Pandora's Box, page 8
Hastings was born in Boston in 1960 to a well-connected and distinguished family of scientists and philanthropists. In 1985, he entered Stanford’s storied Computer Science Department. “I really loved software,” Hastings confessed. “I never loved anything so much,” but “the big thing Stanford did for me was turn me on to the entrepreneurial model . . .”27 In other words, how to turn software into money.
According to Netflix co-founder Randolph, in his memoir, That Will Never Work, Hastings has the mind of a “supercomputer,” and a way of brushing aside the ideas of his associates for being “totally unsupported by reason.”28 The downside of having a mind like a computer is that he sometimes behaved like one as well. Gina Keating, a staff writer for Reuters and UPI, in her book, Netflixed, writes that some ex-Netflixers have described him as “unencumbered by emotion,” and that he has an emotional IQ of zero.29 Maureen Dowd compared Hastings to Ayn Rand in The New York Times.
At the time, everyone knew that e-commerce was the next big thing. Randolph says that he and Hastings decided they wanted to create “the Amazon.com of something,” they just didn’t know what. Gourmet dog food? Personalized shampoo? Something. As fast as Randolph spritzed ideas, Hastings shot them down. Until he said, “Videotapes,” and Hastings responded, “Maybe.”30 Hastings and Randolph imagined a start-up boasting of two innovations that they hoped would give it an edge: DVDs, still a novelty, that were much easier to handle than bulky VHS cassettes; and the internet, which Netflix’s customers could use to order their favorite movies from the comfort of their homes instead of negotiating traffic to reach the nearest brick-and-mortar video store.
Hastings initially financed the start-up himself, to the tune of $2 million, for which he received 70 percent of the shares. The infant dot-com giant was affectionately known as “Kibble,” like the dog food—a placeholder. “Net” made sense, since customers would order their DVDs on the internet, but “flix” reminded everyone of “skin flicks.” In the absence of an alternative, however, “Netflix” it became.
Every day, Hastings and Randolph made the half-hour drive together from Santa Cruz, where they lived, up Route 17 to Los Gatos, where Netflix set up shop in 1999. They had no idea how much traffic their maiden effort would attract. It turned out that there would be a lot—so much that fifteen minutes in, the servers crashed and the printers jammed, but at least they were up and running.
That same year, Hastings met Ted Sarandos, one of five children who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. Sarandos dropped out of Arizona State University in 1983 to sit behind the counter at Arizona Video Cassettes West. By the time Hastings met him, he was in charge of sales for one of the largest video distributors in the United States.
Despite their vastly different backgrounds, the two men hit it off. Among other things, both were liberal Democrats. In the year 2000, Hastings hired Sarandos with the title of chief content officer, thereby creating an improbable odd-couple marriage between Silicon Valley and sort-of Hollywood.
Right from the get-go, Netflix’s computers vacuumed up data from the customers: where they lived, how many DVDs they ordered and how often, what titles, on which side they parted their hair if at all, and so on. The algorithm was able to predict which films users would enjoy based on their ratings of DVDs they had already rented. Heavy users were known as “pigs,” light users as “birds.” As Randolph put it, “Our hard drive knows almost everything.”31 Everything, that is, except how to make money. Business might have boomed right out of the gate, but so did costs. They were losing money on every transaction. Hastings took one look at the numbers and told Randolph they didn’t make sense. “It’s like a taxi,” he said, “driving all the way to another state just to pick up a four-dollar fare.”32
The two men were watching the riches-to-richer success story they’d dreamed about turn into an obituary. In September 1998, Hastings served Randolph a “shit sandwich.”33 As Randolph recalled, his friend and partner began with a thick slice of twelve-grain praise, and then slipped in the shit by telling him that he had lost faith in his judgment. Hastings opened his laptop to reveal a screen on which his friend’s performance was reduced to a list of pluses and minuses, with the latter more numerous than the former. Randolph was furious. “What the fuck, Reed,” he exclaimed. “You’re concerned about where we’re going, and you’re going to lay it out for me in fucking PowerPoint? This is bullshit. There is no way I’m sitting here while you pitch me on why I suck.”34
Up to that point, Hastings had been more of an absentee investor than a day-to-day presence. Randolph was the CEO, the man on the ground running the operation, and in his head he thought of himself as the founder. Now Hastings was suggesting that he would replace Randolph as CEO, with Randolph demoted to president.
