Mistakes Were Made

by Peter Tauber

Of all sad words of tongue and pen, few convey such poignancy – indeed such neediness and desperation – as thaemost prized, self-consoling incantation “I told you so,” a minor pleasure usually contingent on being, to the party of the second part, at least somewhat married. “Somewhat married” is not a bad way to describe the essential relationship of writers to the industry we keep. We may entertain a dalliance with our Mistress-Muse, and lust after the punishing Bitch Goddess. However what ought to be a love, had also better be living. When it is neither, there should at least be the rain check of a good story to tell.

These are a few of my favorites. I was so right and so wronged. To be honest, being right before one’s time is, in such affairs as politics, what pre-maturity is to bank withdrawals, not without its penalties.

It occurs to me that I may have not just brought this on myself but wished it on myself. My very first serious attempt at autobiographical fiction was an effort to turn the sow’s ear of my college record into something closer to a silken purse in several graduate school applications and thus stay out of the Army. The irony is, the single most egregious line in the pile - “I have learned more these four years on my back, felled by my own blows, than in any course” - was, though it that reeked of insincerity, probably the truest. Especially the part about four years on my back. The effect was immediate failure, military conscription, a keep-myself-from-panicking diary, ultimately a book and a movie sale, which by my count beat the lady in My Brilliant Career by 74 years.

So there I was in Hollywood, feeling as validated as my rental car and I am trucked to a meeting with a really big producer (R.B.P.), a TV meta-mogul (write your own Will Rogers joke here___) in a limo. I mean that literally: a craft-union truck picked me up and I was dropped at R.B.P.’s limo where we had what I only later learned is called a “meeting” in an ambience that in post-Godfather semiotics would be called “a meet.”

R. B. P. had just bought my book, The Sunshine Soldiers, a journal of Army basic training during the Vietnam War – what World War II vets compared to See Here, Private Hargrove and later delusionary investors to M*A*S*H. He has also bought John Updike’s Couples. They were intended as his first feature film projects. For me (the role of me that is) he kept saying, “I want Dustin,” who had just finished The Straw Dogs. For the screenwriter, he had been very, very smart. He’d gotten (albeit cheaply) a guy who I never heard of, but who R.B.P. swore was going be huge, as soon as America saw The Rookies. In the event, this writer’s as-yet unscreened TV movie would teach a generation of American men how to cry without pulling a groin muscle. R.B.P.’s first question was, “Do you think we can get any girls into it?” The honest answer, as I all-too helpfully blurted out was “Hey don’t you think if we could’ve – we would’ve and….” Here’s where the sound of one’s own voice can drown out the sound of one’s better judgment whispering, “Shut up, stupid!” “…If you didn’t see it in the book…um, it’s not in the book because, um…well, maybe sort of in flashback of what we didn’t have there…but I mean, you know it’s journalism and it’s about the deprivation of… it’s a war and granted it’s funny but…girls, huh? I just don’t know if that would be ethical in terms of what real veterans are risking….”

Gentleman that he was, R.B.P. wined and dined me and they put me up at the Beverly Wilshire. I was on the same floor as the Rolling Stones who were in town to do an album. Never since have I felt so much like a screenwriter as when I would get onto an elevator filled with gorgeous young women and when the doors opened I headed right and they, as it were, left.

I suspect my producer-patron was probably relieved when later that year the Justice Department anti-trust division (attention students, there was once such a thing, and this was even under Nixon) invited his chief backers, one of the big three networks, out of the film production business. This is why neither Updike nor I got invited to the Oscars®, not to mention the Emmys® or the Golden Globes.

Actually, I had very affectionate relations with my first producer, and in fact his favorite niece married my cousin, and so I would occasionally drop him a line offering a joke or an insouciant idea that I hoped he would appreciate. Albeit, they were usually parodies of his stock-and-trade.

One such, in 1978, was just a conceptual gag. I was living in Malibu and the place was stocked with an excess of gorgeous young women. They were lovely girls with no apparent source of income, a taste for luxury cars and brains that could transit visible light. What we had here was a supply-and-demand problem. There were ten times as many potential cheerleaders as Pepperdine alone could absorb. In fact, if they were all laid end to end… oh sorry.  So, what if they went into business, free-lance cheerleaders with P-I licenses? Why not? Ladies of the day by day, full of good cheer and a size too large for their bathing suits, ready to dash in where ever they were needed in the somewhat depressed and economically recessed late-Carter-era America. They laughed off the suggestion… until someone else added the critical nuance of the gorgeous young women running toward the water in hyper slow motion.

All these meetings were teaching me something. I kept telling myself that at any moment, all of this would click in. Or, clique in. On the other hand, I noticed that you got undivided attention when you were “just in from the East Coast” and got late morning lunch postponements when you lived at the beach; so I kept a New York apartment and was always just in from the Older Coast.

