Turn of the Century Read online

  News will definitely have to get a sign-off from Fifty-nine to start announcing exit-poll numbers at eight Eastern Time.

  “I’m frankly amazed Fifty-nine is cool with your going so urban,” Laura Welles, Featherstone’s smart deputy, told George a few days ago. “I’ve been telling Timothy for a year that part of the show’s genetic code is definitely urban.”

  In the entertainment business, “urban” is the euphemism for black. George and Emily decided, starting with the January fifteenth show, to lay bits of rap into the NARCS soundtrack—what the show’s musical director calls their Spackle of Sound, a maximum of six seconds at a stretch, three times per episode. A week of audience testing in Omaha determined that was optimal: any less and the young, rap-friendly audience segment didn’t respond, any more than eighteen seconds an hour and the antirap audience majority became, as the research firm described it, “assertively intolerant.” Testing over the last month has discovered a substantial audience segment, mostly whites in their thirties, who find the rap interludes on NARCS “energizing” and “stylish,” but only in the precise, small doses the show is giving them. The research firm calls this middle group the Hip Urban Ambivalents, or HUAs. It is all such a delicate balance—fascinatingly so, like constituency politics, like trying to keep soccer moms and Social Security recipients all voting Democratic, or Christian fundamentalists and libertarians in the Republican party. No, not like politics, George realized the day after the New Hampshire primary: getting an audience for a TV show (or a movie or a magazine) is politics, what America has now in lieu of real politics. Being a Saturday Night Live viewer or a Touched by an Angel viewer or a NARCS viewer is at least as meaningful for most people as being a Democrat or a Republican. Sure, the Democratic party “has mismanaged its brand image and brand equity for a generation,” as Bill Bradley said at Ben Gould’s cocktail party last month, pandering smartly to the Manhattan crowd, but Republicanism is a dying brand too; national politics is a dying brand category, like organ meats and typewriters. When Fifty-nine wants their disinclination to cover campaigns affirmed, George knows they have more than once cited “Mactier’s end-of-politics paradigm.” It’s easier for them to make a zeitgeist argument than a lost-ad-revenue argument. George has become their pet intellectual. It both embarrasses and pleases him.

  “Iris, we’ll be—”

  “I know,” she says in her perpetual stage whisper. “Fifty-nine.” From Iris’s mouth, it always sounds like “the principal’s office” or “the oncologist.”

  George carries the notes, as he always does when he and Emily are in meetings together. That way, she doesn’t have to be the girl. With her expensively blond, not-quite-short hair, Emily looks ten years younger than she is. She acts ten years older, George thinks.

  “So I understand you flew back with Timothy.”

  She gives George a look and an elaborate sigh.

  “You downgraded yourself to business class just to avoid sitting in the same compartment?”

  “Same row.”

  “I don’t know, Emily,” he says, smiling, “I thought you were supposed to be the plugged-in Hollywood partner.”

  Emily doesn’t respond. “The gay PR guy, the hairplugs, the smile …” Emily is changing the subject, George realizes after a beat. She is making a quick index finger loop-de-loop to indicate that George is supposed to fill in the blank.

  “Hank Saddler. He’s supposedly married, by the way.”

  “He said downstairs, ‘Fifty-nine is convinced you guys can walk on water.’ ”

  “I don’t trust Hank.”

  “Factually? Or ethically?”

  “He’s a creep.”

  “He’s a PR guy.”

  “He’s also a basically stupid person who sincerely believes he’s smart. It’s a dangerous combination. Dumb schemers frighten me. Hi,” George says, smiling big to the main receptionist on Fifty-nine. George is friendly and respectful to the assistant class. He is a natural at endearing himself to them and at impressing the top people; it is the middle people, like Saddler, he tends to ignore or dislike, and vice versa. “We’re here to see Timothy.”

