Pandora's Box, page 11
For him, the game changer was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. After stopping for the night at a motel, Janet Leigh is knifed to death in the shower. Martin exclaims, “We’re only twenty minutes into the movie. She can’t be knifed—she’s Janet Leigh! It’s so powerful when it comes at you like that. I loved it. And I try to replicate that. The sense that anything can happen. If the jeopardy is real, it’s much more exciting if and when they do succeed.”39
Martin ended up in the Hollywood trenches, where he spent ten years or so, from 1985 to 1995. By that time, he was dissatisfied with his two preoccupations, history and fantasy, the former because the readers already know how the story is going to turn out, and the latter, mostly set in the Middle Ages, because in his view they were getting it all wrong. He likes to says it was a “Disneyland middle ages,” replete with castles, princes, and princesses, not to mention a class system featuring those without crowns and silk garments at the bottom. He came up with the formula that would make his work unique: “What I’d like to do is write an epic fantasy that had the imagination and the sense of wonder that you get in the best fantasy, but the gritty realism of the best historical fiction.”40
Needless to say, Martin was also frustrated with network TV, which, he discovered, was all about budgets. He likes to tell the story about an episode he wrote for The Twilight Zone featuring Sir Lancelot riding a horse into Stonehenge, which required building a costly set. He recalls, “The producer came to me and said, ‘You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge, but you cannot have horses and Stonehenge.’ I was heartbroken”—so much so that he returned to writing books, starting A Game of Thrones in 1991.41 It’s been described as “like J. R. R. Tolkien with a lot fewer elves and more sex.”42
The lunch dishes were cleared, but Martin was garrulous and Benioff and Weiss spellbound. After the success of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which adapted the first of Tolkien’s trilogy, Martin explains, “The studios said, ‘That thing with dragons and elves is a hit, we better have something with dragons and elves.’” It had a familiar ring. They were all over him, but The Song of Ice and Fire was almost impossible to produce. They’d say, “We can’t have these seventeen subplots and casts of thirty. We’ll pick one character and get rid of everything else.”43
Benioff recalls, “He wanted to write a series where he could have both the horses and Stonehenge and fuck all these limitations and fuck length and everything else that they’re holding you back with.”44 Martin wanted it all—or nothing. He realized that it could only be done for television—not ABC or CBS or NBC or Fox because there was way too much sex and violence—but a cable service like HBO where sex and violence were the coin of the realm. When Benioff and Weiss proposed just that, he jumped.
Still, to this day, they remain thunderstruck by their good luck. When Martin asked for their qualifications Benioff admitted they didn’t have any. “We don’t know why he trusted us with his life’s work.”45 Nevertheless, with Martin’s blessing in hand, the two novices brought it to HBO. They knew that convincing the cabler that had produced The Sopranos to go for dragons and ice zombies was extremely unlikely. Not only had HBO never done anything like this, but it was a “tweener,” a mash-up of genres—neither fish nor fowl, fairy tale nor horror, fantasy nor swashbuckler—and could easily fall in the cracks between them. Then there was the stubborn fact that Game of Thrones was a budget buster, a period piece set in exotic locations and stuffed with funny character names that sounded alike—Tywin, Tyrion, Tyrell—made-up languages, and so on, which rendered it a challenge to follow. But they also knew “if HBO wasn’t going to go for it, there was just nobody else who had the resources to do it right,” explains Weiss. “Either they did it or we didn’t do it at all. There was only one chance.”46
When Benioff ended up across the desk from the redoubtable Strauss, he had the unenviable task of persuading her to take an unserious genre seriously. He was, needless to say, petrified. They heard she was a hitman, that she wasn’t going to smile at them, just stare as if they were idiots. They later described it as the scariest pitch they’d ever done.
The writers, who knew that they had little chance of being picked up, found to their surprise a passionate advocate in Strauss. She took them to Albrecht, who couldn’t be bothered to read more than ten pages of the book. He sent Strauss to Plepler, in New York.
