Pandora's Box, page 19
Darabont was abruptly fired at the end of July 2011, midway into the production of the second season. The cast and crew were dazed and confused. Said one, “Even when you have a hit, they can still destroy you.” Reportedly, AMC was “terrorizing” the cast to discourage bad press. “They’re scared,” said an insider, speaking of the actors. “They’re on a zombie show. They are all really easy to kill off.”48
Darabont was in the habit of promiscuously sending vituperative emails to everyone in whose work he was disappointed. He claimed their behavior had given him heart trouble. “Fuck you all for giving me chest pains because of the staggering fucking incompetence, blindness . . . and beyond-arrogant lack of regard for what is written.” In this vein, he continued, “I deserve better than a heart attack because people are too stupid to read a script and understand the words.”49
Darabont targeted two writers, Chic Eglee, a veteran of The Shield and Dexter, and Jack LoGiudice for delivering what he considered inferior scripts, and he told an AMC executive he should have “hunted down and fucking killed them with a brick, then gone and burned down their homes.”50 Would that his own scripts were as colorful as his emails.
In December 2013, Darabont filed a suit for $280 million in damages, accusing AMC of self-dealing with its vertically integrated production arm, AMC Studios, which allegedly gifted the cable arm, AMC Networks, with abnormally low licensing fees, thereby minimizing the payouts to profit participants like himself. In 2021, Darabont (and talent agency CAA) won a payout of $200 million from AMC. With that in mind, in November 2022, producers Robert Kirkman, Chic Eglee, Glen Mazzara, and Gale Anne Hurd filed a new suit against AMC.
As things turned out, it seemed that AMC walked with the dead for too long: eleven seasons and innumerable spin-offs. It paid the price of becoming a monoshow network, putting all its bodies in the same grave. The problem seemed to be that no one who remained at the network after the exit of the Wolynetz-Sorcher-Wayne gang was any good developing new shows. “AMC was always in the habit of lining up behind one idea and beating it to death,” says Wolynetz. “Their greatest successes were not developed there. Each arrived as a complete pilot script.”51 Better Call Saul was a spin-off from the same team that produced Breaking Bad, and Killing Eve was developed by the BBC. Says one source, “They had nothing to do with it other than airing it.”52
By this time, the Dolans’ company, which owns not only the Knicks and the Rangers but Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, and the Beacon Theater, was being run by Charles Dolan’s son, James. “Jim was born on third base, part of that generation that thinks they’re entrepreneurial titans, like Trump,” continues Wolynetz. “But it’s a company that started at an office park on Long Island. They got to a very, very high altitude through no fault of their own, but at the end of the day, they’re still at an office park in Long Island.”53 A veritable parade of executives followed the Mad Men gang out the door, including Stillerman, Collier, and Collins.
Sapan’s job was to be a “Jimmy whisperer,”54 as one source put it. In April 2021, Sapan gave an upbeat interview about AMC’s glowing prospects to The Hollywood Reporter, and then left three months later. Says the source, “They haven’t been able to hang on to a CEO since Josh left.” Finally AMC gave up and made James Dolan interim CEO.
The primary role of the CEO had been “to insulate everyone else from the whims of Jimmy Dolan,” says Wolynetz. “What you’re seeing is what happens when you have Jimmy untethered. He’s petulant. Look at all the people he’s banned from Madison Square Garden because they said something bad in public about his management of the Knicks.”55 The New York Times reports that he is using facial recognition technology not only to bar lawyers representing companies that are suing him from the venues he owns, but all lawyers working for these companies.56 On Thanksgiving weekend in 2022, Radio City Music Hall, another of his venues, refused admission to a lawyer shepherding her daughter’s Girl Scout troop to a Rockettes concert.57
As Wolynetz explains, “Jimmy’s not stupid. He has a command of what his business is—cable—but his business doesn’t exist anymore. It had tremendous value as an acquisitions target a few years ago, but they missed their window. And Jimmy’s reaction to anything that’s complicated is to make cuts.”58 AMC has been unordering episodes and shows that have completed shooting.
