Pandora's Box, page 10
Albrecht had indeed joined AA but had started drinking again around 2002, the same year he got divorced from his wife Annie and was upped to CEO. According to Adweek, HBO colleagues confirmed that drinking was an issue, and compared him to a “ticking time bomb.”4 Nevertheless, Albrecht continued, “It didn’t occur to me that I would lose my job.”5
Albrecht tried to hang on, but The Los Angeles Times disclosed that a similar incident had occurred in 1991 when he allegedly assaulted a woman in his division, someone with whom he had been having an extramarital affair. In 2022, a new book on HBO by Felix Gillette and John Koblin resurrected this story with some new details. According to this account, attributed to an anonymous source, “In an apparent fit of jealous rage, Albrecht had attacked [her], charging at her from across the room, grabbing her by the neck, knocking over her executive chair, and strangling her down to the floor. Before she could lose consciousness, he let go.”6
Albrecht denied the entire incident, but by the time it resurfaced, he was president of Legendary Television, which put him on leave, which became permanent. Albrecht’s lawyer denounced the accounts, calling them “false, inflammatory and destructive depictions of Mr. Albrecht based upon fictionalized accounts.”7
Back in 1991, the press alleged that two, perhaps three similar episodes had occurred with other women. “He couldn’t keep it in his pants,” says a source at HBO. “It was like an addiction for him.”8 The staff used to joke that the reason Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss made such an effective team was because she was gay.
Says Fuchs, “He was protected by the boys’ network. You know how easy it is to destroy an actress’s career like Harvey did with Mira Sorvino? You just tell the studio head, ‘I got to tell you. This is the most difficult woman I’ve ever worked with. I mean, she’s a terrific actress, but I wouldn’t work with her again in a hundred years.’ Boom, it’s done.”9
The Jensen assault, however, was too public to stay in Vegas, and eventually the collateral damage threatened Bewkes himself. He was in line to succeed Richard Parsons as CEO of Time Warner, and he had a shareholders meeting coming up on May 18. Reportedly he wanted the mess behind him. He pressured Albrecht to step down for behavior unbecoming—anyone. On May 9, 2007, a year or so after Albrecht closed the Gem Saloon, he himself was deadwooded.
In 2010, Albrecht still saw himself as the victim. “Violence against anybody is wrong,” he said. “I did a dumb thing in Vegas, it lasted three seconds, and the price I paid for it personally, professionally, and financially was enormous.”10
It’s easy to understand why Bewkes was reluctant to part with Albrecht. In 2006, the year before he was ousted, HBO was swelling Time Warner coffers to the tune of $1.2 billion in profits on revenues of $3.4 billion, nothing to scoff at. And HBO still had plenty of room to grow. It had penetrated no more than a third of American homes, and its subscriber base was expanding at a rate of a million a year.
Albrecht had not only grown the bottom line, but he had made good on HBO’s promise to furnish quality programming. It was The Sopranos for which he was best known. David Chase credits him with saving him from the “pissy little dolts and small-minded, fear-induced decision-making” network execs who were eating his soul. “I washed up on the beach of this place HBO,” he goes on, “and I would have drowned if I hadn’t.”11
Albrecht’s abrupt departure could not have happened at a worse time. By 2007, HBO was staring into the post-Sopranos abyss. The cabler had scored with the behind-the-scenes Hollywood comedy Entourage, as well as Big Love, a charming, inventive, and well-reviewed dramedy set in polygamous Mormon country, but their numbers were nothing like those of The Sopranos. The premiere of the final season of Big Love was beaten by Worst Cooks in America on the Food Channel. Beyond those, other new shows failed to ignite. Carnivale, a depressing series set in the Depression, was slated for six seasons, but dropped after two. Ditto Rome. Lucky Louis only lasted one season, and same for the torpid Tell Me You Love Me. The aptly named Bored to Death somehow hung on for three seasons; How to Make It in America bombed, while In Treatment was a well-written but only a mildly interesting talk-a-thon largely confined to the four walls of a shrink’s office. Hung, Tremé, and Newsroom all hovered in the limbo between success and failure. True Blood and Boardwalk Empire were in development, but still question marks.
