'Sweeney Todd' Producer Richard Zanuck

DATE December 13, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Movie producer Richard Zanuck on his latest production,
"Sweeney Todd," and his career
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The great Stephen Sondheim musical "Sweeney Todd" has been adapted into a new
movie starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, directed by Tim Burton
and produced by my guest, Richard Zanuck. And yes, he is from the Zanuck
family. His father, Darryl F. Zanuck, co-founded the movie studio 20th
Century Fox and produced such classics as "Young Mr. Lincoln," "Drums along
the Mohawk," "The Grapes of Wrath," "How Green Was My Valley," "My Darling
Clementine," "The Snake Pit," "All about Eve" and "The Longest Day." Richard
grew up in the studio and became its president at the age of 27. From Fox, he
became a senior vice president at Warner Brothers, and soon after became an
independent producer. He now has The Zanuck Company. Among the movies he's
supervised or produced are "The Sound of Music," "Jaws," "Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid," "The French Connection" and "Driving Miss Daisy."

Let's start with a track from the soundtrack of his latest production,
"Sweeney Todd." Here's Johnny Depp singing the part of an angry Sweeney out
for revenge.

(Soundbite of "Epiphany")

Mr. JOHNNY DEPP: (As Sweeney Todd, singing) They all deserve to die
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why
Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett,
There are two kinds of men and only two
There's the one staying put in his proper place
And the one with his foot in the other one's face
Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you

Now we all deserve to die
Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us, death will be a relief
We all deserve to die!

And I'll never see Johanna,
No I'll never hug my girl to me
Finished!
All right!

You, sir, how about a shave?
Come and visit your good friend Sweeney
You, sir!
Too, sir!
Welcome to the grave
I will have vengeance
I will have salvation
Who, sir?
You, sir?
No one's in the chair
Come on, come on!
Sweeney's waiting

I want...

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: Johnny Depp from the soundtrack of the new film "Sweeney Todd,"
produced by Richard Zanuck.

Richard Zanuck, welcome to FRESH AIR. Whose idea was it to do a film
adaptation of "Sweeney Todd"?

Mr. RICHARD ZANUCK: Actually, it took a lot of convincing for many years,
but Tim Burton finally persuaded Stephen Sondheim to give up his masterpiece
of theater, musical theater, and he gave it to Tim to make a film.

GROSS: Do you have any direct interactions with Sondheim about the movie?

Mr. ZANUCK: Oh, yes. You know, he's been a collaborator all the way
through, first with the screenplay and then the casting process. He actually
had final approval of the director--he approved Tim--and of...

GROSS: Well, who else was he going to go with? If Tim Burton's been
badgering him for years?

Mr. ZANUCK: Yeah, no, exactly. And then he had final approval of Mrs.
Lovett and of Sweeney, so he approved those two actors, Johnny Depp and Helena
Bonham Carter. But it was his final approval that we needed, and of course he
supervised the music during the course of the picture and all the rest.

GROSS: So he was there while it was being made?

Mr. ZANUCK: No, he was there for two weeks. We pre-recorded all the singing
a month before we started shooting.

GROSS: The last time I spoke with Stephen Sondheim--this was in 2000--he was
talking about how really difficult it is now to find singers who can sing for
Broadway, and I mean particularly who could sing his songs. And it's
interesting that, you know, neither Johnny Depp nor Helena Bonham Carter are
really singers, and I think Depp used to sing harmony with his band, but I
don't think he ever sang lead. So these strike me as such challenging songs
for people who aren't, like, really seasoned, top-notch singers.

Mr. ZANUCK: You're absolutely right. And Tim, from the very get-go, said,
`I want actors to sing. We can get the great singers of Broadway to come in
here and do this, but I want real actors, people who may not be the great
voices for these songs'--which are very difficult, Sondheim's probably the
most difficult to sing. But Tim wanted the acting ability and the actors. So
all of these people were nonprofessional singers, all the way, the entire
cast. There was one lady who played the beggar woman who's a singer from the
London stage, Laura Michelle Kelly; but outside of that, everyone, including
the young people, had never sung professionally before.