  There are two basic show-business personality types, the Merry Chatterer (Steve Ross, most of the DreamWorks principals, a majority of record executives, almost every agent and TV executive) and the Inscrutable Hardass (Michael Ovitz, Barry Diller, John Malone). George finds virtues in both. A majority of Merry Chatterers may be silly people, but what’s the point of show business if it doesn’t occasionally transmute work into a fiesta? He enjoys even insincere Hollywood gaiety if it’s energetic enough. Some Inscrutable Hardasses are brilliant, but every one is dead-set on appearing to be brilliant—if you doubt that their still waters run deep, well, they might drown you just to prove the point. Inscrutable Hardasses often form good-cop/bad-cop partnerships with Merry Chatterers—Ovitz with Ron Meyer at the old CAA, Jon Dolgens with Sherry Lansing at Paramount, and at Microsoft, as Lizzie once pointed out, Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold. But George’s preferred executive type is an old-fashioned mogul hybrid, the Merry Hardass, who he’s discovered is surprisingly rare, especially in Los Angeles. Merry Hardasses are scary but fun, like fairy-tale creatures. Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, who talked to George and Emily about coproducing NARCS with Harvey Keitel as the star, is one. (George half expected him to shout “Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum!” when he rumbled in for meetings.) Sumner Redstone of Viacom (Rumplestiltskin as Lear) and the movie producer Scott Rudin (Popeye crossed with Bluto) are also Merry Hardasses. Harold Mose, who arrived from Toronto a year and a half ago to patch together MBC, is another.

  Featherstone is pure Merry Chatterer. “Yabba dabba doo!” he says when he spots George and Emily, instead of hello. “Long time no see, Emmy Lou!” He kisses Emily on both cheeks.

  “Timothy,” she says.

  Featherstone winks at George, and says as he leads them into a conference room, “Let me take you into my la-bor-a-tory.” The walls are covered in magnesium panels, expensively riveted. A line of several dozen TV screens wrap around the room like a belt.

  Emily smiles by reflex, hating herself for pretending to enjoy the pointless Bela Lugosi impression. “Good Grandpa Munster,” she says, inching back into her own good graces.

  “No—George Hamilton,” Featherstone says. “He taught me. I worked with him, you know, right after I ankled Woody.” Timothy Featherstone was fired as a second assistant coffee boy on Interiors, and his father, who was a huge Jack and Bobby Kennedy contributor, had asked Jack Valenti to get young Timothy a gofer job on Love at First Bite. That was his career in feature films. While he was on “sabbatical” he totaled his Porsche in an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway, killing his twin brother, then produced a highly rated movie of the week based on the accident, which led to a successful career phase as a “long-form” TV producer. (He claims he was the first producer to show “female butt cleavage,” as he calls it, in network prime time.) Then he worked as a programming executive under both Howard Stringer (smart Merry Chatterer) at CBS and Brandon Tartikoff (an exotic hybrid: Inscrutable Chatterer) at NBC, then briefly at Fox and VH1, and now here he is at the MBC, practically in charge. “So, I don’t want you guys to be blindsided in there. I want to set the table for you on Harold’s state of mind, okay?”

  “Is there a problem?” George asks.

  “No. Absolutely uh-uh. Niènte. But ownership’s back on the table, comrades.”

  MBC owns half of NARCS, and although it’s successful, which gives George and Emily some leverage, they have already agreed to give the network half ownership of any future MBC series they create.

  “A longer license term?” Emily asks, all nice disingenuous calm. “He wants five years instead of four?”

  “No,” Timothy says, “we’re going to want one hundred percent ownership on the new shows, but with a guaranteed back end for you guys, as well as—”

  “Timothy,” Emily shouts, “we’re not … employees. We’re not—”
/>   “Emmo, Emmo, Emmo,” Featherstone says. “Don’t go there, Emiline.”

  “Full ownership?” she says. “No. Unacceptable.”

  George had been surprised that MBC hadn’t demanded more ownership earlier. He’s always quietly preparing for the worst, ready for the secret trapdoor to swing open directly under hiiiiiiiiiim. It is automatic. Anytime any boss asks to meet with him, he steels himself, ready to be fired. If Lizzie is more than a half hour late coming home, he starts imagining her raped, then murdered, the phone call to her father, life as a widower. Since things usually turn out much better than awful, George feels lucky most of the time. And if they don’t, he’s ready.

  For several seconds, no one makes a sound.

  “Em,” George finally says, “we’ve said ourselves that Reality is not going to have a billion-dollar syndication life. This isn’t exactly ER. Back-end ownership—”

  “Or Baywatch,” Featherstone adds, a beat late.