HBO thought it would get a bump from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s sequel to Band of Brothers, called The Pacific. Hanks in particular was hands-on. “If there was a showrunner on Band of Brothers and The Pacific, it was absolutely, one hundred percent Tom Hanks,” says a source involved with the production. “He got all the scripts, he read them, he gave us notes. He hired the directors.”12
Kary Antholis, the executive in charge of miniseries, remembers, “The first cuts were coming in, and it was hard to make sense of what they were about, what the drama was, and who the characters were, and how it all fit together. It wasn’t working.” Antholis claims he figured out a way to salvage it.13 Still, if HBO expected it to replicate the success of Band of Brothers, it was going to be sorely disappointed. The costs spiraled upward to an estimated $21 million an episode for a total of $200 to $225 million, about $100 million more than its predecessor. A chunk of that price tag would have been defrayed by the DVD sales that had made Band of Brothers such a gold mine in 2001, but they never materialized. By 2010, when The Pacific premiered, DVD sales had slid 22 percent.
Then there was John from Cincinnati, the poison pill Albrecht had left behind. By the time the surfer and his board were scraped off the sand, the TV landscape had changed. HBO’s slogan “It’s not TV, It’s HBO,” was sounding increasingly hollow in view of the premium cabler’s raft of subpremium shows. Sophisticated viewers could do a lot better with lowly basic cable networks, like FX and AMC, that were quickly recasting themselves in its image, albeit with ads.
Formerly adoring TV critics, who had licked HBO’s face, started to growl. The New York Times’ influential media columnist David Carr wrote that HBO was confronting a midlife crisis with a great deal of thickness around the middle while in the same pages, Bill Carter wondered if HBO had “finally tumbled from its pedestal of prestige.”14 The answer was yes, and the tumble was taking its toll. It was no longer gaining subscribers at the rate to which it had become accustomed. By 2009, it had 29.3 million, only 600,000 more than it had in 2006.
Bewkes moved quickly to repair the damage, although his solution was inelegant, to say the least. He promoted a colorless, ex-military bean-counter, former COO Bill Nelson, to the top CEO slot. Beneath him, confusion reigned. There were three co-presidents, none of whom particularly liked or respected one another: Eric Kessler from the marketing side, Hal Akselrad, general counsel, and Richard Plepler from corporate communications who was rewarded with the plum programming slot. Problem solved, except for one thing: none of the top four, including Plepler, had any experience programming, while the two executives who did—Carolyn Strauss and Colin Callender—were passed over for the top jobs. Strauss was too cold, Callender too hot. His portfolio was the made-for-TV-movie division called HBO Showcase. He was another controversial character, a monstre sacré, as someone called him. A Brit, he was admired for his impeccable taste—his triumph was Angels in America—but feared and disliked for his terrible temper. The story, possibly apocryphal, was that he was thrown out of an anger management group because he was too angry.
Bewkes handed programming to Plepler despite his inexperience—he had neither a financial, a legal, nor a creative background. “Jeff didn’t know the industry,” says Fuchs. “You had a company that didn’t have anyone at that upper level, after Chris left, that knew who to hire.”15
On the other hand, according to Glenn Whitehead, president of business affairs and production at HBO and HBO Max, “Richard was creative adjacent. He had been very close to Michael Fuchs. He was very, very close to Chris Albrecht. He had his nose in lots and lots of programming activities for many, many years. He had a keen understanding of how original programming in particular was critical to the HBO brand and how it could be deployed to support that brand.”16
Plepler was smart and preternaturally articulate, a protégé of the fabled spin doctor John Scanlon, who represented a spectrum of high-profile clients, including 60 Minutes. Fuchs had met Plepler and Scanlon through Democratic Party circles, and hired Plepler to do PR in 1992. Smooth, unflappable, and strategic, he was the perfect counterweight to the combustible Fuchs, a master at fashioning the HBO narrative at a time when few would give it the time of day. He nurtured a coterie of New York City and Washington, DC, influencers, including the editors of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and New York, plus respected writers like Frank Rich. A political junkie, he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and dined regularly at the Lambs Club, a watering hole for the who’s who in theater and film. He would entertain at his Upper East Side townhouse with elaborate dinners, where the élite mixed with the élitest.