You know, it was an exercise in courage on everybody's part, particularly
Johnny, who is perhaps the biggest movie star out there right now. You know,
he exposed another side of himself that nobody had seen or heard, and he took
a big chance doing something like that because, you know, if he didn't have
the voice, it would have been bad for the picture, and certainly bad for him.
But he surprised all of us.

GROSS: So tell us more about the interactions you had with Stephen Sondheim
before and during the filming.

Mr. ZANUCK: Well, I met him early on, well before we started shooting, and I
was with Tim and John Logan, the screenwriter. And we talked about early
concepts and just things in general. At first I was worried that we were
taking his masterpiece and putting it up on film. And it was a three-hour
stage play and we were obviously going to have to boil it down to two hours or
below two hours, and that meant some cutting and some editing and, you know,
making it a film. And he went right along with that. He was very
cooperative. He didn't treat it as anything tremendously special that
couldn't be touched.

GROSS: Tell us one of the questions that you brought to Sondheim.

Mr. ZANUCK: That we brought to Sondheim?

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. ZANUCK: First we brought the cast. He asked to see Johnny, and Johnny
went to see him, just the two of them. We all thought Johnny would sing for
him, or he would demand Johnny to sing, and I think he expected Johnny to sing
for him; but after the meeting we found out from Johnny and from talking to
Stephen, no, they just talked about concept. Johnny said he wasn't prepared
to sing in front of Stephen Sondheim, and Sondheim approved him. And
actually, he was the only voice that--Johnny--that we hadn't heard until about
eight weeks before we had to do the pre-recording. It was nervous-making at
that time. Everybody else auditioned.

GROSS: I can't imagine. I mean, this, it's a musical, and your lead
character, you've never heard him sing. What an act of faith.

Mr. ZANUCK: I know. It was one of those things. But sets were being built,
wardrobe was being made, all kinds of plans. People were, you know, scurrying
around getting ready to make the picture, but nobody had heard Johnny's voice.
And we all just reassured ourselves, Tim, who'd made five other pictures with
Johnny, hadn't heard his voice, but we'd sit around saying, `Well, Johnny's a
smart guy. He knows what this means for his career and all of the rest. He
wouldn't do this, he wouldn't put himself in this position unless he was
convinced that he could do it.' But that's all we had to go on, you know, the
fact that he was a smart guy and that he must have a voice or he wouldn't put
everybody and himself in this very dangerous position.

And I was in my office at Pinewood Studios, and Tim was in the office next to
mine, and he came in--I was on the phone. He came in and just laid a cassette
player in front of me with these big earpieces and then walked out. And I
didn't know what it was. I hung up and put it on and pushed play, and there
was Johnny singing "My Friends," which is one of his great ballads in the
piece. And I walked into Tim, and we both practically started crying. We
just said, `Oh my God, he's better than we dreamt he could be.'

GROSS: My guest is movie producer Richard Zanuck. We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is film producer Richard Zanuck,
and he's been producing movies since the 1950s. His latest is the new film
adaptation of "Sweeney Todd," which is directed by Tim Burton and stars Johnny
Depp.

Let me ask you to just do the roll call of some of the many movies that you've
produced. Just like tick off a few that everybody will know.

Mr. ZANUCK: "Jaws," "The Sting," "Cocoon," "The Verdict," "Driving Miss
Daisy," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Planet of the Apes," "Big
Fish"--I gave you the last few that I've done with Tim. But as a young studio
head, I put into motion "The Sound of Music," "The French Connection,"
"Patton," the original "Planet of the Apes," "M*A*S*H," blah blah blah. I'm
running out of hits.

GROSS: Well, that's a pretty impressive list.

Mr. ZANUCK: I can mention a lot of pictures that I'm unhappy that I put into
production, but let's not--please don't ask me about those.

GROSS: OK, I'm not going to put you on the spot about that right now. Maybe
later.

Mr. ZANUCK: OK.

GROSS: So you got started in movies at your father's studio, the studio that
he founded, 20th Century Fox. And when you were in your 20s, correct me if
I'm wrong, you were overseeing production of "The Sound of Music." And since
we just talked about "Sweeney Todd," what was it like to do that film. Did
you like Hollywood musicals at that point?

