B004YENES8 EBOK (31 page)

There was my own tendency to hire people I liked or trusted but who did not necessarily do the job well enough to be left alone to do it. My susceptibility to Sharon and Tyne’s demands, which caused an extra workload for me and all those with me, cannot be minimized, and, finally, there was an industry-wide problem: the entertainment explosion of that time, the resultant geometric progression of the dollar worth of any film or television package, was—via the trickle-down theory—having an effect on me as well.

The Columbia Boys Choir I assembled to pay tribute to the 1985 “woman of the year,” Barbara Corday. From left: RJ Wagner, Robert Stack, Joe Bologna, Carl Weathers, William Shatner, and Robert Culp.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

The good news was my meager percentage of profits would be greater. The bad? Each show or potential show on television was worth so much more (practically with each passing day) that the various individual film and television companies were grabbing up every piece of writing talent with any kind of credits at all and putting them under exclusive contracts at exorbitant sums of money, in the hope that those people would create and produce even more such product for their corporate vaults.

The result was that we were no longer playing musical chairs the way we had, for now the rules were reversed. Instead of removing a chair, each turn we were removing a player.

Staff writers would leave shows for overall development deals, effectively exiting the series marketplace to become entrepreneur-developers, regardless of their lack of expertise or suitability in this arena. Existing shows would, as a consequence, have to go deeper and deeper into the talent barrel to find workers.

The best television writers left series television years before the mid-1980s. Now the industry would make millionaires out of the less-than-brilliant ones who remained, leaving only the most minimal talents and beginners to do the work.

It wasn’t just that writers were being put under exclusive contract and therefore generally unavailable for hire. It was my reluctance (read refusal) to grant producer credit to some kids in their early twenties with something like only two episodes as a writer of a
Wonder Years
to their credit.

I also resisted the packaging fee as immoral and a form of extortion. These agent add-ons had their beginnings in the long-ago of television, in the days when, for example, a network would place a direct call to the William Morris Agency or the Music Corporation of America in New York. The network would call one of these major agencies because what they perceived they needed was a new Variety series, starring someone such as (again, only a potential example) that agency’s client, singer Perry Como.

The agency would “package” the show, providing from its roster of clients not only Mr. Como, but the producer, director, the musical coordinator, choreographer, co-star, et al. For presenting the network with this very neat package, the agency would require a fee: usually 10 percent of the show’s entire budget, over and above the contractual commissions charged their clients for getting them work and negotiating their deals.

There was so much money involved that it was not unusual for the Morris office to be making more than their own client(s), including Perry Como, the guy whose talent had precipitated the whole thing in the first place. To soften that blow, the talent agents would (after some pressure from the client and, ultimately, the justice department) eventually agree not to commission the client personally but to be content with only the packaging fee. This kept Como and other such talents sanguine, as it appeared, at least on the surface, as if they were saving money by not having to pay commissions. No one seemed to calculate what those hundreds of thousands per week being paid to the packager were truly costing Mr. Como in the form of reduced profits or in monies not expended on making the show better. And who would do that anyway? Certainly not William Morris or the accountants they hired to calculate such things for the producer/star.

Bad as all this was, at least the Morris office or the Music Corporation of America did, in those days, provide a service. But by the 1970s, right up until the present, the concept of the packaging fee had finally been subverted to the point where one single element created a so-called package; if an agency had a star, a producer, or anyone who was of the essence to the deal, that would (in this modern era) constitute a package.

By insisting on—and getting—a packaging commission, Zeigler/Diskant, the literary agency that in the late 1970s represented the Steinbeck estate, would actually reap a greater fee on my
East of Eden
miniseries than would their client, the estate of author John Steinbeck. The affordable $400,000 then paid by BNB in total for the rights would, instead of going to the Steinbeck heirs (who would then pay the normal 10 percent commission of $40,000 on the sale) be allocated as follows: $150,000 to the Steinbeck estate and $250,000 to the agent for “packaging” the project, which, by the way, they didn’t do.

The conflicts of interest are obvious and abhorrent. The very people who have a fiduciary responsibility to represent and protect their clients are, in a very real way, taking the food from their mouths.

There was no need for such fees on
Cagney & Lacey
, and I would not pay them. Ronnie Meyer, who I believed liked and respected me well enough personally, nevertheless once told his client, Sharon Gless: “Barney is not a friend of the agency.” The agency in this case was the super powerful and ubiquitous CAA. To be labeled “not a friend” could mean that many doors might be closed in the very tough struggle to buy/lease/rent the writing and directing talent necessary to make a quality show.

The final freeze-frame from our Emmy Award-winning episode of “Heat. ”

Photo: Courtesy of MGM

To work on such a show as mine might be good for the client, but the test since the 1980s has been, is it good for the agency? True as this was at CAA, it was just as much or more so at the other of the then-big-three talent agencies, William Morris, and ICM .