Plepler says, “It was an easy green light for us.”47 But according to Strauss, “That was not an easy green light at all.” Plepler’s attitude was, We’ve already got vampires, referring to True Blood. Now this? What are we, the Syfy service? For starters, Games of Thrones was totally off-brand.48 Benioff reassured him that they intended to downplay the fantasy elements, both because they were expensive and because they wanted a broader audience, not just sword-and-sorcery geeks. They wanted mothers, NFL players—in other words, everyone—to watch the show. And, as they had also told Plepler, they would save money by keeping the sprawling, bank-busting battle scenes off-camera. “It’s not a story with a million orcs charging across the plains,” said Weiss.49 (They later admitted they were lying.) Weiss also felt that “with the fantasy genre on television, tonally it’s very easy [to go too] campy. Every scene, you change two lines and it’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”50
Benioff, however, had done his homework, and played to Plepler’s passions. “Knowing that I am a political junkie, he said that the show is about power,” Plepler recalls. He says Benioff convinced him that “within the first fifteen minutes you’ll forget where you are. You could be in fifteenth-century England or you could be in tenth-century France.”51 Later, the two writers described the pitch meeting as “a con job.”52 They knew they had considerable latitude in describing the project because they were confident that none of the HBO executives could possibly have read Martin’s four-thousand-page opus, and therefore they had no idea what they were saying yes to.
Pitching only the pilot, the writers were vague about the rest of the series. Weiss confessed, “We knew that it was gonna turn into exactly what we promised HBO it wasn’t.”53 However they did it, it worked. Plepler was convinced. He is reputed to have thought, Power and pussy. Who’s not going to love that? Plepler was working with a constrained $1 billion production budget when he became co-president in 2007 and only marginally more three years later when he became CEO. Nevertheless, in November 2008, Plepler gave Benioff and Weiss about $10 million to shoot their pilot. The following year, they went to work.
For seventeen years Albrecht was Strauss’s powerful mentor and had given her a lot of latitude. When he left, she found herself with a target on her back. Lombardo remained her only shield. The tone of the office had been set by Mr. Hetero, as Albrecht was called by HBO’s gay employees, and Lombardo and Strauss were two openly queer employees in the company. They became the closest of friends. They adopted kids at the same time. She sat with him in Cedars-Sinai in LA while his partner died of AIDS.
Strauss was loved and valued in the LA office. But in the New York office, they were just hearing the bad stuff, and Plepler is said to have begun pressuring Lombardo to get rid of her. Says Whitehead, “The firing of Carolyn Strauss who, along with Casey Bloys, was probably one of the greatest programming executives to ever walk the surface of the earth, remains an enduring mystery.”54 It’s possible that Plepler was punishing her for passing on Mad Men, the previous year. He was angry about it. He said, “This is the biggest mistake ever that we didn’t make this show.”55 Says Strauss, “I think that was something that bothered Richard. One of the reasons that they wanted me gone is because my development list was small. It takes a lot of time to do this stuff. It worked out much better for me to produce a few things really well than manage a huge slate of projects, which definitely is not my strong suit.”56
There was that other reason as well. “The feeling was that HBO had a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign up and now we wanted to roll out the welcome mat,”57 says Schaffer.
The gossip reached Albrecht, who told Strauss that she was going to be fired. Strauss asked Lombardo outright if this were true. He confirmed that Nelson and Plepler said, “We think it’s time for her to go.”58 She was not the crying kind but she broke down and sobbed, stormed out of the building, and never returned. She was not officially fired, nor did she officially resign, but it became “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” as one HBO-er put it. She didn’t want to work at a place where she wasn’t wanted, especially a place, as she puts it, “where I poured my heart and soul for a long time. It sucked.”59 She left in 2008, a year after Albrecht was fired.