Plepler rose so quickly through the cabler’s executive ranks that he collected more than his share of enemies along the way. As one source put it, “While he excelled at guarding the brand, the brand he was best at protecting was himself.”17 And another, “Nobody enjoyed being Richard Plepler more than Richard Plepler.”18 He basked in the limelight, the Emmys, the Globes, and so on.
Plepler seemed almost genetically engineered to extricate HBO from the perfect storm that was buffeting it, and well able to replace Albrecht. Says yet another source, “Richard was adept at making you believe that you were in a sacred zone of closeness and friendship. It’s easy to discount it or to minimize it, but whether it’s a skill or an illness, awesome or sickening, it served him well.” Fuchs, who originally hired Plepler, is particularly bitter. He says, “He did it to me. Richard’s gimmick was, he was able to deal very well with men older than him. He became like their loyal son.”19 Says another highly placed executive, “He became consigliere to Michael, to Chris, and then to Jeff Bewkes, never missing a beat.”20
By several accounts, Plepler managed upward better than he would manage downward. According to one, “When Fuchs blew himself up in his quest for the crown, Dick Parsons warned Bewkes, ‘Plepler’s Michael’s guy. You can’t trust him. You got to get rid of him.’ Bewkes talked to Richard, said, ‘Listen, if you want to continue with me, I can’t have you maintaining your relationship with Michael.’”21 Plepler broke the bad news to Fuchs, telling him something like, “‘I’m young in my career. I’m not getting a big payout the way you are.’ Michael apparently understood.”22
As it turned out, Fuchs didn’t understand. Eventually, the source speculates, “Michael got resentful, worried about his legacy. Because HBO was starting to do stories about Bewkes, building up Plepler and Albrecht, and Michael would think, What about me?” According to Fuchs, “Richard is all about Richard. He’s a dog, he’ll follow whoever feeds him. Richard had his head up Bewkes’s ass so fast that he probably was wearing a diving bell. He should never have been a CEO.”
Plepler declined to comment on Fuchs’s characterization of him, and would say only, “Michael Fuchs brought me to HBO, for which I’m eternally grateful. He deserves all the credit in the world for focusing on original programming when it wasn’t obvious. For that, he deserves a standing ovation.”23
There was even said to be such a thing as a “Plepler show,” one bathed in an aura of prestige that was not crude and vulgar. But he was smart enough not to be limited by his limitations. He is said to have disliked Danny McBride’s comedies, which were all crude and vulgar, but he greenlit them anyway.
Plepler delegated programming operations that involved millions of dollars to Mike Lombardo. The head of business affairs on the West Coast, Lombardo was a lawyer and dealmaker who had good relationships with the talent agencies that sent projects his way. HBO’s HR department said, “If he doesn’t get this he’s going to walk, taking his contacts with him, and you don’t want to lose him.”24 All the program divisions—documentaries, miniseries, sports, specials, and series, both drama and comedy—reported to him. (Lombardo declined to be quoted for attribution.)
As it turned out, the stone in HBO’s shoe seemed to be Lombardo himself. First off, says HBO communications head Quentin Schaffer, “With Mike, Richard was gracious, supportive, and inclusive, and had said they were partners. Mike was under the delusion that ‘partners’ meant ‘equals,’ but Richard was the one fully in charge of running the company.”25 Second, according to Whitehead, “Mike refused to be the head of programming operations. He insisted that he be the head of programming, period. He said, ‘No, no, no, no. I want to be creative.’ Making Plepler the person to whom programming would report was no mistake, but letting Mike be the head creative as opposed to head programming operations, I think in retrospect, was challenging.”26 (Translated from HBO-speak into English, this means that it was a mistake.)