Hastings substituted the pay-per-DVD plan Netflix was using with a monthly subscription fee that entitled members to keep the DVDs as long as they wanted. By the year 2000, Netflix was shipping more than 800,000 discs a week to 300,000 subscribers. No sooner had Netflix begun to thrive, however, than the dot-com bubble burst.
A year and a half after the launch date, Netflix was again hemorrhaging money, to the tune of $45 million a year. They hadn’t yet made it onto fuckedcompany.com, the site known as the “deadpool” of dot-com corpses, but they were entering its gravitational field. The big internet companies like Microsoft viewed Netflix as no more than a gnat buzzing about their ears. It was a content company hostage to the US Postal Service.
Randolph recalls trying to partner with or sell Netflix to Amazon, which at the time had an office filled with desks made of old doors sitting on sawhorses in a second-floor walk-up located in a seedy Seattle neighborhood squeezed between pawn and porn shops. Jeff Bezos, with a domed forehead and a too small body lost in a too large shirt, made Randolph think of a “turtle,” but it was a turtle who lowballed them, while Blockbuster just laughed them out of its offices.35
Netflix’s empathy-challenged CEO cut the staff by nearly half, and then managed to halve that number again, which enabled it to reach its goal of one million subscribers by December 2001. The company went public in May 2002. The target was $70 million; Hastings raised $80 million. That same year, for the first time, it would break even. Netflix was back in business.
Meanwhile, Milch was busy spending HBO’s money and trying to turn Deadwood into a hit. He had a bad back, and his preferred method of creation, says one colleague, was to “lie on the floor, [where] he’s got writers writing down everything he dictates. It’s all stream of consciousness, and it’s very bizarre.”36
The Deadwood writers’ room was at Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch in Santa Clarita. “I can’t stress enough the importance of being in one place, the ranch,” says Malcomson. “It was really liberating for that kind of writing. Anything could change at any time because all our sets were available.”37 Local cowboys tutored the cast on riding horses and other skills, like cursing. Robin Weigert, who plays Calamity Jane, recalls, “They were poetic and profane. David pulled turns of phrase from them. ‘Tighter than a bull’s ass in fly season,’ came straight out of the mouth of one of the cowboys.”38
Milch loved actors and they, for the most part, loved him in return. The reason was simple: he invited them into his process. Says Malcomson, “He allowed us to have co-authorship of the show.”39 He also wrote them the best roles they would ever have. McShane knew he would never get a better part than Swearengen, Malcomson knew she would never get a better part than Trixie. And the same goes for the rest of them. Says McShane, “David was the only showrunner I’ve worked with who is worthy of that name. It was a real trip every day, coming in knowing David would be there, knowing that you were also going to get maybe ten minutes of his opinions on Austrian economic theory in the thirties.”40 Recalls Cox, “I always felt like I was about five years old when I was in his presence.”41
Actors are supposed to receive scripts at least a week before shooting, but awaiting inspiration, Milch claimed not to think about an episode until a few days before the camera was ready to roll. He was constantly churning out new pages, still warm from the printer, minutes before the actors had to go on camera. Some of them, like McShane, who had a photographic memory, could take the changes off the page in an hour. He explains, “Good dialogue ain’t difficult to learn. It’s only the crap, the flavorless expository bullshit, that’s difficult to learn. This show didn’t do . . . that thing where some character re-explains the entire plot for the fifth time to another character. [Besides] you were never just delivering a monologue. You were also getting a blow job or addressing a severed head in a box.”42
The other reason actors and crew loved Milch was that he was famous for his generosity. “Every Friday—‘Good Luck Fridays’—we’d have a raffle, and he would give away a minimum of $25,000 of his own money,” McShane recalls. “Just for the crew. No actors.”43 Milch even wrote a part for Cox’s wife, Nicole Ansari, so that she could get a green card. Adds Weigert, “He’s paid for people’s kids’ college educations or their court cases.”44
Money might have meant nothing to Milch, but it did mean something to HBO—a lot. The downside of Milch’s gone-tomorrow, here-today improvisatory passion was that economy was never a consideration. He spent time the way he spent money—lavishly—but on a set, time is money. It was a habit that eventually would bite him in the ass.
