Leaving Los Angeles (Part One: Work)

"I'm allergic to Los Angeles, it's stretching me thin. They vaporize desperation and we're breathing it in." -- Mark McAdam, "Allergic"

A few weeks ago, on a gun-metal gray Brooklyn day, replete with slushy rain and rainy snow, I decided to fully give up what is left of my Venice, California life. What follows is an account of how I finally gave up on my oddly loved hometown. Doctor Freud, arguably one of the finest prose-writers of the twentieth century, purportedly said that "work and love are the cornerstones of our humanness." Humanness is my beat, so to speak, and I have spent all year fighting the dual sensations of having too much of it, and not enough. I have had three what I would call "rough years" in my life as grown-up. One, my thirty-fifth, involved surprise surgery to repair my heart before I died of congestive heart failure, which was imminent. The second, my fortieth, was bookended on one end by a double-feature of my pop's slow death from cancer -- which spread from colon to brain like a fire in Malibu -- followed a week and half later by the attacks of September 11th in Tribeca, where I lived, and ending 13 months later with the break up of a 12 year relationship which I (and he) had thought would last forever. It is a mark of all the dualities that I so love that we are still family, closer and better than before in many ways.

The third and perhaps most stamina-challenging annus horribilis was this one, 2007. It seemed to go on quite literally endlessly. The war with the studios has arguably radicalized me, which is a good thing, and I will never again enter into another relationship with a studio (or perhaps person) in either hope or fear, only the stoic certitude of a veteran of foreign wars.

The war with the hijacked GOP has re-politicized me after a decade of sorrow and pity for my own party and the nation it has abdicated responsibility for. This, indeed, is the Age of Abdication; a time when right and wrong and good and evil are considered naive and even childlike constructs only held onto by unsophisticated and earnest rubes like me. My love for New York and for the theater (which I found myself fighting for on the Huffington Post), the art, and for the streets, the light, for the toughness and the patois (and the Post) has re-ignited. The life-long romantic attachment I had held close to my repaired heart for Los Angeles has dwindled down to that of a Chandleresque head-shaking weariness. Sitting at the counter of Musso's is now an exercise in empty nostalgia and dubious food. The low-level company town-toxicity of being in a place where so many residents simply talk about one thing and one thing only has frankly poisoned me, and the laziness of a detached culture, bathed in cynicism, distraction, and hustle, has coarsened me. I can't go back. There is a building, a gorgeous old building on Rossmore Boulevard in Hancock Park, which is populated by so many show-biz folk the staff, in consideration of the demographic, posts the weekend grosses at the reception desk. There it is, L.A. in a (simplified) nutshell.

I had spent much of the past year planning and (haphazardly) executing a wearisome and costly to-and-fro transcontinental shuttle-diplomacy between my two selves; the playwright in New York and the unlikely creator and executive producer of a top 20 TV show in Los Angeles. Trip, the dog seemed pleased to be on either coast, so long as I was within his ambit, avec songs, walks, and cookies. However, flying with a dog who needs to be checked in like a suitcase is a little bit like sending your children off to a sketchy Outward Bound program wherein kids have perished, or making a loved-one fly coach on ATA or Aeroflot while you fly privately. It is a cause for agitated business-class vodka-drinking if you are me, and Trip is child, buddy, and confrere rolled into one.

Last New Year's Eve, I was on a plane to London. I wanted to wander, flaneur-like, about a city not my own, before launching into the second half of the grueling first season of Brothers & Sisters. I saw plays and wrote half of an episode, so as to give everyone else some time off. 2006 had been brutal. A pilot shot, thrown out, re-shot after recasting. Re-shoots of the re-shoot. A colleague (an experienced TV professional), who decided that my exuberant style of writing the second episode was a reflection not simply of inexperience or experimentation in a new form, but rather, of a drug habit. (Perhaps a not unreasonable assumption in Los Angeles, but in my case not true. I had told her in confidence that the novel and never-endured schedule of TV production, (eighteen hours of writing and being on set usually), had driven me to doctor-approved Ritalin, which she chose to share with a number of people at the show, in a remarkable display of discretion, show-biz style. ( This colleague "moved on.") By late fall, under a new show-runner (number 2), we were catching a bit of wind, and with it an audience -- and that audience was holding or growing by the week. The stakes got higher in Burbank as 2006 wound down and we were on more and more solid ground.