Mr. ZANUCK: Well, let me back up a little bit. My father had left the
studio, and at the time I was getting out of college at Stanford. I'd been
working every summer, all summer vacation, starting when I was a young boy.
So I was very tuned in to the studio and to the business. I was a, you know,
very recognizable face on the studio lot because I'd been there, grew up there
for years and years and years every summer, and knew everybody, knew
everything.

When he came back to take over the studio, I'd made three pictures at that
time, the first one being "Compulsion" when I was 24 years old, which won the
Cannes Film Festival award at that time. But when he came back, he really
at--he'd been away for 15 years, didn't know anyone, he came back to protect
his picture, "The Longest Day," which was his masterpiece, and he was afraid
that the studio was going to go under because of the "Cleopatra" debacle.
They were about ready to go bankrupt. They'd sold the backlot, which was now
Century City. And he needed someone to trust. And after a long board
meeting, which I was at like a fly on the wall, in which he'd taken over the
company, the two of us came back and he said, `I'm going to take a nap in the
hotel. I'm exhausted after this meeting.' Said, `I don't know anybody out in
Hollywood anymore, I've been gone for so long. Make me a list of who you
think should be in charge of the studio and then we can talk about it at
dinner. Wake me up at 8:00.'

So I came, woke him up at 8:00, and he started getting dressed, and he said,
`Did you make up your list?' And I said yes, and I handed him a piece of
paper, and all it said was me. And that was the list.

GROSS: Really?

Mr. ZANUCK: Yes. It just said me. And he said, `Oh my God.' He said, `No,
I agree. You would be great. You know the business, you made pictures, you
know everybody.' He said, `But we're going to get killed by the board of
directors and everybody'll think it's, you know'--and it is nepotism and all
the rest, but...

GROSS: You were in your 20s.

Mr. ZANUCK: Yeah, I was 27. And so we went to dinner at Danny's Hideaway in
New York. I'll never forget it. We both kind of got loaded. By the end of
the evening he said, `I'm going to call each board member tomorrow and tell
them that you're in charge.' And he did that and then left for Paris. And I
left for Hollywood. He never came to the studio in the nine years that I was
running it. He would come into New York for the board meetings each month,
but he never came to the studio. And one of the first things that I did was
close the studio, because they had no productions going and everybody had to
be let go. And, you know, tumbleweeds were starting to roll down the, you
know, from the, main gate to the commissary and it was very grim. The company
was on the verge of bankruptcy.

I kept writers going, and I found that they had purchased, several years
before, "The Sound of Music." And I thought, `Why haven't they put this in
work?' They'd never put a writer on it or anything. So I got Ernie Lehman,
who had done "West Side Story" and was a great, great writer. He stayed on to
write the script. And I had several other scripts going, and four months
later we opened the gates to the studio. We were--the hills were alive again.
So, you know, we were back alive as a studio. But we came very, very close to
closing the doors forever.

GROSS: Now let's talk a little bit about "Butch Cassidy." That was initially
supposed to have Marlon Brando in it? Am I right about that?

Mr. ZANUCK: It was originally brought to me with Paul Newman and Steve
McQueen.

GROSS: Oh, Steve McQueen. OK.

Mr. ZANUCK: Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen, and actually we had a very, very
tough time working out a billing for the two of them, and Steve thought he was
a bigger star. He'd just made "The Great Escape." Paul had certainly been
nominated many times by that time and had been a star longer, felt Steve was
just a newcomer out of TV. So we could never do it. I built models of a
spinning wheel with their names on it revolving. I had half the world--I had
a globe with half the world cut up with one's name on one side of the world.
We worked everything out, couldn't do it.

Then we started--so Steve dropped out, and we talked to Warren Beatty about
it, and he wanted to do it but he was more interested in the relationship with
the girl--being a, you know, the two guys and the girl, and so he, you know,
we got a little scared of that. And then we talked about several other
people. Redford was someone that I didn't know much of. I'd seen him in
"Barefoot on the Park," I thought he was too collegiate and so forth, and I
was really the one holdout on Redford. And I'd known him as a young man
because we competitively swam together in Santa Monica, but I hadn't really
followed his career. He was, you know, good looking, more collegiate than I
thought this role called for. And George Roy Hill, the director, Paul Newman
and Bill Goldman, who had written the original screenplay, kept sending me
messages, calling me, saying, `You've got to use this guy. He's the perfect
guy,' and so forth. I finally gave in.

