Poking A Dead Frog Part 13

That's right. Les, Jimmy, and I had sort of settled on Boston as the setting for the series. I had never visited Boston, so my wife and I went to look around. We were staying at a hotel across from a bar called the Bull & Finch. We started our journey of discovery there on a Friday afternoon. All the regulars were already expounding on the state of the world. I loved it. I looked around and told my wife, "We don't need to go anywhere else. This is it." She said, "You know, you're going to spoil this place for their regulars." I said, "Sure, I guess, if we get really lucky . . ." I hope they've forgiven us over time.

The Bull & Finch eventually became the third-biggest tourist attraction in all of Boston.

The regulars later did complain the bar was ruined. It became a huge industry. I feel bad about that. But, look, we had no idea anything like that was going to happen.

On the bright side, the owner of the Bull & Finch reportedly became a millionaire.

He did well, yes.

After Cheers ended in 1993, an entertainment company built facsimiles of the Cheers bar in airports and hotels around the country. In each, there were two animatronic characters, Bob and Hank, modeled after Norm and Cliff. One was a delivery driver, the other a businessman. They would crack corny vaudevillian-style jokes.

We were asked permission and we said, "Sure." It was pretty much underway by the time we heard about it. I always found that strange. You entered a bar where no one, including the robots, knew your name.

Cheers was very much a character-driven show, less gimmicky and quieter than other sitcoms. Is this why it might have taken longer to hit with audiences?

It definitely took awhile to find an audience. The first year it aired, 1982, we were ranked seventy-fourth out of seventy-seven shows. I think we would have been canceled, but NBC didn't really have any other shows to replace us. Over the summer, our compet.i.tion showed repeats. It was then that the vast majority of the TV audience on Thursday night had to either talk to each other or tune in to watch us. When we began the second season, we had already made the top twenty. I'm not sure that would happen now. We wouldn't have been given a second chance.

Another advantage was that we had more time per show. Sitcoms now have almost three minutes less content, around twenty-two minutes-we had about twenty-five minutes. The network now wants more room for advertising. Consequently, everything is condensed, and, especially when you're first starting, you have to overwhelm people with comedy. As a writer, you don't have the time to establish a character before they have to earn their first laugh. With Cheers, we had the luxury of more time. If you can get a joke right after a character's introduction, that's fine. If not, let's wait.

Is it true that Bill Cosby was once up for the role of Sam Malone?

In the beginning, the network called us about Bill Cosby playing the lead character. We were Cosby fans but we took a vow, a blood oath, before we started the show, that we would never have a "name" in the t.i.tle of the show, whether it be an actor or a character. Bill Cosby was a star. We wanted to avoid Bill Cosby in Cheers. Because if you ever lose that star, the show is over. So that was the main reason we didn't use Cosby and I'm happy that we didn't. I'm sure he's happy, too. Two or three years later he came along with one of the most successful sitcoms in history.

Did the Cheers writing staff have any rules regarding jokes? What to avoid?

We had a rule that if writers were pitching jokes and two writers came up with the same punch line at once, it was gone.

Why?

If two writers arrived at the same joke simultaneously, someone in America would, too. Maybe that wasn't the case, but it was one of our superst.i.tions.

When a show lasts eleven years, such as Cheers, how can the writers even remember what jokes have already been used?

Jokes you can remember, particularly if they're yours. There are entire plot lines I've forgotten, but I always remember specific jokes.

If you're on the air a certain amount of time, say five or six years, there's no way you can remember all the shows you've done. For plot points, we had a show historian. All she did, essentially, was sit in the writers' room when we were pitching stories and say, "You did that in season three." By the end of our run, that was happening more and more. If you're on the air a certain amount of time, there's no way you can remember the shows you've done.

Cheers had a large writing staff, didn't it?

It varied. We started with five writers full-time, and then a couple of writers would come in to do punch-up, including Jerry Belson [The d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e Show, Gomer PyleU.S.M.C., The Tracey Ullman Show] and David Lloyd [The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Wings, Frasier]. It was small for a week's show, but that's how we wanted it. We always considered it a compliment when we were called a writers' show. To us, the writers were the stars of the show. After we'd been on a few seasons we had established writers actually sending us spec scripts.