Upon my return to LA in 2007, I could be found nervously trying to retain a voice in the making of our show, and gently trying to keep moving forward the political discourse in it, along with a mildly candid discussion of sexuality in American life today. The studio and network were cautiously supportive without ever giving me even a suggestion of free reign. (I did not expect it.)

To be fair, in terms of the gay storylines of B&S, ABC had been unfailingly enthusiastic, for which I was grateful. I also tried to bolster the modest proposal that men and women over forty-five years of age are in fact VERY BLOODY interesting, and not, contrary to the vagaries of demographic and market testing, invisible deliverers of lessons and straight-talk, and far from geriatric totems. Women especially are riveting when they have lines of experience on their faces and the glow of a life actually lived in their eyes.

As 2007 progressed, the guardians of the promising network show grew less patient with my efforts to sew in storylines that were more serious than funny. When I pushed back, arguing for more complexity and greater nuance, I was told that my approach to the reality of TV was not especially helpful just as we were getting caught up after the horror of endless reshoots on episodes one, two ,and three. I was told that my ideas were steeped in the theater (and therefore, too much angst, a phrase used repeatedly to end discussions with me), and that it was perhaps better for me to offer less resistance to the now smoothly-running machinery. I would be told that I was tired and to take a few days or a week or so here and there away, and then would be told, in the midst of arguing for my voice, that I wasn't around enough to merit the opinion.

As work on the first season ended last April, there was tension, and a meeting. The sympathetic studio head, always a gentleman, always warm and considerate, suggested that perhaps I might now spend more time thinking of new projects for Disney. I sighed, looked at my watchful and protective agent, and in May, before coming home to New York, signed on the line, conceding the point that life would be better if I just let the trained TV professionals do their thing at the show I had nominally created.

I tried and succeeded minimally in not taking it too personally, hardly my strong suit. Years before, the theater and opera director Peter Sellars had offered the unasked for opinion that my plays felt like those of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero - which was not a compliment. When I looked at him with a certain expression on my face, he laughed and said the truest thing I ever heard about show business: "Robbie, come on, you have to have a thick skin in this business." To which I would add, some twenty years later, "Well, Peter, it also helps if people are too fucking scared of you to insult you."

When I came back from a brief hiatus in June, at the start of the second season, I was prepared to help the new show runner get his sea-legs before passing the baton entirely. I would write four episodes or so, rather than the fourteen I co-wrote the first season.

The first weeks of the new regime (show runner 3, brought in by others), were an exercise in diplomacy, politeness and tact for the new team and for me. As days went by, I was asked by trained TV pros to stay on instead of "thinking of new projects." I did so with renewed hope and enthusiasm for the possibilities of stamping the show with my idiosyncratic world view, which maintains that all dualities are capable of fucking you up, and certitude is a theory rather than a fact, and that nobody knows anything until they are tested.

That last one brings me nicely to a day in August. A storyline I had NOT written in a script with my name on it, was greeted by the despair of one of our stars. Despite it having been approved, vetted and probed by all execs (trained TV pros) and the producer in charge of the transition (number 2), I was instantly and inexplicably asked to step back entirely (the day prior I had been begged to stay).

Step back I did, with broken heart, as I was about to write an episode I had been planning for two months. (About the making of a campaign ad, a sort of Day for Night of the Soul for Calista Flockhart and Rob Lowe, whose character, a moderate centrist, was running for the presidency.) I had been an advocate for the intelligence of our cast, for their analytic skills, for their basic rightness. A good writer trusts his actors, and somehow suddenly all of that trust and respect seemed not to have mattered as much as I imagined. C'est la guerre.

There had been a power-play by the trained TV professionals, and I managed to be in the worst place at the right moment (for them). When asked to step back, I got in my car, in shock, and drove to my little place in Venice, a few blocks from the ocean, shaking. In the "fullness of time" I would come to realize that I had done all I could. Fighting to make B&S a reflection of my own world-view was now impossible. It was time to be the eminence gris. I had done the hardest part: taken a small idea and not given-up until the fruits of that idea were on the air. I had refused to give-up even when we were written off. (Even Nikki Finke coolly described Brothers & Sisters as dead in the water before we were picked up, though that information could only have come from one of a handful of executives betting on their own pet projects, as nobody else had seen the show at the time she printed that kind prediction.)