Another good idea they laughed at, but should’ve made, was something I dashed off the day Princess Diana married Chuckles the Crown. I actually used it as a mock-pitch in a piece on LA culture I did for the New York Times satirizing the most craven tendencies in the “let’s-lunch” pitch business. I had two guys named Sid discussing a princess whose heir-to-the-throne husband is turning out to be a wee bit bonkers and maybe club footed (“I see Dudley…”), and she calls a lawyer. The lawyer is blown up, followed by unaccountably exploding equerries and footmen. She grabs the kids and heads for the territories. She goes to the one place on earth she can be safe, where everyone else arrived last week too, and half the girls look just like her. The Queen doesn’t want her grandkids “potty trained with a lot of Joshes and Amys” and so our girl is chased from town to town… (Maybe we pay a royalty to Route 66 or The Fugitive.) Maybe she has a body-guard who adores her (I see Selleck in a recurring cameo) and gets to punch out the Future King once a season…

I never actually got an official meeting on this concept, although I talked it up with a half-dozen agents turned producers now turned entrepreneurs. Maybe it was the proposed working title Who Was That Ex-Lady?

The problem I seemed to keep encountering was that nobody wanted to take a chance and risk making a mistake; which is surprising when you think of the mistakes they were not only making but also putting on the air.

Before long I found myself passed around like a private joke and by the sheerest accident I was sent to see the right person in the right place at the right time with a real need for stuff that was too early by a year.

Indeed I don’t think I can ever top that success. Before even a word of mine got on the air, my work at Saturday Night Live was praised in Variety, TV Guide, The Washington Post, and both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. In fact it was all for not writing a word that got on the air. Preston Sturgess called his auto-biography Between Flops! Yo, Preston, beat this: I was hired in August 1980, fired before the first show of the Fall, never wrote a broadcast line, and was widely credited with being a late-night savant. This all happened because a memo I had written to the new post-Lorne-era producer pointed out that she was about to captain the biggest you-were-warned-humiliation since the Titanic. It was, appropriately, leaked (not by me) and I was invariably quoted when the avoidable disaster struck. (A note to future anthropologists digging on this site: prior to 1998, “Titanic” was a metaphor suggesting historic disaster, not enormous opening-weekend grosses.)

Curiously, the most critical point was universally overlooked: that late-night shows had to keep faith in their young audience, and remain authentic and “edgy.” Howdy Doody’s beloved Princess Summerfallwinterspring (Judy Tyler) died in an auto crash, then next season opened with her returning as a puppet. That was essentially the game plan for the New SNL – insult the audience by pandering to it. Hey, you go with what works.

The result of mentioning the Emperor’s state of dress was, not only that the same lousy sentence got quoted everywhere – with two grammatical, one spelling error and a solecism no one noticed – but, she fired me, NBC fired her, Dick Ebersol got a job and CBS offered me a deal to create and produce my own late-night show since I was so smart. All I needed was an idea.

I later learned that the produce part had something to do with an imminent WGA strike. It’s all a learning experience. I was learning. In fact, one thing I’ve learned is that every time I ever sign a contract some guild goes out.

Now this was rich: NBC had fired me for being right about how they were ruining their best franchise, and CBS had hired me because of something they read in the papers. Obviously, if you want to be treated like serious talent, you have to act the part. I laid down my creative challenge at CBS: “It’s only worth doing if it’s something you can’t do on TV.” To which three CBS execs eagerly agreed. “Had to push the envelope,” one said. “We’re thinking infotainment,” another agreed. “Like Real People and Stand-Up America,” said the third. “What’s your idea?” Idea. Damn, I knew I forgot to bring something.

Earlier that week I had met with a producer friend (not a contradiction) who wanted to interest me in doing a dramatic project for something called “cable,” the beauty part of which he explained, was that “you could do stuff you couldn’t do on network or broadcast.” I assumed he admired my novel, The Last Best Hope and a vision of what he meant danced through my head. I took “can’t do on TV” to mean, “of such exquisite quality or length that the masses wouldn’t normally…” or what some might call “narrow-casting” or others, “special” or some, “really, really boring.” He had a more succinct definition: “I mean, we’re talking seriously naked… even frontal.”

So I tried my definition on CBS. “You know, sketch-comedy is reactive. Give me a grain of sand and time and you get a pearl.”

“Yes.” Maybe. They understood; maybe they were learning.

“Infotainment you want? Facts? Everything you need for a year is in one book, The Statistical abstract of the United States – and it’s public domain. Throw a dart, hit a factoid and off we go… 24.3 million Turkeys in Minnesota – that’s a sketch set in Mondaleville…”

“We’ll call it the Zany Crazy World of Real Life People.”

“I’d rather go darker,” I tried diplomatically. “Let’s call it Root Canal.”