Cheers certainly never talked down to its audience. I remember jokes that concerned Dorothy Parker and seventeenth-century poet John Donne. I don't recall similar jokes on Laverne & s.h.i.+rley.

We had a publicist at NBC at that time, and we had lunch with him one day. We were talking about the low ratings for Cheers, and he sighed and said, "I'm going to be honest with you. I just don't know how to sell a show that does Arthur Schopenhauer jokes."

A joke about a nineteenth-century German philosopher. Not exactly a "can't miss."

That's what we liked about it. Diane met an old friend of hers from graduate school and they were going on and on about this and that. Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the subjects mentioned. Diane's line at the end of the conversation was, "Well, that's enough 'Schop' talk." To them, it was screamingly funny. It would have been a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual pun that would have confused and annoyed anyone else who had heard it. It was very much a Diane joke. It wouldn't have worked with Norm.

Cheers dealt with some very serious issues: h.o.m.ophobia, alcohol, and s.e.x addictions as well as other topics that were regarded as risque for a network show at the time-and would perhaps even be considered risque today.

We dealt with h.o.m.os.e.xuality in the first season in an episode called "Boys in the Bar" [January 27, 1983]. Sam's former Red Sox teammate writes an autobiography and comes out of the closet. There was discussion among Sam and the rest of the regulars about the fear of Cheers turning into a gay bar. The episode really wasn't about h.o.m.os.e.xuality, more about paranoia. Everyone started to turn on each other. I once had a guy at a seminar ask if that particular show was about McCarthyism. I said "exactly." That's the first time I realized what the show was about.

Is it true that, at one time, there were plans to produce a Cheers episode about the AIDS epidemic?

Yes. One of Sam's girlfriends calls to tell him that she just tested positive for HIV. It was toward the end of the series. AIDS was very much in the news. It was an epidemic. The question for our staff was, "Are we being irresponsible by having a s.e.xually active male the central focus of our series and not dealing with the issue in some way?" The more high-minded among us said, "Of course we should deal with it." The writing session went on for three or four hours just deciding if we wanted to do it. The big question was, "How do we make this funny?"

Toward the end of this long writing session, Bill Steinkellner, who was one of our producers, said, "Well, what's wrong with somebody tuning in to watch their favorite comedy at nine o'clock on a Thursday night and, for thirty minutes, to live in a world where things like AIDS don't exist?" When no one could think of an answer, that's how we decided to look at it.

Cheers dealt with some serious issues that were beyond your control, such as the 1985 death of actor Nicholas Colasanto, who played Coach. Was that difficult to deal with as a comedy writer? Not only the death of a character, but also of the actual actor who played him?

We knew that Nick was very sick quite a long time before he pa.s.sed away. We had him off the show for half a season because he wasn't feeling well. When he felt better, he came in to pay us a visit and frankly, he didn't look well. Putting him on the show would have been jarring to the audience. He was so emaciated and obviously terminal. So we knew that that day was coming, and we had time to prepare. We just tried to soften it, not to spend a lot of time on it. We wanted to give him a tribute at the end of an episode ["Birth, Death, Love and Rice," September 26, 1985] and move on.

The network, in years past, was always giving us notes about adding youth to the show. So this was our chance. We actually named the replacement character Woody even before we found Woody Harrelson. We created a backstory where Woody had been a pen pal of Coach's, and that worked out well.

It seems that as the show evolved over the years, the humor became broader and more physical, and it became less about dialogue.

It did tend to lean that way. There was one show where Sam and Diane grabbed each other's noses and didn't let go ["I'll Be Seeing You," May 3 and 10, 1984]. I think the first time we tried that joke it was just experimental. It worked, so we moved forward. I think the point we were trying to make was that you reach a stage in a relations.h.i.+p when you can no longer reason with your romantic partner. You go back down the evolutionary scale, physically-grabbing each other's noses. Ted and Sh.e.l.ley made it work.

You and Les co-wrote the final episode of Cheers, "One for the Road," which was broadcast on May 20, 1993. I remember the National Enquirer actually publis.h.i.+ng the entire leaked script a week or so before the show aired. The build-up to the show was tremendous.

