen’s on our summer reruns had us consistently among the top five rated shows in the country. No one of importance cared.

I had moved from my Lacy Street office and, with Corday, had taken a house for the summer in the Malibu Colony (the home of the estranged wife of Tyne Daly’s agent, Merritt Blake). Three days a week, I drove to a West Los Angeles cutting room, where I worked on the final edit of
This Girl for Hire
. That was where Judy Mann, Liz Smith, Marilyn Beck, and other columnists and reporters found me. My phone was beginning to ring a lot. Everyone wanted to know what I had heard from CBS. I, of course, had heard nothing. What’s more, I didn’t expect that I would.

I stated this fact for publication and announced my plan to make
Cagney & Lacey
:
The Movie
. I told the newspaper folk that I expected to begin photography the following spring in New York; that Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly would, of course, play the title roles; and that I had a script by Ronald M. Cohen that was too hot for the network and that would now be expanded to feature length. All this, I went on, was of course contingent on getting the executives at Orion to agree. I was, I said, optimistic about that.

The truth was that Mike Medavoy of Orion had turned the idea down cold, that Dick Rosenbloom had denied my request to spend $5,000
³⁵
on a press agent to handle this burgeoning campaign, and that Jamie Kellner —Orion’s then syndication maven—had said an emphatic no to my suggestion that we take the series to Metromedia in the same way MGM had with the then-newly canceled series
Fame
. The Orion sales chief simply did not believe
Cagney & Lacey
had the same demographic appeal to local stations as the MGM musical series.

I was keeping the whole thing alive, single-handedly, from a one-line phone (without a hold button) in an editing cubicle and from my vacation house in Malibu.

I had a theory at work here that was not unlike what I sent out in that, now somewhat celebrated, form letter; Mike Medavoy might not believe me that there was a movie in
Cagney & Lacey
, but maybe he would if he read it enough in the newspapers.

The mail, including petitions, continued to flow in support of
Cagney & Lacey
. I was not ecstatic over
This Girl for Hire
but was finally convinced it was about as good as it was going to get. It seemed to me to lack style, which was doubly damning when one considered it had always lacked content.

I just could not get enthused over this picture. My view must have been colored by the demise of
Cagney & Lacey
and the fact that we had come in at least $50,000 under the license fee on
This Girl
. It meant my decision to lay off the project with Orion was a lousy one. The only reason for making this film was money, and now I had come up with substantially less than I might have. Hindsight is
20/20
. Still, it did have me a bit dysphoric as I ruminated over the various and many sour business decisions I’d made in my life.

In late August, the final day of editing on
This Girl for Hire
, I got yet another phone call. It was from my friend, publicist Julian Myers:
Cagney & Lacey
had received four
Emmy
nominations from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Sharon and Tyne, the show for Best Dramatic Series, and Mo Harris, et al., for sound mixing). Although less than I had hoped for, it represented 80 percent of the nominations garnered by the entire CBS network. The press was having a field day with this. There is nothing the print media enjoy more than tweaking the noses of the networks.

Let’s face it: the newspaper business has never been quite the same since the invention of the phrase “film at eleven,” and, as a consequence, there really is very little love lost between the two media forms.

About this time, Tyne came out to Malibu Colony Beach for a visit. She brought two bottles of champagne and a toast for Corday and me. “For regular people, you two are extraordinary.”

We got a third bottle delivered and, save for one ounce that the teetotaling Corday took for the salute, Tyne and I drank the rest. Very drunk and very sentimental about
Cagney & Lacey
, it was a fun afternoon.

Calls, mail, visits continued, and all heaped praise on my defunct series.

I was on a dubbing stage a few weeks later, supervising this nearly final process on my less-than-spectacular M.O.W., when Corday called with more news: the latest Nielsen’s showed
Cagney & Lacey
to be number one in the country. More nose tweaking from the nation’s print media followed.

USA Today came out with a front-page headline, including a color picture of Tyne and Sharon: “
CBS Canceled Cops Number One
,” it said in very bold type. Kim LeMasters called with congratulations. What the hell does that mean? ABC’s
Good Morning America
wanted Tyne and Sharon to appear on their show. What irony. We couldn’t get them this coveted spot before we were canceled. Rosenbloom reluctantly paid for the women to fly back to New York.

