Pandora's Box, page 20
Luck had been a disaster, mostly of HBO’s own making, and worse, an embarrassment. Nothing clicked until the first season of True Detective in 2014. Naegle and Lombardo hailed creator Nic Pizzolatto as a genius. That was the good news. The bad news was that he was widely disliked. “He had to be appreciated by everyone as the smartest guy in the room,” says a source who worked closely with him on the show. “What was particularly galling to Nic, was that Cary Fukunaga got so much praise for what he felt was his work for the first season.”21
The worse news was that the second season of True Detective, which arrived in 2015, was disappointing. Nevertheless, Lombardo invited Pizzolatto to do yet another, saying, “I’d happily be in business with him for a long time,” resulting in an indifferent Season 3.22 Season 4 is in the works, scheduled for late 2023 or early 2024, minus Pizzolatto.
The Leftovers became a critics’ darling, and did much to repair HBO’s reputation as a home for quality shows, but viewers were less impressed, and its numbers weren’t great. It seemed like the business model—two new originals in the fall and spring each—might not be enough to fend off the growing competition from basic cable and fetal streamers like Netflix and then Amazon Prime Video.
Just as discouraging as the shows HBO was airing were the shows it wasn’t. It had passed on Weeds, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Shameless, The Walking Dead, and failed to even get a shot at Homeland. The combination of internecine warfare, bad calls, and overdevelopment took its toll. Says one well-regarded rival executive who doesn’t want his name used, “When production is run by an agent and a lawyer, I don’t think that is the best scenario for creative excellence.”23
After Naegle’s departure, the buying spree continued. Spreading the blame, one source points out: “It wasn’t like Lombardo got to pick all these on his own.”24 One source points a finger at Plepler as well. Echoing Fuchs and others, she argues that a lot of the projects Lombardo picked up were PR-driven, catering to the tastes of Plepler’s dinner guests.
The team of Plepler and Lombardo presided over what would become the longest drought the cabler had known since it branded itself as “not TV.” In April 2013, Lombardo signed Ryan Murphy, whose golden touch made Nip/Tuck and American Horror Story hits for FX, and whose Normal Heart would win an Emmy for HBO, to a straight-to-pilot deal for a sexuality series called Open—which never did, because he killed it in 2014.
Lombardo ordered a pilot from Jenji Kohan about the Salem witch trials called The Devil You Know, with Gus Van Zant (Good Will Hunting) directing. It was produced by Lionsgate, where Kohan had an overall deal. The pilot never aired and the project was never heard from again. Lewis and Clark, a six-part limited series, was slated to shoot in the summer of 2015 with Casey Affleck as Lewis and Matthias Schoenaerts as Clark. It never happened, either, and HBO blamed bad weather.
Although Lombardo had a reputation for saying yes to everything, after HBO had entered the valley of the shadow of death, he had become considerably more circumspect. Vlad Wolynetz was then at the BBC trying to sell him shows. “We couldn’t get anything moving,” he recalls. “Half the problem there was that HBO used to be able to sit on things because ‘We’re HBO, they’ll wait,’ and they took full advantage of that. There’s a wonderful word in Ukrainian that has no analog in English, pidstrashena, which means, ‘quaking from the womb to the grave.’ That was Lombardo to me, someone who was so terrified of making a mistake he wouldn’t make any decisions at all. He had a firm view that we should hold a firm view. He was a mountain of nothing.”25
While Weiner was struggling with Mad Men, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were shooting the pilot of Game of Thrones, entitled “Winter Is Coming.” The show would prove beyond successful, and therefore has an air of inevitability about it. In the beginning, however, it was anything but. Every step of the way was fraught with the peril, the possibility, nay, the likelihood of failure.
It was directed by Tom McCarthy, who had helmed the well-regarded Station Agent, featuring Peter Dinklage. Production on the pilot began on October 24, 2009, three and a half years after HBO greenlit their pitch, and ended roughly a month later, on November 19, 2009. There was a pervasive confusion over the tone. Was it a drama bowing in the direction of fantasy? Or was it fantasy bowing in the direction of drama? Weiss explained that from preproduction to post were four of the “longest months of both of our lives—sitting there thinking every day that this thing that was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity . . . and we fucked it up.”26
The two showrunners were writers, not directors, and they were in way over their heads. They made a lot of rookie mistakes. For example, in an early scene, a member of the Night’s Watch talks about returning to the “wall,” but the wall had neither been shown nor even mentioned, so viewers had no idea what he was referring to.
