Pandora's Box, page 2
Fuchs subscribed to the conventional wisdom that the networks programmed for women, so HBO would program for men. He recalls, “That was a big part of boxing for us, because boxing tickets were expensive and to certain people one boxing event a month was worth the price of buying HBO.”10 But even with something like boxing, its coverage was better than the networks’. No sponsors meant no cutting between rounds to a Buick ad, for example. Instead, it had a camera in the corners of the ring so viewers could see and hear the trainers talking to the fighters, squeezing the blood out of their eyes and using styptic pencils on their cuts. Not to mention the fact that he paid heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, who flaunted his bad-boy image, $26.5 million to keep him fighting on HBO.
So far as sex went, there was more than enough to keep the testosterone flowing. “Randy guys were a major part of our demographic,” Fuchs goes on. “Initially, when people thought of pay TV, one of the things was, ‘Oh, we can see nudity and we can hear profane language,’ and yes, we took advantage of some of that.”11 Nevins says, “I was free to do sex shows that people could jerk off to. Good for them. Why not?”12 Among her documentaries were several sex-themed series: Real Sex, Taxicab Confessions, G-String Divas, and Pornucopia: Going Down in the Valley, featuring Stormy Daniels.
HBO also showed the famous French burlesque shows from Moulin Rouge and Casino de Paris. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, standing there with seventy naked girls, and fuckin’ beautiful French women,” Fuchs remembers. “I get a salary, too?”13 Wags at the networks, riffing on HBO’s slogan, quipped, “It’s not TV. It’s porn.”
HBO eventually dipped its toe into made-for-TV movies. The mantra was, “Make noise, make noise, make noise,” so it could get off the TV page, but in the beginning, it couldn’t even get onto the TV page. “We were in this place where faded stars like Jimmy Stewart or Bette Davis would bring us their vanity projects,” says a former HBO publicist. When she pitched a B-list star to The Tonight Show, “They would say, ‘Are you serious? Why the fuck would we want to have one of your stars? We’re The Tonight Show. We don’t care about these people.’”14
Fuchs quickly rose to VP of programming and offered his old job to Bridget Potter, a bright, ambitious Brit. She had nearly twenty years of experience working at NBC and CBS. Potter declined the offer at first. She recalls, “It was easy to turn HBO down, because they were like the dregs.”15 She continues, “They weren’t saying, ‘Oh, we could be smarter. Oh, we could be better.’ They were saying, ‘Oh, we could be dirtier.’”16 Sam Cohen, a powerful New York agent who represented blue-chip clients like Mike Nichols, told her, “If you go to HBO, you’re leaving the business. What they’re doing is disgusting, it’s bad, it’s cheap, forget it.”17 Potter took the job anyway, because Fuchs told her she could do anything she wanted, while at the networks she could do nothing she wanted.
Potter got along with Fuchs. “I liked Michael. He had a charismatic personality. He convinced programming executives that he knew more about the business side than the business executives, and he convinced the business executives that he knew more about programming than the programming executives. But the truth was, he didn’t know much about either. He was posing as a programming genius, but the programming was not genius. He loved doing nightclub stuff—Totie Fields, Buddy Hackett, Henny Youngman. He loved this HBO Theater, old turkeys right from Broadway, just abysmal.”18
For his part, Fuchs liked Potter. Still, HBO was a boys’ club, and Potter was not a boy. In the senior management meetings, there were maybe two women and thirteen men. “I found it all very difficult,” she continues. “The guys were in the Michael Fuchs business. They would go shopping with him, and they would play tennis with him, and they would travel with him. If he would suddenly go to LA, they would all go to LA. I couldn’t and didn’t do that.”19 She had to go home every night to her family. But each morning she read the sports section of the papers so she’d have something to talk about with the guys.