Milch “was very clever about how he extended the schedule,” Cox observes. “He made HBO dance to his tune. He would become obsessed by a theme, so I spent all my time at home just waiting on the call, maybe for two or three weeks—nothing. Then suddenly I was in, and he shot a lot of stuff, and then he would just throw it all away, and focus on something else.”45 Says actor Jim Beaver, “Deadwood was the single greatest experience of my acting career.” But, he says, “I remember seeing a call sheet one day that said, ‘Day 19 out of 10.’ We just shot until we got everything, which made for an expensive show, which ultimately was the cause of its demise.”46
Actors might have loved Milch, but directors not so much. Allen Coulter was known for his meticulous preparation and attention to detail, giving Chase those David Lynch moments he loved, the curtains flapping in a breeze coming through an open window, small but telling touches that planted wild plotting in the badly needed soil of “reality.” Coulter valued his autonomy, and had an often prickly relationship with showrunners. He refused when Milch asked him to direct episodes of Deadwood. He explains, “David Milch was known as a lunatic who would rewrite things and show up with scraps of business written on little pieces of paper, who would direct the actors himself, and I wasn’t interested in that.”47
If Chase was hard on directors by insisting on the integrity of the script, Milch’s movable circus was tough on directors in the opposite way: often, there was no script at all. “Working with David Milch, we never knew what he was gonna do and he never knew,” recalls Adam Davidson, then a novice tasked with directing Episode 9 of Season 3. “He told me, ‘All I ask is that you trust the process.’ And I said, ‘Of course.’ I didn’t know that that process meant when he wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t know what he’s gonna write that day. The very first day of shooting I had no script.” He was given a page that said, “Title page,” but there was no title. He turned to “Page 14, Scene 32,” but there was nothing there. “I had no idea what Scene 32 was,” he recalls.48
Eventually, he got some more pages, and when he looked at the title page, he discovered that he was shooting “Amateur Night,” which featured Cox and his traveling thespians. Davidson somehow improvised his way through it. Addressing Milch, he said, “David, I understand there aren’t gonna be any pages. I’m fine with that. I just want to know what’s the feeling you want behind the scene.” Shouting, “Everybody stop what you’re doing. Come over here,” Milch brought the production to a halt, and proceeded to regale the cast and crew with a lengthy story about Theodora, the fifth-century beauty and former actress-slash-courtesan whom he referred to as the Whore of Constantinople. It was Milch unbound. The moral seemed to be the redemptive power of art, offering a glimpse into the heart of “Amateur Night,” wherein the actors and crew were supposed to volunteer their assorted skills to raise money for the theater.
Milch went on: “Didn’t I hear somebody can juggle?” He singled out one of the Teamster truck drivers who had a glass eye. “Let’s get you in makeup and you’re gonna take out your glass eye.” It was thus that he cobbled together “Amateur Night.”49 Says Cox, “I think the pages were blank because he would go, ‘I want to show aspiration. I want to show the ability of people to transcend their concrete condition through self-expression,’ even in lawless Deadwood where life is cheap. Rawness evolving into community. That’s David, that’s the artistry of David Milch. I admired Adam for just going with it.”50
Deadwood premiered in March 2004. The critical reaction was ecstatic. The New York Times called it as “addictive as The Sopranos.”51 In The Washington Post, Tom Shales wrote, “There are so many good actors having such good times that even at its most stubbornly twisted . . . there is something madly jubilant and robust in Milch’s vision.”52
HBO was happy with the reviews, unhappy with the number of viewers, and unhappier still with the budgets. Beaver recalled, “Normally a 22-episode season of a [network] show will shoot from July to April. We were shooting from July to April on a 12-episode series!”53 Imagine how much time was eaten up entertaining cast and crew with the story of the Whore of Constantinople. Milch admitted to reshooting much of the third season. “The budget was astronomical,” he said, estimated at $4.5 to $6 million per episode at a time when The Sopranos’ budget was skyrocketing as well. Still, Milch always claimed he never got a note about cutting expenses. At the end of the shoot for Season 3, recalls McShane, “It was, ‘See you next year,’ whatever, but there was no next year.”54 HBO pulled the plug.