Hewing to the assurances the writers gave to Plepler, Benioff and Weiss had downplayed the spectacle and ditched the battle scenes, but as a result, the pilot, filmed in Northern Ireland and Morocco, had no scope. Lombardo remembers someone saying, “We could have shot this in Burbank.”27 Instead of Lawrence of Arabia, they got In Treatment.
Screening the pilot for HBO was painful. Benioff and Weiss recall seeing Lombardo sitting with his head in his hands as if he had a splitting headache. “I was just staring at Mike’s face,” Weiss recalls. “It was like a horror movie.”28
Weiss told Variety, “HBO was really on the fence about whether or not they were going to let this go to series.” It was, after all, a project from the old Albrecht regime, but HBO had given Strauss a deal; she was attached to the project and fought for it. The writers recalled that while HBO “was mulling whether or not to green-light the pilot, we kept telling them the show would be a big hit. But we’d never made a TV show before so we didn’t actually know what we were talking about. And we knew we didn’t. We thought it was likelier than not that we were full of shit.”29
Plepler must have seen something in the pilot, because he gave Benioff and Weiss another $8 to $10 million to reshoot approximately 80 to 92 percent of it, depending on whom you ask.
Plepler called in his fixit team, comprised of HBO house director Tim Van Patten and cinematographer Alik Sakharov. Initially, Van Patten passed. “I got no more than fifty pages into the first book, and I said, ‘I can’t do it. I’ve got to have somebody I can grab and ask, What is this relationship again? Who is this? Where do they live?’”30 Eventually, he came ’round.
“We had to start from scratch because the original pilot was such a fiasco, with such a three-by-four TV-box mentality,” recalls Sakharov. “We wanted to open it up. We didn’t want to do something that would resemble small-screen TV, because that was not what was coming off the page. It was calling for a grander, more pictorial scope, more like a feature film.”31
Finally, Plepler allowed them to go to series. “That first year felt very probationary,” Benioff said in 2015. “It was like, ‘All right, these guys are probably not very good at this. Let’s see what they can do. We’ve already sunk a lot of money into this pilot. Might as well get one season out of it.’” A friend of theirs, writer Craig Mazin—who would go on to do Chernobyl and The Last of Us with Strauss—had seen and hated Pilot #1, then Pilot #2 at the premiere. “That is the biggest rescue in Hollywood history,” he recalls telling Benioff and Weiss. “Because it wasn’t just that you had saved something bad and turned it really good. You had saved a complete piece of shit, and turned it into something brilliant. That never happens.”32 The $20 million or so pilot was one of the most expensive in the history of the business. Plepler gambled another estimated $50 million on the budget of first season.
Nothing could have been more different from the gamble on Game of Thrones, alien as it was to HBO’s brand, and guided by its amateur-hour creators working in a déclassé genre, than the show up next, Vinyl. On its face it seemed a sure thing, another dark, warts-and-all drama boasting two gold-plated, pedigree producers, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, working in their respective comfort zones where each was a megastar. It was as close to money in the bank as HBO could get. Except for one thing. If HBO, in the post-Albrecht, post-Strauss, Plepler-Lombardo era was notorious for its star-fucking, Vinyl would prove that it could just as easily be star-fucked instead. Who were the stars that fucked HBO, the platinum service that was too good to be TV?
Like everyone else, Lombardo was blinded by the glitter of the talent involved, not by the subject, in which he had, according to one HBO source, no interest. It was Luck all over again. If celebrity pairings like Milch and Mann had bitten HBO in its corporate ass, the cabler seemed to have learned nothing.