Lombardo was indeed a controversial figure. He seemed to want to be liked, but as someone put it, “Wanting to be a nice guy and being a nice guy are two different things.”27 Some HBO-ers remember him as a know-it-all who didn’t know it all. According to Schaffer, “Whether intentional or not, Mike operated through fear. Everyone was scared of him.”28 And another source: “He would leave people crying. More people hated him than any other executive who has come through HBO.”29
Adds Whitehead, tactfully, “Mike is in many respects, an exceptional human being. But as he got elevated and got more and more power, he did not always wield that power graciously as he might have earlier in his career. Mike intimidated many of the people that worked for him.”30
On the other hand, Lombardo had his fans. Says David Levine, who spent a decade at HBO starting in 2009, and became executive VP and co-head of drama in 2016, “I really loved working for Mike. He seized on fear. I never showed him any fear, and he respected me.”31
The net result of the executive shuffling was that Bewkes hired four people to replace one—Albrecht. As the number of executives metastasized, so did the bureaucracy. Previously, Strauss had simply reported to Albrecht, whereas now she reported to Lombardo, who reported to Plepler, who reported to Nelson. HBO was becoming an executive-heavy, network-style organization that Fuchs would never have recognized.
Reports of HBO’s demise were premature, to say the least. Although Albrecht’s exit was a body blow, the glass-half-fullers could point to shows incubated by Albrecht and Strauss, like True Blood, that would premiere the year following his exit and turn out to be the first real hit since The Sopranos. True Blood was not a “Plepler show,” Ball explains, it was a genre show, and “it didn’t feel like ‘HBO important.’ By that time, they really liked the mantle of being important.”32 Again, Plepler greenlit it anyway.
All but forgotten in the anxiety and bad press surrounding the black hole that threatened to swallow programming were the two nobodies who had waltzed into the HBO offices and pitched an implausible sword-and-sorcery epic to Strauss the previous March, 2006. The series, of course, was Game of Thrones, the very definition of a not-Plepler show.
David Benioff and Dan Weiss were novelists trying their hands at movies. Benioff had written a more than respectable thriller, 25th Hour, which Spike Lee turned into a movie. Weiss had done little more than keep Eagles frontman Glenn Frey’s bathroom stocked with toilet paper when working for him as his personal assistant. In 2006, George R. R. Martin’s agent sent Benioff four volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire. Fantasy had always been a déclassé genre targeting kids and nerds. Benioff had read a lot of it when he was a boy but, he explains, “[When] I hit puberty, and realized that my Dungeons and Dragons game was never gonna get me laid, I just went cold turkey on fantasy, I still didn’t get laid.”33
Benioff groaned every time his gaze fell on the stack of Martin’s books on the floor, approximately 4,200 pages’ worth of sword fights, damsels in distress, and airborne, fire-breathing creatures of various shapes and sizes. He picked up the first book, A Game of Thrones, and was only a few hundred pages into it when, gobsmacked, he called Weiss and said, “You have got to buy this book, ’cause it’s given me the most fun I’ve had reading anything in a long, long time.”34 They became converts, more than converts, zealots in their devotion to the saga. They were desperate to put Martin’s series on the air. When asked about their project, they described it as “The Sopranos meets Middle-earth.”35
Cut to the Palm Restaurant in Hollywood, in 2006, where the two were meeting Martin for the first time. Acutely aware that they had zero TV experience, and that Martin had turned down every single suitor who had approached him, they were more than a little nervous. As Weiss puts it, “For us, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When you want something really, really badly, it can be terrifying to meet somebody who has the sole power to say yes or no.”36
Martin is a squat, elf-like man with an abundant beard, and a head of untamed but thinning white hair trapped under a trademark Greek fisherman’s cap. He looks like one of his own creations. To Benioff and Weiss, and later the cast and crew of Game of Thrones, he became a figure of veneration.
Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, Martin was the son of a longshoreman. “We had no money, we lived in the projects, we didn’t own a car,” he recalls. “I lived on First Street, I went to school on Fifth Street. My world was confined to five blocks.”37 His imagination, on the other hand, was free ranging, his lifeline. When he was a child, his teachers would catch him reading Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov. They grabbed the books, admonishing him: “Read a real book.”
Real or not, Martin loved “reading a book and not knowing what’s going to happen. And being in suspense.” He explains, “When the hero is scared, I want to be scared,” continuing, “A lot of this gets interfered with by the conventions of entertainment. The hero is surrounded by 150 Nazis, but if he’s Harrison Ford, we know nothing really bad is going to happen to [him] . . . The moment the reader begins to believe that a character is protected by the magical cloak of authorial immunity, tension goes out the window.”38