Needless to say, there was a lot of intra-office sex. As one woman who worked at HBO during that period described it, “It didn’t have a rape culture like Miramax, but it was a ‘happy’ place where shy, rich, probably married dorks could run amok, fulfill their fantasies of money, power, and access to female bodies. Higher-ranking women inside the company felt they were safe, but you’d see your colleagues chatting up the assistants, actresses, and so on, and you knew they could be prey.”20
One of those higher-ranking women was Nevins, who took a more casual view of sex in the workplace. As she puts it, the younger women were brought up by Gloria Steinem, the older women, like herself, by Helen Gurley Brown. That meant “I read Cosmo like it was Spock for babies and I dressed and did everything she told me. I bought cosmetics. I bought a push-up bra. I unbuttoned the second button where you see the cleavage.”21
Nevins thought “being touched by a man inappropriately was part of the rules of the game.”22 Speaking of another employer, she says she got hired as a PA by sleeping with the boss. “It meant nothing to me. Nothing. Zero.”23 Looking back at HBO, she says, “I didn’t approve or disapprove. Did anyone die on the cutting room floor? Nobody was getting shot. Nobody was getting murdered. As long as there was air-conditioning and the lights stayed on, I was happy to stay there for a long time.”24
By 1984, Fuchs had become CEO. He was ruthless and tenacious, the enemy no one wants to have. Fuchs didn’t try to be liked. He was notorious for his fierce, pugnacious, take-no-prisoners management style. He himself admits, “I had a big mouth. I accepted that people found me arrogant. I liked to give it back. I’m a pusher. I have been fired from almost every job I’ve had.”25 Adds Potter, “His code of ethics was basically The Godfather. He would quote it constantly, not in an ‘Aren’t I clever’ way, but like a true believer. He demanded complete loyalty. There was a cult of personality in the place. If you didn’t drink the Kool-Aid, you weren’t going to last. He had no modesty. He did not want to be second-guessed on anything, ever. That was part of his idea of himself as a prince, and in his own mind, HBO was his court.”26
Good times finally arrived in the early 1980s. By 1981, HBO was able to expand its service to twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Two years later, it boasted 13.5 million subscribers, an increase of two million over the previous year. So far as Time was concerned, the tail was wagging the dog. The video group accounted for two-thirds of its profits. Dollars were inbound so fast the counters couldn’t keep track of the beans.
When there was money to spend at HBO, it went for what was euphemistically called morale-building, which is to say, partying. Says one marketing executive, “We’d have parties at the Bel Air Hotel, or they’d cordon off the Malibu Country Club. It really was velvet handcuffs. If there’s one thing that’s a through line, it’s excess. Excess was the key to our success.”27
According to another source, the long list of perks included “the seemingly bottomless expense account; the private dining rooms on the fifteenth floor of the HBO building off Bryant Park in New York City, where you could schmooze talent and impress your friends; the private on-site gym that even provided you with workout clothes; the corporate retreats at posh resorts, where we were encouraged to spend half the day getting massages or playing golf; the limos, the lunches, the inevitable upgrades to first class on commercial flights. And those were just the perks at my level. They increased exponentially as you went up the ladder, until you reached the baronial echelon of Michael Fuchs, who had the use of a corporate jet and a fully staffed mansion in Acapulco” that belonged to Warner Bros.
The source continues, “If you didn’t do cocaine, or at least smoke dope, there was something wrong with you. You were definitely not hip enough to work there. It was not considered a problem, it was medicinal relief. We used to buy drugs from a guy out in front of the Time-Life Building. We’d get high at lunchtime and go back to work.”28 One woman who traveled back and forth between New York and LA is said to have avoided taking drugs through airport security by simply FedEx-ing coke to herself.
Then HBO hit a wall. Along came the VCR, seemingly out of nowhere, that obliterated HBO’s prime selling point: showcasing uncut, uninterrupted Hollywood movies. As subscriptions dwindled, a bank of dark clouds settled over the company. The picture looked so bleak that McKinsey & Company, the EMT of management consulting, was hired to give the business model a hard look. At a meeting with the McKinsey team, Levin stood up and asked, “Have you ever seen a business that was at this kind of crossroads?” One of the consultants answered, “Atari,” a legendary instance of a fast-growing, envelope-pushing Wall Street darling that collapsed overnight. Everyone in the room blanched.29
There was, however, a silver lining. The easy availability of movies on tape created an opening for original programming. “The movie companies had far too much leverage over us because they were almost our only source of product,” Fuchs recalls. “Our original programming gave us leverage against the studios.”30
Potter beefed up original programming by hiring Chris Albrecht, a former stand-up comic and sometime agent, as senior VP in June 1985, at a salary of about $50,000. He was in charge of developing series, and headed up the LA office in Century City. Albrecht was an appealing man with a Cheshire Cat grin that under stress became more vulpine than feline. When he started to lose his hair he opted for the Vin Diesel look, the shaved dome.