That was strange. I'm still not sure how they got the script. But we ended up shooting the last scene without an audience, just to keep it secret. It was a very quiet scene, and we didn't want anybody to know how it ended. n.o.body except for a few people saw the whole show being shot in its entirety.

You once said that all final episodes are very difficult to write. But I would think that final episodes would be easier to write than pilot episodes, in which you're still imagining who the characters are.

First of all, the whole country gets primed for a final episode. There has to be a spectacular finish. It's almost inevitable it's not going to be like the rest of the series because you're going to have to reach conclusions. I think the best ending ever for a television show was M*A*S*H. They had an inevitable conclusion: the end of the war and almost everybody going home.

For the rest of us, we have to manufacture an ending. And one of the problems is that the network always wants to make the last episode longer than it would normally be. In our case, it was ninety minutes, three normal programs in length. Way too long.

The final episode does end on a quiet note. Sam and Norm are alone in the bar, very late at night. After Norm finally leaves, another customer, unseen from the waist up, knocks on the door. Sam says, "Sorry, we're closed" and walks into the back office.

Was there any hidden meaning to that last scene? Some fans felt that it was a metaphor for death.

I'm flattered that some feel that the last scene was a metaphor for death. Every comedy writer aspires to that level of hilarity in their work. Actually, any interpretation other than our saying good-bye and leaving Sam Malone in his bar just as he was back in the very first scene of the series would be coincidental and unintended.

Our agent, Bob Broder, played the customer in the last scene. Bob wanted Cheers to go on with a revised cast. When no one went along with this idea, he became quite despondent and was required to go through a metal detector whenever he came on the lot. [Laughs] So his being turned away at the door in the last scene could be an apt metaphor for thwarted greed and ambition.

Is it true that the then president, Bill Clinton, was going to make an appearance on the final episode?

Yes, and we wrote a whole segment for him. This character, the president, would have learned that the bar was going to close, and he was going to stop by for one last drink. One of the customers would give him advice on how to run the country. We actually cleared the script with his people. But Clinton canceled at the last minute. He was meeting with [Soviet Union president, Boris] Yeltsin in Vancouver for a summit.

That lame excuse.

I wasn't happy with the whole scenario. We stopped being Cheers, and we started to be a "thing." It started to become, "This has got to be sensational. Let's bring Diane back. Let's bring the president on. What about the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions dancing in the bar?" I would like to have that final episode back. We were serving other masters.

We had an episode of Cheers that aired just before the final episode. It was called "The Guy Can't Help It" [May 13, 1993]. It was written by David Angell, Peter Casey, David Lee; all three later went on to write and create Frasier. David Angell died on Flight 11 on 9/11. But this penultimate episode should have been our final episode. It was a half hour. Sam goes to a s.e.x addiction group. Everybody at the group stands and tells their story. This very attractive lady gets up and talks about how addicted she was to s.e.x: "Going from man to man, not caring, just wanting him." Everybody's shaking their head. She sits down. Sam has been frowning in sympathy and has been expressing understanding throughout her story, but when she finishes he sits next to her and quietly asks, "Do you like Chinese food?"

I think that should've been the end. He's still the same Sam from the beginning. A lecher throughout television eternity. And that's where we should have left him.

I suppose the pressure not to put a halt to a runaway hit show is huge. There's just so much money involved that the network would do anything to keep it going.

The money involved is incredible. It's difficult to stop. In fact, we received overtures from the network to continue Cheers with Woody as the head bartender. Both Les and I said, "That's not Cheers anymore." It was time to move on. But I think that if Woody had been agreeable-which he wasn't-the network would have brought in another producing team. It was just too big for the network to ever want to stop.

The final episode of Cheers was shown on two giant Jumbotron screens outside the Bull & Finch Pub in Boston. After the show, at 11:30, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno broadcast a live feed from the bar, which was filled with the show's cast, as well as celebrities, athletes, actors, politicians. The evening has become infamous for how out of control it became. Were you there that night?

I was. It became a circus. The entire cast was upstairs in the restaurant above the bar. We were in a room by ourselves, and they had set up refreshments and, of course, a television to watch the show. There were bleachers outside for fans. Jay Leno was going to shoot live for The Tonight Show after the episode ended. This was his first year. The evening progressed and I could see everybody getting tipsier and tipsier. I thought, Wow, this is going to be strange. Two hours from now these people are going to be live on The Tonight Show. They're going to have to make some kind of sense.