And after the first day's dailies seeing him, I didn't realize that you put
him on a horse and, you know, lengthen his hair and put him in a cowboy
outfit, he was the perfect guy. And I saw it after the first day's shooting,
and I called everybody up and I said, `You're so right. How could I have
missed this one?' But they were a great team. I love that picture.

GROSS: So in the middle of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," there's a
Burt Bacharach song, right? "Raindrops Are Falling on My Head."

Mr. ZANUCK: Yes.

GROSS: And it's so odd, you know. It's this like Western and a period piece,
and suddenly there's a Burt Bacharach song and basically like a music video.
You know, Paul Newman's driving Katharine Ross on the handlebars of his
bicycle, and Bacharach's playing in the background. What did you think when
you first saw that? Did you think, `Perfect, what a great idea'? Or did you
think, `This is ludicrous.'

Mr. ZANUCK: No, I loved the idea. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" was
more of a myth than--I mean, they were real characters, but, you know, the
whole idea of it and the way we ended it with them going out in a blaze of
glory, the whole thing was a little bit non-Western. It was, you know, there
was a bit of tongue in cheek in all of it. It was more fun. It wasn't a true
Western in the traditional sense. So when this was conceived early on, and
then we heard Burt's song, we loved the idea.

And I remember, when I took it back to New York to show my father and the
board of directors right before our board meeting, we had lunch afterwards,
after the picture, and they all loved the picture, but one board member,
stodgy old fool, said, `This is a Western. What's that song doing in there?
"Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," that stupid.' And then another board
member said, `Hey, Ed, you're right. I kind of thought that was silly in this
picture.' And they all started ganging up on me, and I had an argument and
left. But the song stayed in the movie and became a classic, won the Academy
Award. It's one of Burt Bacharach's great pieces. I thought it was a
delightful interlude, and it just, you know, exemplified the nature of the
picture, the whole fun of it all.

GROSS: Let's talk about a movie that didn't do so well for you, and I'm
thinking of "Hello, Dolly," which starred Barbra Streisand in the Carol
Channing role. This was made in 1969. And 1969 is a year that young people
are like dropping LSD and taking over college campuses, the nation is divided
over the war in Vietnam, and "Hello, Dolly" just seemed so out of step with
what was happening culturally in America, and it was a really big flop. What
was it like for you making that, and did you see it coming? Did you see,
like, a big flop coming?

Mr. ZANUCK: "Hello, Dolly" was, at that time, the biggest stage musical in
the history of American theater. All the road companies had played through
many, many actresses all across the country, and it was just a huge hit on
stage. And so we had all--and the music was very popular--Louis Armstrong
singing the song "Hello, Dolly" and everything. And instead of getting Carol
Channing or someone like that, we took the hottest singer of the day, which
was Barbra Streisand, was just, you know, had killed them in pictures. She
was doing great concert tours, the records were selling well.

Well, the concept of it just didn't work. And I thought we made a pretty good
movie out of it, and God knows that it was expensive. We built a whole
"Hello, Dolly" street and the parade and all of that, but, you know, things
don't always work out. Every picture isn't going to be a hit. And when they
cost a lot, they're going to lose a lot. And that's exactly what happened.

GROSS: Now, your father, Darryl F. Zanuck, who had hired you to be the
president of 20th Century Fox, fired you in 1970. Why?

Mr. ZANUCK: Well, he should've. I would've fired myself. I made, you know,
three musicals--"Hello, Dolly," "Doctor Dolittle" and "Star!" "Star!" with the
same team--Robert Wise, Julie Andrews--as had made "Sound of Music." I was
chasing that rainbow of "The Sound of Music." And it's funny that we started
the program talking about "Sweeney Todd," which is a musical--in the horror
sense--but I had vowed never to touch another musical, because I really felt
that those three big musicals had cost me my job. So, no, I brought the
studio to its knees. I mean, we had made, during the course of that period,
"Patton," "M*A*S*H," "The French Connection" and "Planet of the Apes" and a
lot of other successful pictures, but we couldn't recover from the damage that
befell us with those three big musicals. So, you know, he had every right
to--I would've fired anybody under those circumstances.