AMC has become a poster child for the ills that are besetting the cable industry. Since it has already licensed its most valuable asset, the endless zombie saga, to Netflix, chances are it will be picked over and sold for parts, like Sundance Now Channel or Shudder. As LightShed Partners’ Rich Greenfield, a highly respected industry analyst, put it, “AMC Networks is the walking dead.”59
Post-Homeland, Showtime went from hit to hit: Ray Donovan, Billions, The Chi, and Yellowjackets, plus some very fine limited series like The Loudest Voice and Your Honor.
If Dexter: New Blood was the most popular show in Showtime’s history, Yellowjackets is second. HBO, as usual, turned it down—what with its hit, Euphoria, it apparently had had enough of teenagers.
Part teenage female bonding, part horror, Yellowjackets makes Lost look like a Disney series. The showrunners, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, faced skepticism that girls—schooled in social skills—could devolve into the required savagery. One man said, “What are they going to do? Collaborate to death?”60 But they proved good Donner partiers. Yellowjackets is best known for its casual cannibalism, as a plane carrying a New Jersey girls’ soccer team crashes in the snowy wilderness of Ontario’s mountains, stranding them for nineteen months. Instead of lobbing snowballs at one another and building snowwomen, the girls turn feral, indulging in demonic rituals, knifings, poisonings, dismemberments, and finally cannibalism.
The captain of the team, the pretty prom queen in most shows, freezes to death at the end of Season 1. As Season 2 begins, contemplating her frozen corpse on an empty stomach in an episode whimsically named “Edible Complex,” her best friend gives it a shove, and an ear falls off. She tries to put it back on, but as anyone who has attempted to reattach a frozen ear knows, it doesn’t take, and she ends up eating it. After the first bite, the rest of the gang barbecue the body, which smells like sirloin, and digs in.
Ironies abound. Said one of the actors, Jasmin Savoy Brown, “It’s kinda funny to do COVID tests and then also be like, ‘Hey now everyone just lick and bite this thing!’ We exchanged all germs possible, but couldn’t ride in the same van!”61
Meanwhile, David Nevins lost a power struggle at Paramount Global, which owns both Showtime and the Paramount Network, and resigned.
Along came Yellowstone. After it was rejected by HBO, Taylor Sheridan reportedly told Viacom, also in the Paramount Global ownership mix (it’s complicated), “You will have no part in any of this—except for footing the bill. I will write and direct all the episodes of the show. There will be no writers’ room. There will be no notes from studio executives. No one will see an outline.”62 Sheridan then proceeded to write a blizzard of prequels and entirely new shows, all of them hits to one degree or another. He’s a one-man streamer, Sheridan+. Yellowstone, which ended up starring Kevin Costner, not Redford in the lead, concluded after the fifth, 2023 season, as a result, rumor had it, of Costner’s sundry dissatisfactions with his employer. He is also preoccupied writing his own multi-movie western series. If a former nobody-actor like Sheridan can write, why not a somebody-actor Costner?
Critics have called Yellowstone a “white grievance” show because it chronicles the saga of rancher John Dutton clinging to his land by fighting “progress” and change. When he’s elected governor of Montana, he subordinates his gubernatorial responsibilities to the demands of Dutton-hood, and seemingly inherits the mantle of Barry Goldwater, the Republican cowboy candidate who lost the presidency to Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Sheridan’s work, however, presents a lesser-of-two-evils world that has something for everyone, red staters as well as blue staters. Those who think Yellowstone and its prequels are red-state shows are contradicted by the gut-wrenching portrayal of homicidal Catholic clergy remorselessly beating, torturing, and killing indigenous women in one of the prequels, 1923. Sheridan, who has been known to wear a Liz Cheney T-shirt and once called Trump a “motherfucker,” pushes back against the notion that Yellowstone is a red-state series. “They refer to it as ‘the conservative show’ or ‘the Republican show’ or ‘the red-state Game of Thrones,’” he says. “And I just sit back laughing. I’m like, ‘Really?’ The show’s talking about the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the West, and land-grabbing. That’s a red-state show?”63
If it is a white grievance show, it’s a white grievance lite, easy for liberals and conservatives alike to swallow. As James Poniewozik puts it in The New York Times, John Dutton is “a Marlboro Man Tony Soprano.”64
8
Out of Luck and Off-Key, HBO Gets Game
Mired in Milch, while Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese fought over Vinyl, Game of Thrones came to the rescue, and Insecure added some color.