Fuchs acknowledged that Albrecht was a good programmer, but he feared his LA executives were too easily snowed by Hollywood glitz. “I didn’t trust the West Coast office. They would buy everything,” he says. Fuchs likes to point to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, both produced by Tom Hanks’s company after he left HBO, as examples. “HBO spent hundreds of millions of dollars [on those shows], because Chris was taking Pilates lessons at Tom Hanks’s house. A two-hundred-million-dollar Pilates class!”31 (According to Albrecht, Hanks took Pilates lessons at his house.)
Fuchs’s dislike of the West Coast office was reciprocated. After he killed In Living Color (which went on to become a hit for Fox), Albrecht said, “We’re not really in the television business. We were in the . . . ‘what Michael likes’ world and ‘what we could convince him to do’ world.”32
HBO continued to fiddle with original productions. The Hitchhiker, which ran from 1983 to 1991, was a supernatural thriller, shot in Canada on a shoestring. “Michael loved The Hitchhiker,” recalls Potter. “But it was really dreadful. The rule was, [every episode] had to have sex.” Inside HBO, it was known as “The Twilight Zone with tits.”33
Much, much better than The Hitchhiker was Tanner 88, an eleven-part half-hour political satire, pegged to the 1988 presidential contest between Michael Dukakis and George Bush the Elder. Potter wanted Garry Trudeau to make it, but he would only do it with Robert Altman, who agreed. But Altman was famous for biting the hand that fed him, and HBO’s hand was too plump to resist. “I cannot tell you how frightening the whole thing was,” Potter says. “Altman was a pig, he was just horrible to me. He was learning computer editing, using Tanner as an experiment. If it flopped, he was still going to be ‘Bob Altman,’ but I was going to be out of a job.”34
Tanner 88 didn’t attract many viewers, but it did attract press, and the kind of buzz Potter was after: “People inside the business started to see that they could come to HBO with projects that weren’t commercial, that weren’t low comedy, that weren’t about people who were having sex with strangers and dying.”
Potter was, as she puts it, “pushing every minute to be provocative. The buzzwords that would fly around our office were ‘adult,’ ‘smart,’ ‘new,’ ‘fresh.’”35 She was always asking, “Could a network do this show?” If the answer was “Yes,” HBO walked away. In 1991, it won its first Emmy for a made-for-TV movie, The Josephine Baker Story, which displayed the HBO trademarks: sex and politics. Emmys, by the way, although they may seem silly, serve to attract subscribers, talent, product placement, and advertising.
August 15, 1992, marked the debut of The Larry Sanders Show, a half-hour that ran weekly for six seasons until March 15, 1998, and became HBO’s first successful series. The talented but very fucked-up Garry Shandling had an idea for a show loosely based on a comic much like himself. Think Seinfeld. Think Curb Your Enthusiasm. Drawing on his experience as guest host of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, he realized that the backstage Sturm und Drang might be a better target for his caustic wit than the anodyne chitchat that went on in front of the camera.
Poorly disguised as Larry Sanders, he played an enfant terrible at the center of a late-night talk show. Himself a vain, needy, and supremely self-centered stand-up comic unpopular with cast and crew, Shandling played a vain, needy, and supremely self-centered talk show host unpopular with cast and crew.
Unlike features, where writers are often treated like scum, television is a writer-driven medium. Shandling, naturally, was the head writer on the show. A forty-three-year-old man who turned self-hatred into an art form and insecurity into late-night poetry, he had a nervous, twitchy presence signaled by a trademark wince that quickly faded into a grimace, suggesting a mix of laughter and pain that was all his own.