Except to say that it was the occasion for simultaneous brain outages on the part of Albrecht and Strauss, why HBO traded its best show ever for its worst will never be satisfactorily explained except to say that it was a perfect storm of malign forces. The decision was, however, the first in a string of poor choices that would set the stage for HBO’s gradual decline lasting (with the exception of a few blips like True Blood) until Game of Thrones five years later.
HBO’s CEO claims the cancellation was more accidental than intentional, the result of poor communication with someone, and more or less blamed it on Milch. Albrecht was determined to produce the beyond-awful John from Cincinnati, another Milch show, so anxious that, according to Milch, he wanted to shoot it before embarking on a truncated Season 4 of Deadwood. Albrecht says he called Milch on a Friday and told him he wanted to do the fourth season, but suggested six episodes instead of thirteen, explaining that he was anxious to get to John from Cincinnati. But the showrunner, insulted, bridled and suggested no episodes at all, instead of six or thirteen.
Cox, quoting someone or other, attributed the demise of the series to “a Jewish pissing contest” between Milch and Albrecht. He says, “David took his ball away, said, ‘Fuck it, I’m not doing it. That’s it. No show.’ We were all shocked, but also given David’s fragility, shall we say, I wasn’t surprised because he’s a genuine artist working in a commercial industry and there’s only so far you can push somebody like that.”55 Looking back, Milch says, “That was one of the saddest days of my life.”56
Albrecht, citing Deadwood as his most expensive regular series, canceled the show in May 2006. It was as if HBO said, We don’t care about numbers, we want your show to make noise, then turned around and said, Your show makes noise, but it’s not getting the numbers. For all that HBO put quality at the top of its agenda, this was a reminder that it was in business to make money.
Were the actors ever given a reason? “Nothing,” says McShane. “There was never a reason. It was like, ‘Are you going to just throw the show away?’ And they did.”57 Worse, assured that there was going to be a fourth season, several of the actors—Olyphant, Malcomson, Weigert, et al.—had bought new homes, only to find the rug pulled out from under them.
Milch called everyone to give them the bad news. Weigert told him she had just written a check for a down payment on a condo. “I definitely felt out to sea without a paddle,” she recalls. “There are very few times in an actor’s life when they look good enough on paper to buy. What was a windfall instantly became an albatross. David’s first reaction was, ‘Do you want me to buy it from you?’ I said, ‘No, David. I’ll figure it out.’ That kind of generosity from him, you almost had to defend yourself against. He’d just offer you the world and God forbid you should say yes because it’s way too much for anybody to give anybody.”58
Malcomson sums it all up: “Deadwood was lightning in a bottle. It all went to shit after that. But I’m okay with that. If Trixie is the highlight [of my career], I’m absolutely fine to be in that company and to have done that show.”59
Cutting Deadwood off at the knees, however, left a tangle of loose ends. Cox’s plot, the arrival of the theater troupe, was meant to counterbalance the story of mining baron George Hearst, who was to consolidate his hold over Deadwood. His character, Langrishe, was a stand-in for Milch, who was supposed to illustrate the power of the artist over the power of the capitalist. If only.
As it turned out, money did play a starring role in the death of Deadwood. “Yes, David had an expensive process, but it wasn’t about David’s process,” recalls Strauss. “It was more about the deal structure on it.”60 At the time, says Greenblatt, “HBO would say, ‘If you want to do it with us, we have to own it.’ They were the first to do that, because they could.”61 In this case, however, Paramount produced it and owned the international rights. “We had no back end on the show, Paramount did,” Strauss continues. “It was one of those moments where a financial decision dictated the creative decision.”62