  “—is really kind of a theoretical deal point here.”

  She gives George a hard look. George is not just caving in, but ganging up with the second-dumbest man in television to humiliate her with a smile, in the name of reason and easy compromise. This was why she had come to despise the president of the United States long before impeachment. Not because he was a liar, or a sex addict (Emily, as it happened, went down on him once, in a limousine outside the Hotel Inter-Continental during the 1992 convention in New York), but because he’s just a high-end New Man gone pathological, slipping and slithering on a dime.

  “For Reality, maybe,” she says, playing along against her instincts. “It’s different. But everything else is straight-ahead entertainment. Long shelf lives.”

  “Riiiight … ?” Featherstone says.

  “Right, what?” she spits.

  “But Timothy,” George asks, “what is the argument for the network owning shows like My People, Your People or The Odds or Actually Bizarre?” These are the three other series George and Emily have in development. They are, respectively, an hour-long “sitcom of manners” about husband and wife executives; a zany “alternative” comedy set in Las Vegas; and a cross between The Twilight Zone and Candid Camera in which unwitting “contestants” would secretly be taped as apparently supernatural tricks (UFOs, phantasms, emptied offices) are played on them.

  “Well, we’re prepared to give Reality a thirty-nine-week commitment. Rock solid.”

  This is news. George and Emily have asked for twenty-six weeks, were hoping for thirteen, and prepared for six. (George has been prepared for a pilot order, period.) Now the network is going to hand them $50 million and eighty hours of prime time to execute his weird, untried idea.

  “Timothy,” George says, smiling as big as he ever smiles. He is almost dizzy. Is this what crack feels like? “You buried the lead.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He means that a firm thirty-nine-week commitment sounds absolutely fantastic as far as we’re concerned, Timothy,” Emily says. She’s grinning for real now, using adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. But she won’t let the astonishing good turn make her irresponsible. “And you mentioned back-end guarantees? On the other shows?”

  “Business affairs, Emma Bovary, business affairs! Good-faith negotiation, et cetera, et ceterama.”

  Emma Bovary? Ridiculous as ever, but George is impressed by the erudition.

  “Harold will buy and air thirty-nine weeks of Reality?” Emily says to Featherstone. “One-point-six million a week?”

  “D’accord, darlin’.”

  “No speaking French. That’s why I defected from Canada.” Mose is in the room. Featherstone swivels his chair and bolts upright. George and Emily stand.

  “George! Emily.”

  “Superb,” Emily says, and George, dumbstruck, manages only a robust, “Hi!”

  “How are you?” Mose asks.

  Having already answered, Emily offers her cheek for a kiss.

  “Great!” George pipes up, suddenly as taut and overwrought as a teenager. He always notices the aroma of Harold Mose. Why hasn’t Ralph Lauren bottled this fragrance? Maybe he has. It must be the daily haircut plus fresh flowers plus cashmere plus BMW leather plus the executive-jet oxygen mix plus a dash of citrus. That is, Mose smells luscious. He smells rich.

  “Pellegrino?” It is Mose’s secretary, Dora, who looks uncannily like Queen Elizabeth II would, if the queen cut her hair very short, dyed it platinum, lost forty pounds, and wore Anne Klein suits. (The queen in Diana’s dreams.) Dora’s beautiful assistant, Lucy, has just set down the boss’s Pellegrino with Rose’s lime juice.

  “Your pilot was perfect for my attention span,” Mose says. “Have you considered making the actual show only fifteen minutes a week?” George and Emily grin. Featherstone chuckles. They have produced a fifteen-minute minipilot for the show—a five-minute newscast and ten minutes of behind-the-scenes fiction. “I expect that Timothy has, in every important respect, badly misrepresented the program to me,” Mose continues, not quite smiling, in his happy-gangster baritone. Are there Canadian gangsters? “So: is this a mutant news program that all people of substance and seriousness will despise, or a bizarre entertainment program that half the audience won’t understand even if they watch it, which they won’t?” He plucks the lime slice from his drink and bites the flesh.

  “Well,” George says, “a lot of people in news are going to go nuts, that’s true, unquestionably. The op-ed pages and the journalism professors will kill us.”

  Featherstone glances anxiously at Mose. The chairman is expressionless.