Plepler and Lombardo quickly moved to replace her with Sue Naegle, a top agent at United Talent Agency who had brought them Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under and True Blood. Naegle’s colleagues at the agency told her she was crazy to go to HBO, because it was still wallowing in its post-Albrecht doldrums. They warned her, “Do you want to go to work at HBO now? It’s circling the drain.”60
Naegle ignored them and took the job as president of HBO Entertainment, responsible for comedy and drama series, each of which had its own head. Naegle knew writers, but as one executive explains, as an agent, “It’s very different to sell television than it is to make it.”61 Another notes, “Now you’ve got three people in the chain of command”—Plepler, Lombardo, and Naegle—“who do not have day-to-day experience in being creative executives.”62
Naegle and Lombardo would ironically become victims of HBO’s success. Like kids in a candy store, they could get anything they wanted, and anything turned into everything. As David Nevins put it, “HBO was very focused on what was politely called star fucking.”63 Lombardo’s only compass seemed to be properties lionized by others, and therefore he was chasing Emmy, Oscar, Globe, Tony, and National Book Award winners. Says Reilly, “What people who don’t have creative instincts tend to do is make shiny big deals because they think that’s the way to go.”64 Nothing came of most of these deals.
HBO went on a buying spree, showering money on anyone who could press a key on her or his new Macbook Air. Well, not exactly anyone. It signed up Karen Russell (Swamplandia), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex), and Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante’s Handbook), as well as Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, and Carl Hiassen. Naegle even convinced Mary Karr to turn her three memoirs into a script. She hired Noah Baumbach to direct Jonathan Franzen’s National Book Award winner The Corrections, set to star Ewan McGregor, Dianne Wiest, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. “It was the kind of show that most people would do for two cents and we were spending what Game of Thrones spends,” Baumbach said at the time, and “we didn’t have dragons.”65 Indeed, the list was so long that Ayelet Waldman, working with her husband Michael Chabon on Hobgoblin, joked that HBO was “like the Works Progress Administration for writers.”66
The deciding factor in all these deals might have been “schmuck insurance.”67 When HBO signed a development deal with a writer, she or he was locked up. When you had as many of these deals as HBO had, they added up to millions of dollars a year, but if the alternative was being ambushed by an up-and-coming basic cable channel like AMC with Mad Men, making them look like schmucks, it was worth it.
In a not so thinly veiled criticism of Plepler and Lombardo, Naegle observes, “You can’t just pick a name television creator and expect that his show is going to be a hit, especially when big feature names start to come into the television space. That’s not something you understand when your background is PR or business affairs. The problem is that when you’re focused on big names, you’re forgetting that David Chase came from I’ll Fly Away, or Matt Weiner started as a comedy writer, or Lena Dunham—nobody even knew who she was.”68
HBO gained a reputation for going through pilots like Kleenex, putting dozens of shows into development—there were reportedly 160 at one time. Lombardo insisted on sitting in on Naegle’s pitch meetings, undermining her authority. He enjoyed a reputation for saying yes. As one source put it, “He was a bully on the inside of the company, but he wanted to be liked on the outside.”69 Says one HBO source, “I don’t blame Sue for buying like a drunken sailor, because I think she knew that Mike wouldn’t necessarily support her if she said no to things.”70
According to Mike White, of White Lotus fame, “They had all of these deals with all of these fancy people, and they were just notorious for never letting things go or coming to a decision. They’re so much about artist relationships, but it ended up being—and I felt this—you want to keep me on the hook but you don’t actually want to make my shit. Like, leave me alone. Stop calling me! This is not working. I have other places to go and do things.”71
Perhaps the crowning glory of Lombardo and the others’ reign of error was, ironically, the one occasion when Lombardo said no. HBO rejected Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone. Sheridan, a former actor and alumnus of Sons of Anarchy turned screenwriter (Sicario, Hell or High Water), recalls Lombardo telling him the only way HBO would produce it was if it were to star Robert Redford. When Sheridan got Redford to commit, Lombardo turned him down again, telling him that he said “an actor like Redford,” possibly because Redford was too expensive for the tight-fisted cabler.72 Given that the show became 2022’s biggest series, it would be fair to say that Lombardo was yellowstoned.