American viewers had never seen a sitcom quite like this one. It pulled back the curtain of this network staple to reveal a writhing ball of vipers comprised of celebrity divas and brain-dead network executives awash in a sea of ego, coke, and sex. Even the better network offerings set in a media milieu like The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Lou Grant never left blood on the floor the way Larry Sanders did every Sunday night.
“Self-deprecating” is a term that doesn’t begin to do Shandling justice. “Self-flagellating” is more like it. He once observed, “Nobody can write better jokes putting me down than me.”36 Among other things, Shandling targeted his here-today, gone-tomorrow sex life, and his relationship difficulties. He would quip, “My friends tell me that I have an intimacy issue—but I don’t think they know me.”37
Although Larry Sanders was an instant success, it was by no means all raves, laughs, and profits. Shandling inspired intense loyalty in some, equally intense loathing in others, and sometimes both at the same time in still others. Jenji Kohan, who would later create Weeds and Orange Is the New Black, recalls that after she pitched an idea to him, her agent told her not to get her hopes up, because Shandling didn’t like working with women.38 Indeed, Will & Grace and Frasier writer Janis Hirsch described him as “a passively malignant emperor” who presided over a “misogynistic writers room where women were called ‘slits’ and where on one occasion, a flaccid penis was placed on my shoulder, you know, just for laughs.” She continues, “My mantra became, ‘I won’t cry until I get home.’” She amended it to “I won’t cry until I get into the parking lot,” which became “I won’t cry until I get into the stairwell,” which morphed into “Fuck, I’m crying.”39
Kevin Reilly, who felt like a fish out of water at NBC, had always been protected by his boyish good looks—an angular face topped by a scrub brush of red hair. He once said, “My whole life, I’ve felt like I could walk in the door with a bloody head in my hand, and somebody would go, ‘Oh, look at that clean-cut guy! What a nice boy!’”40
In 1994, two years after Larry Sanders had launched, Reilly landed at Brillstein-Grey, Shandling’s management company, as head of TV. He recalls, “Bernie [Brillstein] was a great, old-time Hollywood character, full of life, full of love. Brad Grey, who managed Shandling, was the exact opposite. Together, Brillstein and Grey were best personified, as a creative once dubbed them, as ‘Santa Claus and his evil elf.’”41
Shandling occasionally deigned to visit the offices, where the vibe was Walk softly. We produce it, wink, wink, but let Garry do his show. Reilly was a fan but disliked him, calling him “an enormously talented, personally tortured, self-indulgent dick.” One day, he remembers, “Brad called me down, and he said, ‘Garry’s here, and he wants to tell you about an idea.’ I sat down across from Garry, and he didn’t even look at me. Brad pitched me his half-baked thing about his limo driver. I went, ‘Well, that sounds great. I’d love to. Do you have a sense of when you’d like to dig into this?’ Garry looked at me like I just called his mother a bad word. Then he threw up his arms like he was going to vomit. I had said the worst thing you could ever say to him, which was, ‘When are you going to actually do this?’”42
Eventually, Shandling fired Grey as his manager, or Grey fired Shandling as his client. The two ended up suing each other, prompting David Geffen’s famous warning to Grey, “Never invite your artists to your house if it’s bigger than theirs.”43
During the finale at the end of May 1998, a boatload of Shandling’s friends, including Jim Carrey, Tom Petty, Jerry Seinfeld, Carol Burnett, et al., paid tribute. Shandling’s tribute to his cast and crew, who had endured his abusive behavior for six years, was different. “Before anyone could have a glass of champagne, Garry just walked off that sound stage and was gone,” recalls director Todd Holland. “He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t say anything to anybody . . .”44
The extracurricular controversies that swirled around Shandling were manna from heaven for HBO, however, and Larry Sanders confirmed its reputation for daring to go where no other service would. It was rewarded with fifty-six primetime Emmy nominations, and three winners. HBO, however, did not own Larry Sanders, which was produced by Columbia Pictures Television. This meant that HBO could not exploit the show in syndication, and from then on, it was determined to own all its shows.