Well, they didn't. Jay began the interviews at around 11:30 [on the East Coast], and by then everyone was beyond drunk. It was a disaster. I'm not a teetotaler by any measure, but I didn't want to be a part of that. It was chaos. There were spitb.a.l.l.s going back and forth. Woody Harrelson was literally trying to shoot spitb.a.l.l.s into Jay Leno's mouth. People were cursing, stumbling. I remember Jay telling someone, "These people are drunk off their a.s.ses." The cast was all schnockered. So were the VIP guests. It was madness, and all broadcast live.

In your opinion, how would you say Cheers influenced the sitcoms that followed it?

It's interesting. I've heard lately that we had an influence that I wasn't aware of. Tina Fey said some very nice things about us, as did Amy Poehler. Actually, we had our thirtieth anniversary of the broadcast of the first Cheers episode recently, and people who had been on staff came up and said they worked on a lot of shows and still regard this as their best experience. It's hard for me to say. I see kind of an influence on Friends, Seinfeld, and other shows with the gang comedy concept. People who hang around each other outside of a work environment.

Another legacy is that sitcoms now have large plot arcs. I've noticed, too, that sitcoms will now end their seasons with cliff-hangers. We would do that on Cheers. We wanted to have people talking about the show over the summer, wondering about it, thinking about it.

What advice would you have for those hoping to get into writing for sitcoms?

The common fault I see is that a lot of writers don't hear the show. Every show has a voice. The better the show, the better the voice. I remember when Les and I got our first job with M*A*S*H. At the time, the two of us had been writing and sending out spec scripts. [M*A*S*H producer] Larry Gelbart told us we'd written a good script. He said: "You hear the show. Most spec scripts don't." There's a quality that's missing, almost apart from the comedy. Maybe it's our radio background rearing its head. With really good comedy writing, you can hear the characters say the lines on paper. It's tough to tell anybody what to do about that.

Easier said than done.

Right. I'd advise anyone interested in screenwriting of any kind to do some acting, maybe take an acting cla.s.s. It'll help you understand that the words you write on paper are meant to be spoken. You'll hear your writing.

Sitcom writing is still writing after all. When I was in college, I met [fantasy and sci-fi writer] Ray Bradbury. I mentioned that I'd like to somehow write for a living, although I didn't know what form that would take. I asked him for recommendations on how to proceed. He immediately said, "Well, first get out of college. You can read everything you need to read on your own, but you can't experience in college what you need to write."

His point-and I later came to agree with it, even though I ended up graduating-is that, yes, it's important to be exposed to great literature. At a certain point, though, you have to get out and see things, go to strange places, meet weird people, maybe fall in love with one of them, get hurt, and even act in a play that will allow you to wear tights in public. I think life experience for too many of us is very limited. So much literature, film, and television is self-referential and insular. It's a world of sequels, remakes, and homages.

Another thing is, you can teach specifics. Things like story construction, joke structure, and character delineation can be picked up from watching and reading good things. But, overall, this is not a science, and I've never worked with any comedy writer-and I've worked with great ones-who hasn't been wrong on occasion. I mean, really wrong.

The last piece of advice I'd give to any writer would be to avoid envy of your peers and joy at their misfortune. Keep your overheated ego and ambition well-concealed around those less powerful than yourself, and don't carry a grudge in this business, no matter how great the slight. Actually, wait, I'm wrong. All these things can be great sources of inspiration. Set them free. Let them run wild.

ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE.

JOEL BEGLEITER.

Agent, UTA

Finding an Agent for a TV-Writing Job

How does a young writer acquire an agent if he or she wants to write comedy for television?

There are a couple ways to do it. The first is to graduate from one of the writing programs. Warner Brothers, Fox, and CBS productions all have their own internal grooming programs where they take writers who have never been on staff and put them through a six- or eight-month-long program in which they write original material and spec scripts. The writer comes out the other side with a stamp of approval from those studios. Warner Brothers is definitively the most successful of them.