GROSS: How did he tell you the news?

Mr. ZANUCK: He didn't. The board of directors, of which he was--I was the
president of the company and he was chairman of the board, we had a special
meeting right before Christmas in which he told the board, you know, what he
wanted. There was a vote, and it was more like an execution. I, you know, I
was right there and put up a feeble fight, and that was it. Probably the best
thing that ever happened to me in a way, because it, you know, I became an
independent producer, and a couple of years later, my partner and I, David
Brown, had outgrossed 20th Century Fox with our own personal finances.

GROSS: And you're probably referring here to the success of "Jaws."

Mr. ZANUCK: "Jaws" and "The Sting," yes.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. What made you decide to go ahead with "Jaws"? And this was
Steven Spielberg's second movie. His first, "Sugarland Express," was not a
big hit. What did...

Mr. ZANUCK: I produced his first movie.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. Why did you have so much confidence in him?

Mr. ZANUCK: Well, I saw right from the beginning that this guy was a genius.
He knew more about the camera, how to move the camera and move people in and
out of the camera. He knew more about lenses than any cinemaphotographer did.
He just has that ability. He has an eye for staging and all of the rest. I
loved "Sugarland Express." It's one of, in my opinion, it's one of his best
pictures. It led to our selecting him for "Jaws," which, you know, set his
career on fire as a major player in the industry, and didn't do much harm to
my career, either.

GROSS: Since you grew up spending a lot of time in your father's studio, 20th
Century Fox, then took over the studio and then became an independent producer
and made a lot of hits, you know, as an independent producer, I'm interested
in hearing what you think you borrowed and what you think you rejected from
the production style of your father, Darryl F. Zanuck.

Mr. ZANUCK: Well, it was great having a master filmmaker, since I wanted to
go into film and follow his steps. And I was watching, ever since I can
remember, his every move. I would spend whole weekends with him in a
projection room at the studio. I would come every chance I had as a young
person, and as a matter of fact he would say, `Come on your way to school.
I'm running something for a group of executives.' And he'd run a rough cut
with the executives, and then he and I would step out in the hall and he'd
say, `What do you think?' And he was actually--he wasn't doing it for me, he
was doing it for him. He wanted to know what a 14 or 15-year-old's opinion of
what he had just seen.

And so I think you have to be decisive, I think you have to have a good sense
of what plays, what won't play. He would read a script and couldn't always
give you a solution for something that was bothering him, but if he sensed
that from page 20 to 25 there's a lull, it's not quite working, he'd come up
with probably a corny idea, saying, `Oh, she throws a frying pan across the
kitchen, hits him in the head,' some crazy notion like that. Which wasn't a
solution, but you knew you better look at page 20 to 25 because there's
something wrong with it, find something else that is more plausible and more
playable.

GROSS: You know, we were talking before about how much it hurt when your
father fired you after you supervised a series of flops at 20th Century Fox.
He got ousted from his position of chairman of the board within about a year
after you got fired. What was it like for you to watch him be ousted?

Mr. ZANUCK: Well, at the end of the meeting in which I got fired, we walked
out together rather solemnly, and I just turned to him and I said, `You're
next.' And he gave me the big chuckle. He said, `These are all my guys,
kiddo.' Meaning that the board members--William Randolph Hearst and all of
them, Robert Lehman--so he thought he had them all in his pocket. But he made
a series of mistakes in the next few months and he was out within six months
later.

And it was very sad. I came to see him. We hadn't spoken since that fatal
board meeting in which I was axed, but I flew in and we met and embraced and
everything, and it was, you know, kind of a Greek tragedy. We're both out,
and it hurt more for him because he had founded the company from scratch, and
he didn't, you know, know what he was really going to do. He was much more
lost than I had, I'd already recovered. And we needed each other for that
period, and he was starting to fail a bit physically and mentally. But it was
harder for me to see him get it, and it was very painful both ways. But I
think probably I recovered, he never really did.

GROSS: One more question. Do you have a favorite all-time film?

Mr. ZANUCK: No, I don't. I do secretly, but I'm not going to expose it.

GROSS: Because?

Mr. ZANUCK: They're all my children. I love them dearly.

GROSS: OK, all right.