The Wolf of Wall Street, written by Terry Winter, had been Scorsese’s biggest grosser, so the director called him in 2008 and asked if he’d be interested in helping him with Vinyl. As Winter remembers it, “I put the phone down and I was like, ‘Holy shit. Marty Scorsese and Mick Jagger. Yeah, yeah, I think I’d be interested.’”33
It took only one season for Winter’s dream to turn to ashes. Fresh from Boardwalk Empire, he wrote the two-hour movie from a story by himself, journalist Rich Cohen, Jagger, and Scorsese. But the stock market crashed in 2008, and it was not the time for a $100 million Scorsese movie. Winter’s wife suggested turning it into a series. Plepler and Naegle bought the pitch on the spot, but it appears that Lombardo was against it from the start. Says The Wire’s David Simon, “Vinyl was shoved up his ass because of who was doing it, how much heat there was behind it.”34
The show boasted a strong cast that included Bobby Cannavale, who had stolen Season 3 of Boardwalk, Ray Romano, Olivia Wilde, and Juno Temple. If Scorsese had spent $20 million on the pilot of Boardwalk, he outdid himself on the pilot for Vinyl, spending a reported $30 million. Says Coulter, who, along with Winter, was an executive producer, and directed three of the ten episodes, “Marty so exceeded the budget—by $6 million—that we started with a deficit. We were always behind the eight ball. That was the disadvantage of somebody like him. He’s never going to scrimp.
“Neither Lombardo nor Jagger liked Terry’s script,” Coulter continues.35 They hired George Mastras, a Breaking Bad writer, to redo it based on HBO’s and Mick’s notes and made him the showrunner of the pilot. Scorsese hated the rewrite. He called Winter and said, “I don’t even know what I’m reading. I can’t shoot this. I don’t know what this is.” According to Coulter, Winter fired Mastras, and over a long weekend rewrote the script back to what it had been, with a few changes. Adds Winter, “Mike Lombardo found out about this and blew a gasket. ‘How dare you. Who told you to do that?’ I said, ‘Michael, when I’m the executive producer of a show, and the director calls me up and says, “I don’t know what to shoot,” I’m sorry, but I didn’t think I needed your permission to solve the problem. I would have expected a muffin basket instead of getting yelled at for this, but that’s how you roll. George shit the bed here, and Marty hated what he did and I made Marty happy.’”36
Adds Coulter, speaking of Winter’s rewrite of Mastras’s rewrite and the dynamics at work, “No one can really tell Marty anything. He does what he does. And he has unlimited power. So already you had this schism built into the show. Basically Lombardo was never behind it. But it was late in the game, so that’s the script they shot.”37
Winter defends the show to this day. Lombardo scheduled the premiere of what was basically their two-hour Scorsese movie for Valentine’s Day, 2016, at 9:00 p.m. on a Sunday night. It was a choice spot, except for one thing. “That’s head-to-head with the premiere of The Walking Dead, which is a cliffhanger coming off a cliffhanger from the last season,” Winter told Lombardo. “Why are we going up against that?”
“Oh, it’s a different audience,” Lombardo replied, according to Winter.
“Michael, there is no other audience. Everybody’s going to be watching The Walking Dead.”
“No, no, no, no, it’s fine. It’s fine.”38
It seemed to Winter that hubris had overwhelmed HBO. They had a “fucking Martin Scorsese movie as their pilot, so they didn’t [need to] tell anybody about it. But nobody watched the pilot. We got slaughtered. They were watching The Walking Dead. The headlines the next day said, ‘Vinyl is a disaster for HBO.’ What people took away from that was, ‘Oh, I heard that show’s terrible,’ but it was a ratings disaster, not a critical disaster.”39 He says the show scored 74 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, “which is a hit.” HBO was still so confident in the show that Lombardo announced that it was renewing Vinyl on February 18, 2016, less than a week after the Season 1 pilot aired.
“The whole thing was a bad marriage from the beginning,” says Coulter. He points out, jokingly, “Jagger and Scorsese were two men who were essentially ego-less, and willing to listen to everyone.”40 In fact, each was used to getting his own way, but on Vinyl they got in each other’s way. A taste? Under the headline “Martin Scorsese: HBO’s Vinyl Failed Because I Didn’t Direct Everything,” The Hollywood Reporter ran a story quoting him saying, “In order to make it right . . . I think I would have had to direct every episode and be there for the three to four years.”41
HBO was beloved by creatives for leaving them alone, but Winter et al. found themselves in receipt of a flood of notes. Coulter recalls, “Our reaction would be ‘You stupid motherfuckers, you must have your heads up your asses.’”42
Adds Winter, “If I expressed frustration about getting notes on Boardwalk, they were 100 percent worse on Vinyl. [They picked at] every little thing, every depiction of every character.” The notes were bleeding with PC. He recalls, “‘The women in the office need to be more empowered and they need to speak up for themselves.’ But it was accurate to the period, 1973, and it was ugly, but we were trying to shine a light on this stuff.”43
It would have been easy for a showrunner of Winter’s stature to just ignore notes like these, but these weren’t just any notes; they also reflected the views of Jagger and Victoria Pearman, the head of his company and his eyes on the set. Says Winter, “I thought when I got into business with Mick, I was getting into business with a guy from 1972 who was the poster boy for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. But Mick Jagger circa 2015 was now Sir Mick Jagger, who was a very conservative, proper British gentleman.