After you graduate, the heads of those programs will call agencies and say, "We've got a live one here. This guy or woman just came through and they're exceptional and you should think about hiring them." There are incentives then in place for these studios to hire the writers who have just gone through their programs. So your odds of getting a job are significantly higher than the odds of almost anybody else at your level around town. That's one way to do it.

The other way is to be referred by a writer who's already signed. These clients will call their agents and say, "I work with this guy, or I know this guy, and he's incredible, and you should check out his material." It's an a.s.surance that this writer is employable. That's basically saying, "If I had my own show and I was in charge, I'd hire this guy." That's the second way.

The third way, the most difficult way, is to blindly submit your material to an agent. This is especially difficult in television. The material would have to be absolutely, spectacularly exceptional to be taken on by one of the major agencies without any kind of other connection to the industry already in place.

Is the process different if one wants to write for a sitcom versus wanting to write for late night?

The process is definitely different. For late night, it mostly comes down to referral. Head writers for each of the late shows have a full staff of joke writers, and those people have friends, and they refer their friends. Late-night shows generally take packets as submissions. Each show will put out a set of guidelines and say, "Okay, we need you to write three Top 10 lists in the style of David Letterman, and twenty monologue jokes, and then three desk pieces." They'll then take those submissions, look through them, and bring the funniest people in for interviews and hire them. I think it's easier to get one of those gigs on pure merit than it is to get a traditional sitcom writing job.

Is an agent even a necessity for late night?

I don't think it hurts. It certainly helps in the sense that you are made aware of when these shows have a writing opportunity opening up. Unless you already have friends working on these shows-someone who can give you a heads up every time they are hiring-it will be much more difficult without an agent. I don't know how you'd have the information to know when and where to send your packet.

Now, does having an agent help push you through the door of these shows? Not particularly, in my opinion. It's more based on your writing material. But it certainly helps to have an agent because we do a good job tracking when new openings pop up.

As far as your clients, what's the percentage of those who write for sitcoms compared with those who write for late night?

Ninety-five percent of the people I represent work for sitcoms, and 5 percent of them work for late night. I think that that percentage would probably be relatively identical across the board at all agencies.

What are some of the common mistakes you see writers making who submit material to you?

Some mistakes are very basic. When I open a script, and within the first five pages of that script there are three typos, that tells me how little effort that writer put into this piece. It's an easy way to discourage somebody from reading it. It's a really basic turnoff, but it happens all the time.

Aside from that, I think the only real mistake is not honing the material, not submitting a script that is your best work; just submitting something that has not been vetted by twenty or thirty other people who will be honest about whether it's good or not. This happens a lot. One of my clients will call me and say, "Hey, you should check this stuff out. He's my friend. I think he's great. Will you read his stuff?" And I read it and it's not very good and I call the client back to say, "Listen, unfortunately, this is going to be a pa.s.s. Would you like me to reach out to your friend directly to save you from the pain of having to pa.s.s on my behalf?"

The answer is never, "Really? I loved it. It's really surprising that you didn't love it." It's usually, like, "Okay, great. Thanks. Talk to you later." And you can tell that they didn't love it either, and they're sort of embarra.s.sed that they had to send it to you. There definitely have been occasions when I have pa.s.sed on something and the client has fought for it and said, "I think you're wrong about this." But when you get that other immediate response from the client, you know you were right and they were just doing a favor for a friend.

How important is the cover letter?

The cover letter is largely irrelevant. A letter is mostly for writers who are submitting to someone who is not expecting their material. We all receive SPAM e-mails all day long at the major agencies from writers who have bought e-mail address lists. They are deleted immediately. There's not even the slightest consideration. I don't read the letters. When a client has referred a friend of theirs, the letter is not necessary.

Do you prefer original material or scripts based on existing shows?

Definitely original material. I think there was a period more than ten years ago when everybody needed to have material based on pre-existing shows. And that day has largely gone away. It is impossible to work in television without having a piece of original material.

Why did it change?

I think it changed because the industry became significantly more compet.i.tive. Reality television happened. Survivor happened. Suddenly all the hours on prime time that had been devoted to scripted television shows disappeared. Those hours got eaten up by reality shows. So there are fewer shows and it became more compet.i.tive to get onto those shows. You get to a point where you can only read so many Parks and Recs, 30 Rocks, and Offices. So how do you differentiate yourself?