“Good for the client” was old-time thinking. That was from the days of the client being number one, someone to be served by the agent. Now it was all about the agency, and all any self-respecting agency cared about were those lucrative packaging fees paid directly to them, usually at the expense of their very own client.

A writer cannot be packaged, but a writer-producer... a hyphenate... can, and more often than not, is. That, then, was the goal. That is why Steve and Terry wanted to be “in the club,” and that is why—since they were truly qualified to be producers in name only—it fell to me to somehow take up the slack. I was, as a consequence, working harder than ever.

With all these contrarian forces, why then was
Cagney & Lacey
so good? One must not underestimate the contributions of Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless, nor the determination and professionalism of the staff—including the writers—that supported them and me. Very essential to this mix was our attention to character, attitude, and detail.

Mary Beth Lacey and Christine Cagney came from different worlds; their perceptions of the universe were different. If they had never met and one day were to find they were sharing an elevator, they would not speak.

There was always, therefore, the potential for conflict, the quintessential ingredient in any good drama. Is conflict all by itself enough? Of course not.

My friend Jack Klugman had a show called
Quincy
,
M.E.
He played the title role, a forensic specialist and medical examiner for a large city. In a typical episode, a body would be brought into the coroner’s laboratories. It was an obvious suicide—except it wasn’t.
Quincy
’s expertise and his facile mind made it clear that the suicide was bogus and that death was the result of murder. He would then take his findings to the police.

“For God’s sake,
Quincy
,” the detective sergeant would say, “will you quit playing cops and robbers and just stick to your job?”
Quincy
argued, but to no avail. Conflict, see?

Our hero next went to his boss with his findings. This guy was so buried in the bureaucracy of his job that he had no patience with
Quincy
’s findings and would tell him just to do his job and “bury the stiff.” Even more conflict. To top it off,
Quincy
would be ultimately proven right. The hero wins!

It’s good stuff, but here’s the problem: the next week the same thing, or a slight variation, happens again. That’s true for the following week as well, and the weeks and months after that. Plenty of conflict, but it’s all so predictable and—let’s face it—implausible. I mean, after this sort of thing occurred three or four times in succession, wouldn’t the boss and the cops begin to assume that this guy
Quincy
just might know what he is talking about?

It’s a major burden for even the fabulous Jack Klugman to carry, and it’s what used to happen in television—a lot. It was one of the things wrong in the series’ cosmos.

With
Cagney & Lacey
, we had an advantage. We created a Cagney from a well-to-do family with a college education (including some study abroad). She was single, lived in a loft in Soho, and loved New York, the theater, concerts, and the excitement of her job, to which she brought ambition, hubris, and a sense of family tradition.

Lacey was married with children. She was blue-collar. She was sick of the city with its noise and pollution, and she was tired: physically tired of holding down the job at the 14th Precinct, keeping up with her ambitious partner, being a homemaker, wife, and mother, and trying to make up for her lack of self-esteem by attending night school classes in literature near her home at Queens College.

The two women saw the world differently and brought something of themselves and their backgrounds to their work. Conflict was the result—and not necessarily predictable conflict. Sitting on a 1989 panel for the National Association of Social Workers, award-winning producer Dorothea Petrie
⁶¹
asked me, “How did you do it? How did you make it socially relevant and entertaining at the same time?” That answer can be found in this same “formula.”

In our abortion clinic episode, women going to abortion clinics are being harassed. Cagney and Lacey are assigned the case. The two women have feelings about abortion, and, naturally, those attitudes are in conflict with each other. But, it’s not what you might think.

They are both, of course, in favor of a woman’s right to have a choice. Cagney, however, is a Roman Catholic. Her father prods her with the reminder that “Abortion is a mortal sin, and besides,” he adds, “there’s a lotta Irish up top,” referring to the potential prejudice of the ambitious Cagney’s Catholic superiors in the police department on such matters.

Cagney is further upset at the implied sexism of the assignment, and, until the harassment turns to bombing, the blonde detective is annoyed about the perceived low-esteem social-work aspects of such a case in terms of career advancement.

At that time, Lacey is the mother of two and visibly pregnant with a midlife baby (her “choice”). What is driving her to stand up to her partner, to help women with this clearly difficult decision? What, besides her own humanity? We tell the audience, by way of a Lacey monologue, that at age nineteen, before meeting her loving and wonderful Harvey, Mary Beth was herself in need of an abortion and that at that time such procedures were illegal in the United States. We discover that is why our heroine did not finish her education; she needed the money, her second semester tuition money, to fly to Puerto Rico and to pay the abortionist. He did not speak English and indicated, as if she were a dog, that she was to lie atop his “operating table.” Harvey Lacey, of course, knows the story, but once started— Ancient Mariner–like—his wife must tell it through its completion. She ends on a political note: “There’s people who want us to go back to that, Harvey.”