“Lombardo hated Vinyl, everything about it,” Winter continues. “At the end of the year, he wanted me to fire my entire writing staff and make these huge changes in the show. And I said, ‘No, I’m not doing it.’” Winter wondered, “What happened to the network that used to pride itself on being ballsy and taking creative risks? And now suddenly, I’m getting notes that I would expect from a network show.”44
What had happened to HBO? Winter says this “was during the Mike Lombardo era. As the head of the network and programming, the creative decisions were all filtered through his taste, and what he liked and what he didn’t like.”
As Winter sums it up, “It was really sad. We went from being part of the team that created the biggest show they ever did, and we had all their trust and all their support, to the point where they’re questioning every decision we were making, and not only did they not like what we were doing, but they would rather we were really not there at all—the level of disrespect was incredible—full circle in the span of ten years.”45
Winter wasn’t the only one who had had it with HBO. The climate there had changed for Sheila Nevins as well. “I think that the first thirty years of my work life at HBO were manna from heaven,” she recalls. “I gave my heart and soul to my work without anybody stepping on my toes. After Jeff Bewkes left it wasn’t the HBO that I loved anymore. Richard wanted celebrity [documentaries].” She, on the other hand, was making docs on freaks like Robert Durst (she commissioned The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, which aired in 2015). She ordered up Laura Poitras’s award-winning Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden. According to one source, Plepler would say, “How old is she now?” As for Lombardo, she recalls, “He screamed at me. I couldn’t even have a discussion with him. He hated me.”
Nevins continues, “I was stupid. I really didn’t get it. I would tell Richard that Mike was being brutal and nothing would happen. ‘Oh, he doesn’t mean it. Don’t worry about it.’ I didn’t realize that there was a kind of collusion there.”46
Says one source, “Richard was really good at blowing smoke up her ass and behind her back saying, ‘Oh, she said no to this or that documentary, I can’t believe it.’”47
Nevins continues, “It wasn’t until I left that I realized that I was pushed out. I fought for my shows, but I didn’t really fight for myself. I told Richard I was not going to stay after the end of my contract. He said, ‘You are going to have the biggest party anyone ever had.’ What he meant was Thank God! He wanted me to go. It was like cutting my heart out. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of this place. It’s rancid.’ I actually couldn’t breathe in the building. I cried myself to sleep too many nights.”48
Meanwhile, director David Fincher was virtually on fire coming off Se7en, Fight Club, and Social Network. He was not part of the hemorrhage of talent exiting studio features because they couldn’t get work, or the work offered them was so dumb it gave them migraines. On the contrary, he was one of the few Hollywood directors who had consistently been able to turn out high-quality movies that were also commercial. He knew that TV needed him more than he needed TV.
Fincher, in other words, was dealing from a strong hand. He had his eye on House of Cards, which began life as a novel by Michael Dobbs, Conservative Party chief of staff in the Thatcher government, and was turned into a British TV show. It was about a ruthless, conniving politician named Francis Urquhart. Fincher’s producing partners, Josh Donen and Eric Roth, brought it to his attention and told him, “If you want to do something for television, and you’re not too lazy to sit down and watch TV for four hours, this is something you should take a look at.”49 Fincher did sit down for four hours, looked and liked what he saw, but recognized right away it wasn’t for the big screen. “Francis Urquhart is not a character that you could build a $50 million two-hour movie around,” he explains. “I can’t imagine a studio that wouldn’t be saying, ‘Well, he’s sort of untrustworthy.’”50