In 2011, HBO was on a knife edge of decline. It looked like the doomsayers were right. True Blood was still chalking up numbers, but Big Love had ended that year. Girls was still making noise, but it wasn’t setting records. Game of Thrones first aired in 2011 but was suffering growing pains. There was still plenty of bad press.1 The Washington Post dismissed it as a “groggy slog.”2 In 2008, The Post added, “They’ve struck out right and left—five years now. The last year or two was embarrassing, not just bad.”3
A case in point was David Milch’s Luck, which HBO was just putting together. If ever a show was misnamed, it was that one, set in yet another seedy underbelly, the world of horse racing. Indeed, it was John from Cincinnati at the track, minus, thankfully, John from Cincinnati. Like the Gallaghers, no matter how dysfunctional, HBO still considered itself a family. No one benefitted more from this familial devotion than David Milch, who did something like five pilots for HBO. Had he not had his sinecure at HBO, he might well have become the Frank Gallagher of screenwriters, with his silver tongue and copious addictions. Indeed, in 2016, The Hollywood Reporter claimed that Milch had gambled away that $100 million fortune, owed the IRS $17 million, and was put on a $40-a-week leash by his wife.
Luck boasted not only a stellar cast headed by Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte, and Michael Gambon, but had added Michael Mann, a heavyweight Hollywood director and showrunner known for a slew of hits, including Miami Vice, Heat, and The Insider.
The HBO executive who hooked Milch up with Mann was none other than Mike Lombardo. He loved Milch’s script and, as one source puts it, “was infatuated with Mann.”4 He showed Mann the script and asked him if he would direct it. As Plepler recalls, “David [too] was very much in favor of Mann. You have talented artists hugging each other.”5 As it turned out, oil and water doesn’t begin to do justice to the chemistry of Luck. As a Hollywood director, Mann was used to running his own shows, and he did so with a vengeance, but since TV was a writer-driven medium, as the writer, Milch should have been the showrunner, and his creative process involved talking to the actors, going on the set, and even directing when he felt like it.
On the one hand, Milch and Mann were both volatile, both had huge egos, and both were used to getting their own way. On the other hand, they couldn’t have been more different. As one source puts it, also speaking of Milch, “If you try to get a straight answer from him, you’ll blow your brains out.”6 No one, on the other hand, had any difficulty getting a straight answer from Mann, who was strong-willed and unafraid to make others afraid. Says director Dan Attias, who worked for Mann on Miami Vice and Milch on Deadwood, “I was surprised they were put together because you had two alpha males who were headstrong about how they wanted something done. It just seemed doomed.”7
The Sopranos producer Henry Bronchtein called Allen Coulter. He said, “Michael Mann wants to meet with you about Luck.” Coulter recalls that Mann was “a tough guy. Mr. Macho. He’s got more testosterone than the whole town. He would just intimidate the HBO executives. He said to me once, ‘Yeah, they’re afraid of me.’”8
Coulter knew that Milch was involved and understood that this was the kind of combustible situation for which the phrase “Don’t try to mix these two chemicals at home” was invented. But Mann told Coulter, who had managed to avoid Milch throughout his career, that he wouldn’t have to worry: “We have a deal. I control the production, he controls the writers’ room. He will not be bothering you.” Coulter had never heard of an agreement like that and was skeptical. He remembers, “They each had people that were transcribing their meetings, one person from Michael and one person from David, in the same room at the same time, so they could each consult their notes and hold the other one to his word.”9
Nevertheless, Coulter went along with the arrangement, although he thought, “What am I supposed to say, ‘Michael, I don’t believe you’? From the get-go, the lines were blurred. Milch showed up at the first table read to which, as the writer, he was entitled, and Mann literally shoved him out the door and shut it on him. At which point Milch quit.”10
Milch eventually returned, but he was not a happy camper. Recalls Ian McShane, “I was seeing David at that time, and he was miserable because Michael Mann didn’t let him be part of the process.”11 Adds Brian Cox, “Of course, it ended up horribly because David being David, and Michael being Michael, it was very difficult for him to adhere to David’s demands and his eccentricities. He’s harsh, and I don’t think David can work with anybody who’s really going to challenge him.”12
Milch’s response, according to one participant, was passive-aggression. It took a lot of pleading, threatening, and cajoling to get him to hand in his scripts, which would often be late. When Mann and Milch were in the same room together, Mann was oblivious to Milch, and Milch just shut down entirely.