“People won’t think that’s funny.”

“At 11:30 at night, of course they will.”

“You know, we have the rights to Facts on File.”

“We don’t need no stinkin’ rights,” I soothed. “Okay, how about The New Improved Facts,” but we do it pseudo-news/doc… hand-held, like Hill Street Blues.”

“Don’t ever say that around here!”

“Why? It’s great!”

“Because it’s like, what, number 43 for the year?”

“Are you out of your minds – or just stupid? You should be so lucky as to be compared to them this time next year. Didn’t you read that memo I was so famously fired over? The whole story in late-night sketch-com is a pledge of authenticity and risk. Daring. Know what happens if you drive down the street looking in the rear view mirror? You run over a lot of children.”

In retrospect, I’m not sure “are you out of your minds – or just stupid” is as good a topic sentence as it seemed at the time.

I later learned that the term “daring” had been banned at CBS for over a decade. Nonetheless, I actually got a pilot deal and went to Canada to shoot it as the creator and producer. (Thank you, WGA… again.)

There is actually a point, if not a moral, to this litany of screw-ups and near misses, and it is the one event where I really was damned-right and they really were damned wrong. That would be my point – scavenged satisfaction – though the moral remains William Goldman’s, “Nobody knows.”

In the spring of 1978, I was asked by two hot producers (H.P.) to discuss writing a new project for Belushi & Akroyd. We met in the offices of two lady moguls who had just been a double-page beauty shot in Life Magazine as the first of their gender and generation to head a studio.

The two H.P.s had liked the idea I came up with and we developed it over several lunches until we had a real sweet story to recite. I had just returned that day from two weeks of teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder and felt a surge of energy from dealing with all those students. I was no longer young, but there was news of the young to bring. Much of that news validated what I had pitched to the two H.P.s. So we sit down and it now seems like a good time to explain the underlying premise.

Okay, it’s 1978 – outside the gates of 20th Century Fox – and the OPEC oil embargo has gas lines that stretch from Hillcrest to the William Morris Office. Rationing schemes in California include even numbered days for self-styled therapists and odd-days for people “between projects.”

Our story starts in a hard-hit farm town of Washington, Iowa, where amid grumbling at a town meeting the local postmaster cracks that even the usual mail foul-ups now wind up bringing bigger headaches from the Potomac. A hand scrawled envelope sent to the “Department for Help Washington” has wound up in their town’s Health Clinic.

The amusing item gets passed around for the locals to scrawl their own messages back to the Federals – when someone “accidentally” rips it open. Inside is a plea from an imprisoned foreign leader to the only place on earth that ever cared about endangered Democracies. Suddenly, withered pride swells, veterans recall their glories and the town takes the challenge. In the next reel, a dozen farmers sail off to liberate… Googooland. Of course it’s a basic Hope-Crosby vamp, a wholly-road picture of benign bungling… yet in the end, they succeed and help restore hope and freedom and…

Suddenly a gasp, if not a screech: “Do you realize you are talking about intervening in the sovereign affairs of a foreign country?” one of the baby moguls objects. “Didn’t you learn anything from  the ‘60s?”

At first I smiled. Good gag… slowly it faded, then… (How, with my jaw dangling slack I managed to speak I don’t know)…I sputtered, “Yes, what I learned in the ‘60s was not to apply historical analogies where they don’t belong. Vietnam wasn’t Munich and this isn’t Vietnam. It’s Googooland, for God’s sake! It’s just a silly movie about the can-do spirit and doing good. I promise you, there will be no military – just some tractors and milk cartons maybe. In the end, Googooland builds an embassy in their town and gives them 30-cent gas forever. But basically, they just hug and carry them off on their shoulders – people will cheer!”

Time flies when you are being ushered out of a very big office. Might have been 30 seconds left of the meeting, but it seemed like ten.

On my way off the lot I popped back in to the two H.P.’s offices and heard them on the phone to the one we had just retreated from. “Yes, I know… sorry. No, it was more like a lecture than a pitch – don’t worry. He won’t be back,” which I took some encouragement from, knowing the batting average of folks in such places.

I have been back, invited even, and with some occasional good fortune. I think I understand a few things about how decisions get made or not made by those too afraid… and how the person with no power becomes the one with “No” power because you don’t get to “Yes” power with more than one mistake.

I even understand how the same executives who can acutely parody each other and their business in marvelous sit-coms and satires nonetheless repeat every bad habit and folly they themselves like to lampoon. Unless it’s like Jessica Rabbit said, that they’re not “really bad…” they’re “just drawn that way.”

But maybe it’s all part of the Great Plan. If there weren’t block-headed and fearful corporate establishments there wouldn’t be as much need for artists and writers.

Every flea needs his dog.

Peter Tauber is a novelist and frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and Opinion Editorial pages. He lives in New York City.