Now I look forward to writing the odd episode or three, and being useful as close-reader of the cosmology of the show when asked. Before the strike, I was writing a new pilot, taking to heart the studio chief's proposal. I had done my job, and had it not been for that, the trained TV professionals who followed me would not have had a show to save. (I will very openly state on the record that the second show-runner who stepped in, did, in fact, quite literally save the show, and that in fact, were I left to my own devices in TV land, it is fairly certain that B&S would have been canceled within hours of the third episode.)

I will also admit that the fact of following Desperate Housewives means you cannot simply shift the tone which viewers are comfortable with at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night on ABC. I did not understand the full ramifications of this. Putting us after Desperate meant that we had a solid lead-in, and it was important to honor the vote-of-confidence that had been bestowed on us by ABC chief Steve McPherson and the clear-eyed and (refreshingly open) skeptical good will of Disney Studios head Mark Pedowitz. This meant not losing the wide viewership who kindly stayed for us after Ms. Longoria, Ms. Cross, Ms. Huffman, et al were done.

While I took that just as seriously as I had taken the green-light from McPhereson, I under-estimated the anxiety that such prime TV real estate could cause. (Now to present the other side of the argument: I am a dilettante in TV. I don't know the size and shape of the thing. I am too, too much a playwright, too slow for the rigors of commercial network TV. It's one thing to create a show, quite another to run it. To which I say "true, that" and plead guilty. I get it. Most of the battles were ones of attrition, and mostly the duplicity and weakness I experienced were human-sized, with a couple of loud and awe-inspiring exceptions wherein the betrayal seemed rococo and above and beyond the call of duty -- even for show-biz.)

All this year, there was a low quiet rumble. An abstraction of war. Would the WGA strike? Agents at lunch said no. Writers at dinner said yes. Lawyers shrugged in anticipation. Studio execs conveyed quiet disgust with writers. Writers worried. All of it conducted in dribs and drabs and in kitchens in writers' offices, or casually at Craft or Mister Chow or Dupar's. A low echo that never grew too loud. I shrugged it all off as the months went on.

By the time it finally happened, I was disgusted with the entire business, all of it. The daily battles with studio, network, and indeed my fellow producers, the strategic rout I endured had embittered me. It resulted in my first piece for HuffPost on the strike, "Strike Me Out".

I was, it would be kind to say, ambivalent about the strike. I was somewhat under-invested, a response to recent tragic events. Someone I loved wrote me a letter about that piece. He had just broken up with me. A writer. At the time, I thought we still had a chance as a couple. He expressed his outrage and disgust at what I had said. Over the course of a day, I came to see the ways in which I had clouded the issues. My own disdain for the business had led me to blur the lines between values and principles, which I saw as not applying in the land of the Range Rover and the iced-latte.

The working writers I knew in L.A. had, for the most part, cloaked themselves in unenlightened self-interest and rich deals for so long that the prospect of a true Union battle struck me as laughable. I was bruised and bitter, both in work and in love. Love in L.A. seemed to me to operate on another cosmology than my own; beauty and position were the aphrodisiacs I encountered, aphrodisiacs which seemed unerotic to me, who believed in romance, wine, road trips and kismet more than the Studio System. I also noticed that in L.A. the hook-up had replaced courtship, which left me sort of high and dry, sadly. So when I fell in love, a doomed love at that, I fell hard and fast. I fell in love with a writer I idealized for his artistic ambitions and the soul that fueled them, and when I was rejected one night as too romantic, too old-fashioned, too so many things, my repaired heart broke. I hope it never recovers, knowing what I know now. And I don't think it ever will.

In any case, I packed my bags and got on a plane to New York four days later. While packing, I knew I would be staying back east for a little while more than usual when I started to abstractly build little piles of books and art in my Venice living room. My assistant, baseball fan extraordinaire Dan Silk, stared at me, paling with each new pile. He knew it before I did: the books and pictures meant too much to me to leave behind. He knew before I did that the endgame of my life in television was upon me.

So I left. But I will save that for Part Two of this essay.