Right off the bat, Mann and Milch were giving contradictory instructions to the actors. At one point, while Mann was directing the pilot, facing Hoffman and telling him what he wanted him to do, Milch was standing behind Mann shaking his head and waving his arms, “No, no, no, no, no.”13
“There was a day that David was going to kill Michael,” recalls Nick Nolte, who played a trainer. “It’s absolutely true. Michael hadn’t turned the film in [for an episode] and David was livid. He said to John [Ortiz], who plays a trainer on the show, ‘I’m going to go down to the editing room and I’m going to kill Michael Mann.’ The look on Milch’s face was intense, and John was pretty upset and he says, ‘David, you really don’t want to do that. You don’t have a gun, do you?’ And Milch tells him, ‘No, I don’t have a gun, but I have a baseball bat and I’m going to kill him. If I’m not back in a few hours, get my lawyers on the phone.’”14 Recalls Coulter, “When he busted into the editing room with the bat, Mann didn’t even look up, just kept on working. And Milch left.”15 (Mann denied that he banned Milch from the set and the editing room.)
Against his better judgment Coulter became Milch’s mole. “Milch is very, very nutty,” he continues. “He’s very intelligent, and very seductive the way alcoholics are, great at compliments, charming, but very untrustworthy. He’d take me to lunch, and when he saw my cut, he said, ‘They can bury that one with me, I love it so much.’
“I went to his office a couple of times, and it looked to me like the inside of a madman’s mind. Milch was just like a lunatic. You could tell he was just overwhelmed by his relationship with Mann, and he became lost in the writing—he just couldn’t figure out how to tell the story, he was just confused.”16 When it was later revealed that Milch suffered from dementia, it seemed to some that these were the early signs. Says a source close to the production, Milch “was zoning out. It was terrifying. And Michael was the wrong guy to fix it.”17
Then there was the cost. Milch had spent Deadwood off the air. “He was known to be indifferent to budget,” Coulter continues. “But Michael Mann restraining Milch was like the fox guarding the henhouse. Michael never saw a budget he couldn’t bust. They couldn’t control Milch, and they couldn’t control Mann.”18 Instead of Mann restraining Milch, HBO had two Milches on its hands—or two Manns, whatever.
One HBO source explains, “Usually, the creative executive on the show appointed by HBO would have the primary relationship with a showrunner. That role was usurped by Lombardo. He wanted to be the director whisperer when we were in business with Martin Scorsese or when we were in business with David Milch or when we were in business with Michael Mann. The problem was his ego interfered with what was best for the project. That was Mike’s downfall.”19
Luck officially premiered on January 29, 2012. The most enthusiastic reaction came from HBO itself, which immediately renewed it for ten episodes, but its audience dwindled from roughly a million for its January premiere to less than 500,000 by the end of the season.
After two horses died during production, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) accused the show of using old, unfit, and drugged horses, which the cabler and everyone on the production denies. The Guardian wondered if the horses had died of boredom. Then a third horse died. HBO stunned the industry by canceling Luck on March 14, 2012, toward the end of the first season, when it was already in production for Season 2. Citing the deaths of the horses gave HBO the cover it needed to cancel the show.
Not everyone bought it. Says Coulter, “They were massively over budget. It was just killing them. Would they have forgiven it if it had been a hit? Yes. But it wasn’t a hit.”20 It was a sad conclusion to Milch’s career. Of all the insanely talented writers who contributed to the era of Peak TV, Milch was perhaps the most gifted.