Mr. ZANUCK: You know how it goes.

GROSS: I know that story. OK. Richard Zanuck, thank you so much for talking
with us.

Mr. ZANUCK: Thanks so much. I really have enjoyed it.

GROSS: Film producer Richard Zanuck. His latest movie is Tim Burton's
adaptation of "Sweeney Todd."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Producer and writer Marshall Herskovitz on his new
Internet show "Quarterlife," now picked up by NBC, and his career
TERRY GROSS, host:

With his production partner Ed Zwick, our guest Marshall Herskovitz created
the TV series "thirtysomething" and "Once and Again," and produced "My
So-called Life." With Zwick as co-producer, Herskovitz has written and
directed a new drama for the Internet called "Quarterlife." It's about
creative people in their 20s going through a quarter-life crisis, and centers
on a young woman named Dylan played by Bitsie Tulloch. She wants to be a
writer and finds her own voice when she starts a video blog reporting on her
life and inner feelings.

(Soundbite of "Quarterlife")

Ms. BITSIE TULLOCH: (As Dylan Krieger) It's my curse that I can see what
people are thinking, what they want to say and can't say, who they want to be
with.

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. TULLOCH: (As Dylan Krieger) And what good does that do me if nobody can
see me?

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: "Quarterlife" was just picked up by NBC for broadcast in February as
an hour-long series. But Herskovitz made it expressly for the Internet,
cutting each one-hour episode into six eight-minute video pieces. They're
available on the Web site MySpace. They're also available on a new Web site
called Quarterlife, which was created by Herskovitz in conjunction with the
series. Quarterlife.com is also the Web site on which Dylan in the series
"Quarterlife" is posting her video blogs. Our TV critic, David Bianculli,
spoke to Marshall Herskovitz.

DAVID BIANCULLI reporting:

I would imagine that here you wrote all these episodes trying to figure out
what 25-year-olds were like, and then...

Mr. MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ: Mm-hmm.

BIANCULLI: ...you get those scripts out, you produce those programs, and then
you start hearing from actual 25-year-olds being inundated by what they're
actually thinking and feeling and doing.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Yes.

BIANCULLI: How close did you get?

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Well, remember, I do have access to 25-year-olds in my own
life. The genesis of this project came from the fact that Ed Zwick and I
realized that our entire office was filled with 25-year-olds and we were
listening to them talk every day, and they were talking to us. And, you know,
we've had this long-standing, odd interest in various moments in people's
lives, you know, whether they're in their 30s or in their teens or in their
40s, and all of a sudden we looked at each other and said, `Hey, people in
their 20s are kind of interesting. Let's do a show about that.' And of
course, you know, we dimly remember the fact that we were once in our 20s.

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: And in fact, you know, that was a remarkable time in both of
our lives. First of all, that's when we met each other, that's when we became
best friends and creative partners. That's, you know, when you're in your
20s, you end up, whether you like it or not, making decisions that affect the
rest of your life: who you may or may not marry, what field you go into,
whether you pursue the career you wanted to or whether you give up on it. All
sorts of things happen in your 20s that are quite remarkable.

BIANCULLI: I wonder if you could compare and contrast Claire Danes in "My
So-called Life" with Bitsie Tulloch and her character of Dylan in
"Quarterlife."

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Well, I guess, you know, the character that Claire played
was a darker person than Dylan in this. I would say "My So-called Life" is,
in general, a darker show than this show is. And I think that was intentional
on my part. You know, "My So-called Life" was this very true document of what
it's like to be 16 years old, and the stakes when you're 16 really do seem
life and death every day. And I think that's what Winnie Holzman so
beautifully evoked in that show. My favorite episode of "My So-called Life"
was the one we called "The Zit," where Angela Chase has a pimple. And the
show ranges around philosophically all the way from race relations to Kafka's
"Metamorphosis," and there's nothing silly about that, because in the world of
a teenager, the presentation of self, you know, puts you in the same level as
racial prejudice or anything else and, in fact, you know, people responded to
that very, very strongly.

BIANCULLI: Is 10 years enough distance for you to look at something like that
and give yourself a grade? I remember at one point in his career Kurt
Vonnegut graded all of his novels and gave some A's and some B's and C's. Can
you do that with your work at this point?