  “Oh, dear,” Mose says, pulling the desiccated lime from his mouth. “Oh gosh, oh my. And the downside is?” It takes Featherstone a second to realize he should chuckle, and he does.

  “We figure it’ll be similar to the fallout from the NARCS New Year’s show,” George says, “times ten—a fuss that (a) makes people look at the show, like with the Donna and Rudy Giuliani thing on Fox or the Dan Rather nipple episode on the Farrellys’ show. And (b) as a marketing position, I think we could do worse than ‘The Groundbreaking Program the Media Elite Doesn’t Trust You to Watch.’ ”

  Finally Mose smiles. “Correct,” he says. “Exactly.”

  “When the noise clears,” Emily says, “this is smart, tough, good TV. First-class news. First-class drama.”

  “Dramedy,” Featherstone amends, then turns to Mose. “It’s dramedy, Harold. That’s my top-line note. There’s got to be fun elements. A little Mary Tyler Moore, right? Murphy Brown when it had an eighteen-point-six rating. Larry Sanders with heart and a high-Q star. We want it zoomy.”

  Emily glances at Featherstone and George nods too, just long enough, just, to indicate acknowledgment.

  “Explain to me exactly why we need two half hours every week before we get to the actual news program on Friday,” Mose says to Emily and George. “Timothy gave me the amortization argument. But creatively, what?”

  It is unclear to George if Mose’s emphasis on the word creatively implies curiosity or skepticism.

  “The basic idea,” George says, “is we can roll with events, evolve the story lines during the week. As news unfolds, we slip in references on the Thursday show, adjust the tenor, fix it as we go.”

  “Maintain the arc, Harold,” Featherstone says.

  “If the week starts off early as fun and games,” George continues, “a story like Clinton in Sausalito with his English actresses, but then, you know, a bunch of people are massacred in Mexico on Wednesday afternoon, we can adjust the trajectory for that before the Friday program. And the second episode midweek reminds the audience that we’ve got a real, functioning news operation here. It’s also,” he says, glancing over at Emily, “the three-act principle. We need a middle episode to make the transition from the docudrama of the Tuesday show—”

  “Docudramedy,” Featherstone says.

  “—to the straight news hour on Friday. We can’t just go slam-bang from Murphy Brown to 60 Minutes. Thu
rsday’s the hinge.”

  “Thursday, nine-thirty,” Emily says, referring to the time slot Featherstone has broached. “Yes?”

  “Whoa there, little lady,” Featherstone says now in an Elvis Presley voice.

  “But you’re confident,” Mose says, “that you’ll find actors who can cry and argue and laugh and kiss on Tuesday and Thursday and then deliver the actual news on Friday? Credibly? They need to seem genuinely … knowledgeable.”

  “Compared with the people who do news now?” Emily says. “Yes. Compared with Connie Chung. Compared with blondes on MSNBC.”

  “Brian Williams is actually a very bright guy,” Featherstone says.

  “The turnaround time won’t be murder?” Mose asks. “To stay topical?”

  “Writing off the news will be the big challenge,” George says, “no question. But half of the Tuesday-Thursday shows will be non-timely evergreen stuff, relationship stories. Maybe more than half. And a lot of Tuesday-Thursday will be real, our process stuff—footage of camera setups, footage of staff meetings. Which will be about editing, not writing.”

  “Postproduction Tuesday-Thursday will be a killer,” says Emily. “But we want it rough, real—”

  Featherstone leaps in. “Like Homicide, Harold, but sexy and fun and up. Or the MTV shows—you know, the black-and-white, the hotties in the lofts, vacationing, et cetera. If the kids were grownups with jobs.”

  “I get it,” Mose says.

  “Talk about how we leverage in the interactive piece,” Featherstone says. “Reality-dot-com.” Featherstone still welcomes any excuse to say “dot-com.”

  Harold Mose has become very alert.

  George doesn’t want to get into the bells and whistles. “It’s just a notion,” he says. “It’s not a major thing.”

  “Tell me,” says Mose.

  “Well, we could let viewers access the news show in progress during the week on a web site. Give them bits of raw footage and wire copy and real e-mails and story lists and draft scripts, as if they’re hooking directly into our intranet …”

  “Extranet, you mean,” Mose says.