Plepler was well aware that they were signing up too many projects. “We were under tremendous pressure to deliver more and more money to an earnings-based corporation that prevented us from expanding our programming, and that was just the reality of being part of Time Warner.”73 He continues, “I think it’s fair criticism to say that we overbought in the early aughts. The intent wasn’t to keep talent off the market,” but rather to keep the creatives thinking HBO.
There were other reasons for it, besides corporate greed and schmuck insurance. Rupert Murdoch had already attempted a hostile takeover of Bewkes’s company in 2014, and had HBO poured more money into production, it would have affected its bottom line, knocked the stock price down, and made HBO once again a tempting takeover target.
This was also one of the reasons that as early as 2006, when executives from the West Coast office presented a plan to buy Netflix, the three blind mice Bewkes had elevated to the top—Nelson, Kessler, and Harold Akselrad—cut them off at the knees. (Only Plepler dissented.) They feared that the big MSO’s like Comcast and Cox that distributed and marketed HBO, as well as the affiliates, would have, in Whitehead’s words, “punished us for essentially going around them to create a business that was focused directly on consumers. And that would’ve cost us billions of dollars.”74 He continues “The stock would have cratered, and Jeff did not want to make himself [yet again] bait for a hostile takeover.”
Bewkes may have also been gun-shy of internet flash-in-the-pans like AOL, after the fiasco of the Time Warner–AOL merger. He liked to say that AOL was worth almost three-quarters of a billion dollars one minute, and the next minute, nothing.
Like almost every other executive, Bewkes walked the walk dictated by conservative economist Milton Friedman, who convinced corporate America that its sole purpose was to deliver profits to shareholders measured by the value of its stock every quarter. Poor quarterly earnings calls to Wall Street became the financial equivalent of DEFCON 1. HBO, in other words, was at the mercy of the Street.
Friedman’s gospel discouraged the kind of long-term thinking that might have encouraged HBO to buy Netflix when it had the opportunity. Or, as Fuchs puts it, more colorfully, Bewkes “would say that he wanted to produce shareholder value. If I hear one more time that shareholder value means more than anything else, I’ll go to Chicago and piss on Milton Friedman’s grave because that fucking sentence has destroyed American capitalism.”75
Still, it wasn’t all Friedman. There was more than a little arrogance involved. Says one agent, it was, “We’re HBO. They’re the minor leagues.”76 Bewkes was, after all, the man who in 2010, referring to Netflix, famously quipped, “It’s a little bit like—‘Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?’” concluding, “I don’t think so.”77
Hastings, of course, treated Bewkes’s barb as a badge of honor. During one retreat, cocky Netflix executives wore Albanian army berets, Hastings recalled. “For the next year, I wore an Albanian Army dog tag around my neck.”78 The crowning irony, however, was that years later, Hastings asked a former HBO-er how much it would have been prepared to pay to buy Netflix. The answer was $2 billion. Hastings said he would have accepted.
Every once in a while Naegle tried to put on the brakes. Recalls drama head Levine, “They would stop for a week and then something great would come in and they’d say, ‘We have to buy that.’ They couldn’t help themselves. Michael spent way too much money on way too many things.”79
One hit that did make it on the air that Naegle developed was Lena Dunham’s Girls, produced with Jenni Konner. Given the male-centric shows of HBO’s golden age, it was like throwing open a window and letting in a cool breeze. Dunham was just twenty-three at the time. Says Naegle, “It was just difficult to get shows made with female creators. When I came into television there were no women running shows without a male counterpart, period. I was committed to the idea that there was nothing about television writing or producing that precluded an all-female team.”80
Girls was one of the first, if only, shows made solely by female producers. Initially, there was some skepticism on the part of the cabler. “Lena was quite young and there was a feeling that people who were the age of the characters didn’t even get HBO, because they couldn’t afford it,” Naegle recalls. “But I knew that older women would love the show, and she had a proof of concept in [Dunham’s feature] Tiny Furniture, which was very much her voice and made on a shoestring.”