“What are we trying to accomplish here?” he wanted to know.

My position was that from this point until September 26 (the day after they would give out the
Emmys
), we were news, and we would be fools not to take advantage of the heat .

Perhaps, I speculated to Rosenbloom, we’ll get Medavoy to reconsider, possibly Metromedia will come through, maybe—if nothing else—we’ll get one of the networks to rethink picking up an M.O.W. or two based on the show. Meanwhile, I began putting together a pitch on
Lacey & Lacey
, a half-hour sitcom idea for Tyne Daly and John Karlen . They would play the same characters they had in the original series, but all the action would take place in their Queens apartment as Mary Beth, a New York City detective, returned home nightly to her blue-collar husband and family.

Barbara Boyle, then a feature film development executive at Orion, was sympathetic to the idea of
Cagney & Lacey
:
The Movie
. We met to effectuate a strategy to win over her colleagues. I believed I was on to something here. Even as a failure,
Cagney & Lacey
had over twenty million hard-core enthusiasts. These fans were activists; they were not merely passive or nonselective observers of entertainment. I felt these fans could be appealed to and convinced to pay to see their favorite show on the big screen.

Other television shows had made this transition. I believed I could make the film for a reasonable price (five million dollars in 1983 was well below the mean), and with all the recent publicity, we certainly had that sought-after merchandising tool, the pre-sold title.

Despite all this, Medavoy and his colleagues at Orion remained unconvinced. I speculated that if I could get Harvey Shephard at CBS to guarantee that he would purchase the theatrical film for his network, say, two years hence in a pre-buy arrangement, that might help tip the scale for Medavoy.

It occurred to me that my longtime friend Michael Fuchs, then head of HBO, also could be of assistance here. He could not only agree to license the film for his pay cable service, I reasoned, he could put in a good word with Medavoy, with whom he had great influence. It would, I felt, be most helpful for the head of HBO to say to his counterpart at Orion that he would look with favor on such a film as
Cagney & Lacey
:
The Movie
. Fuchs was less than enthusiastic.

I got an appointment with Harvey Shephard, hopefully to convince him to agree to a pre-buy on
Cagney & Lacey
:
The Movie
. It was a major long shot.

The morning of the Shephard appointment, I decided there was no way I could browbeat him into this. Still, the meeting had been set, so rather than cancel I took a new tack. As it was the week of Rosh Hashanah, the time of the Jewish New Year, I pointed out to Shephard that I only came by to thank him for the year of
Cagney & Lacey
and for
This Girl for Hire
. I told him how grateful I was for the opportunity. He seemed to relax as I was not selling. He was quite nice about complimenting me and the show. Finally, at a quiet and pleasantly warm moment in our conversation, he leaned into me and said, “What do you think are the chances of
Cagney & Lacey
coming back?”

Are you ready for this? This was the head of programming for CBS! This was the guy who went back to New York City with a schedule in hand that excluded
Cagney & Lacey
in the first place. This was the guy who kept telling every journalist in America that summer ratings didn’t count! I was flabbergasted.

“Harvey,” I said, “you’re asking me?” I will always remember the look on his face (and yet still another time I would wish for a video—this time of my own [had to be incredulous] expression).

What he meant, Shephard quickly explained, was that if he had some fallout (which he anticipated) in his new schedule, could I, in fact, put the show together again? I told him I thought so. He went on to explain that because of troubles with finances with New York, his budget for development had been cut. He had, as a result, few scripts for mid-season. It might pay to bring back something with which he and America were already familiar.

“I think we could put together a good campaign,” he said.

“America wins!” I countered.

“I like that,” he said.

At one point in the meeting, Shephard told me how upset he had been with the way women were being portrayed on television. It’s why he cared so much for
Cagney & Lacey
and was so disappointed when the bulk of the audience rejected the concept. He talked about being a villain in his own home—how not only his wife, Dale, was upset with him, but his daughter was constantly after him: “Daddy, how could you cancel that series?”