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Yeah, I can. Well, first of all, you know, "My So-called
Life" is mostly Winnie Holzman's work. I mean, I am so proud to have
collaborated with her on that.

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: And, you know, I wrote and directed one of the episodes and
I was there every day helping her, but this was her voice. And the pilot was
Scott Winant's direction, and so it's easy for me to look at that and say,
`This is genius.' You know, I don't say that about myself, but I can say it
about them. So I'd give that an A-plus. In terms of my own work?

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: I would say there are a few episodes of "thirtysomething"
that I think are pretty damn good. I think there are a lot that are good, and
a lot that were less than good, and a very few that were really, really good
and that I'm proud of.

BIANCULLI: Is there one that really leaps out that you'd like to just remind
everybody about right now?

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Well, I think the episode, for me, that sort of went into
another sphere altogether was the one called "Therapy," and it had an intimacy
in it, talking about the issues that a married couple sort of face, that was
really kind of startling. And when you look at it again, it's still startling
in a way. And again, it was so honest. The octane of truth was so high in
that that it just kind of knocks you out and still holds up today. So I would
say that, for me, was sort of the--that was the one that kind of gets me from
that whole series for me.

BIANCULLI: I love that phrase, "the octane of truth."

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: We used to joke about that, Ed and I, when we were doing the
show. We actually, we realized that in general in "thirtysomething," if the
octane was too high it would start to freak people out and they didn't like
it, and if it was too low then they didn't believe it. And we used to say,
`We need to be around 92 octane of truth for this show to be at its optimum
performance.'

BIANCULLI: More "My So-called Life" questions. The audience that that
program had wasn't valued then, but it's all that's valued now.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Yes.

BIANCULLI: Am I right about thinking that?

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Yes, I would say that that's the one time in my career when
it can be documented that I was ahead of my time. Because the networks had no
interest whatsoever in teenagers at that time; teenage girls in particular
were completely invisible to them. In fact--you'll laugh at this--but when we
were trying to keep the show on the air, we called Bob Eiger, who was head of
the network at that time, and we said to him, `You know, you're not losing
money on this show. We know you're getting a premium from advertisers. So
this is not a question of money. We know you have low ratings, but you should
keep this show on the air because it's corporate good works. You are
literally giving a voice to a group of people in the culture who have had no
voice up until now.' That's literally what we said to him.

And it started to change right after that show was canceled. In fact, I would
actually chart the change to the "Romeo + Juliet" film with Claire Danes and
Leo DiCaprio that was a huge hit, like just six months after the show was
canceled, that started this sort of youth, and in particular teenage girl,
sort of thing in the culture where all of a sudden advertisers and marketers
and film studios wanted that demographic. We were just a bit too early for
it.

BIANCULLI: You're president of the Producers Guild of America...

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Yes.

BIANCULLI: ...which is different from the Alliance of Motion Picture and
Television Producers, against whom the writers are striking. So you're not
the target of a strike at...

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Thank you for saying that. That's correct.

BIANCULLI: But what's the difference between these two? How are you
different?

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: If you go to the AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and
Television Producers, you won't find any producers. Those are big companies
and executives. You know, they're represented by the six major media
companies that dominate all media in the United States. Producers are people
like me who try to get projects done. They're generally independent.
Sometimes they have deals at studios, but they live by their wits, they live
on their own, they try to get funding for the projects they love. They're
much more aligned with the writers and the directors in this town than they
are with the big companies that run the show. So it's actually been very
important for us. We've been writing letters to Variety and Hollywood
Reporter and the Los Angeles Times trying to get them to stop referring to the
AMPTP as producers because they're not.

BIANCULLI: Well, you did an essay in the LA Times printed just a couple of
days after the strike began about what's happening to television, not just
about the issues of the strike, but about the issues of corporate ownership.
And you basically said that government policy and corporate strategy are
poisoning the TV business. I mean, what's happened since you started that is
so different?

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Well, the biggest thing that happened was the decision by
the FCC in 1995 to abolish its financial syndication rules, which, to make a
very long story short, allowed networks to own the programs that they
broadcast. Until then, networks were precluded from owning the programs that
they broadcast because it was felt it would give networks too much power if
they did. And, boy, that was a wise decision back in the '70s when they
passed that.

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: And when this was abolished in 1995--which, by the way, was
around the same time that these very large media companies started realizing
that they should be acquiring networks so that they could be these, you know,
sort of consolidated entities--that all of a sudden you had Disney, that owned
ABC and also had its own production wing, you know, the same thing with NBC,
the same thing with CBS, the same thing with Fox, that all of these networks
owned the programs that they broadcast. Which meant that all of the
independent production companies, of which there had been like 40, say, in
1990, were driven out of business because these companies only wanted to do
business with themselves.

And what you have now is a network, since it owns the programs, has a lot of
proprietary interest in how those programs are going to be developed. And
they take much more creative control over the product than they ever did
before at in time in television history. You know, they tell the producers
what clothes the people should wear. They have to decide who the director of
photography is. They tell them to change the color of the walls. They give
notes on every page of the script. You know, they're the owners so they want
to have complete creative control.

The problem, as I said in the piece, is that the people exerting this creative
control are executives. They're not artists, they're not writers, they're not
production designers. So they're not necessarily equipped to be making those
decisions. And what you have then is decisions by committee and decisions by
research. So it's very difficult to be creative under those circumstances.

BIANCULLI: Now, you're maintaining control of "Quarterlife," not only
editorial control in what you're doing, but you're maintaining ownership.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Yes, that's correct.

BIANCULLI: And yet NBC has bought it, or bought the second rights to it, to
be able to show it in, I guess, February on TV.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Yes. Yes.

BIANCULLI: And NBC is going to benefit from the strike, I guess,
because--hey, look--it's it's original programming that you were actually
making to get away from the networks, and yet here it is. I mean, I don't
know. I don't know where the chicken and where the egg is here, because you
made network-quality program for the Internet, probably the first one that
really can be called a network-level show as we know it, for the Internet.
And then the network takes it back. So it's sort of like just another
development arm. How do you see it?

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Well, I see it somewhat different from that, and I think
it's important to elucidate, especially because of the strike. I think, first
of all, it's important to know that we made a deal with NBC two months before
the strike that was quite an extensive deal. They invested in our Web site,
they became our distribution partner for worldwide rights for the show, and
they had an option--a "right of first refusal," it's called--for a network
play. So they had not decided whether they were going to put it on
television, but they had the right to do it. And that was concluded two
months before the strike. So there was no legal basis whereby we could
withhold this from them...

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: ...you know, once they picked up the option even though we
were in the middle of a strike. We had already finished writing all the
episodes, and in fact we were in the last week of production. So, you know,
this wasn't done to give NBC fodder, you know, to resist the strike. This
existed before.

The other thing that's important to understand is that we still own the show
and we still creatively control the show. We are delivering to NBC finished
episodes. They have not even seen the scripts. They don't even know what the
stories are about. That's literally never happened in the history of
television. And by the way, I said in the op-ed piece that I have nothing
against television. I love television. I love working in television. What I
hate is the level of control that the networks have exerted and the fact that
you can't be entrepreneurial anymore. But we've been able to figure out a way
to do both of those things, to own this damn thing and control it ourselves.
So of course I'm happy to go to television under those circumstances.

BIANCULLI: In the previous TV work that you've done, you've dealt with teens,
now you're dealing with 20-somethings on the Web, you've dealt with
"thirtysomething." "Once and Again" sort of got into the 40s.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Yeah.

BIANCULLI: Are you running out of decades, or do you have definite plans to
do a 50-something, an 80-something, something-something?

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Well, Ed Zwick says the only thing left is
"Incontinent-something," you know. One thing I can say is that the baby boom
generation has never been shy about thinking that whatever it does is very
interesting. So I'm sure when we're in our 60s, we'll think that that's the
most amazing decade of life and we'll do something about then. I'm not sure
anyone will want to watch, but we'll be working on it.

BIANCULLI: Marshall Herskovitz, as a multimedia pioneer, I just want to thank
you for being on FRESH AIR.

Mr. HERSKOVITZ: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Marshall Herskovitz spoke with our TV critic, David Bianculli.
Herskovitz's new series, "Quarterlife," can be seen on the Web site
quarterlife.com and will be shown on NBC in February.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.