Leaving Los Angeles (Part Two: Love)

I'm allergic to my hemisphere;
the folks out here seem numb,
so maybe it's time to try out
the other one.
Mark McAdam - Allergic

This, from TV Guide online on December 12:

Ausiello Report
Blind Item: War Erupts on Hit Show!

"At least one hit show is looking on the bright side of the writers' strike: Thanks to the hoopla surrounding the walkout, there's been nary a mention in the press of the firing of a major creative force from a series we love... until now, that is. Wanna guess the identity of the axed exec? Of course you do. Here's a clue: Said bigwig's departure was hardly a surprise -- it came after months of backstage tensions and infighting with colleagues that threatened to tear the production apart. Yours truly even bore witness to a rather ugly -- and extremely public -- incident that only served to make the bad situation worse. By the time of his/her ouster, even the cast had been forced to take sides. (And, given the outcome of the battle, I don't think I have to tell you whose side most of them were on.) However, as difficult as this individual may be, few would contest his/her genius. Guesses? "

No need to guess. These little rumors floated about for months. The writer of the above cutesy blindish item had been digging at the story like a fey Tuscan truffle pig on the hunt, pointed in the right direction by a sly studio farmer. In Hollywood, that makes guys like Ausiello seem like Woodward, Bernstein, and Upton Sinclair all rolled into one unctuous package.

These items never came from me. (Oh, I know where they did originate, but that's between that person and their TV God). At the request of the studio, there would be a polite rebuttal or a dignified "no comment." This was just some of the typical daily excretion that seems to follow in the wake of a hit TV show. The marginally literate, epicene author of the above blind-item thrives on sources with agendas, just as any low-rent Broadway or Beltway Borgia does. Like many of the people I met who write about TV, (most of whom can be bought for the price of a single commissary crepe-suzette, a keychain with the show's logo on it, and a set-visit with its grimacing star), he was possessed of the winning duo of wild arrogance and a staggering un-athletic ignorance of all life outside of prime time, the culture of which depends on low-rent journalistic toadies penning breathless wooze in exchange for future favors and future keychains, and handshakes with future stars.

When I left for New York in 1985, I was a young playwright with the residuals of the South African accent acquired in my teens. My friends were a boozy-druggy lot of Bohemian wrecked hipsters who made up the vibrant LA theater scene, which was exceptionally fecund back then. There was heroin, there was methadone, there was booze in spades, and fragile bits of sobriety to frame it all.

When I returned to Los Angeles, in late 2002, it was as a member of the "writing-establishment," a decade and a half older, no more accent, just the slightly false schoolboy manners remained, manners which had done me no good, and with the goal of finally putting away some money, just a bit, so I would never have to think about lucre much ever again, (artists dream of money, etc.) for the remainder of my playwright's life.

It was my goal to pay for my smallish Boho pleasures, my books, my three years to write a play, and my travel, a sweater or two, and roof over head etc, after age forty-five by doing exactly what I did: Make a TV thing. After my last show in New York, I thought "now what?" Create a TV show. Because as the theater became ever more, well, an avocation suited to, say, a gentleman farmer of organic and rare wild arugula, what with high ticket prices and my off-Broadway royalties, and the sea of white and balding faces, and my somewhat dodgy income from it all, (Hey Robbie, wanna do a new version of Hedda Gabler??!!) I realized that Dinah Washington was singin' to me when she sang:

TV is the thing this year, this year
TV is the thing this year
Radio was great, now it's out of date
TV is the thing this year.

Now, I have left the show I created, Brothers & Sisters, from which I was ousted, not fired, an important distinction, to set the whisperers down the lane straight, so to speak. And like Mr Faulkner, who cleverly announced to to the studio that he was going to be "writing from home," (which any fool should have known meant not Hollywood, CA, but Oxford, Mississippi ) I came east.

I will miss the old L.A. The one of P.C.H and the slow road to Santa Barbara, of funky taco trucks, of sleepy Venice, which on my street has a Gehry house, an elderly African-American lady napping on a listing porch, chickens and roosters in backyards, lots of salsa music on weekends, and a couple of artists who made the Venice art scene happen back in the day.

I will miss taking my mom, resplendent in caftan and some makeup item called (I kid you not) "TV Touch," down the hill from her place on Doheny to Kate Mantellini's for chicken paillard, a vodka-tonic-double for me, and a Campari-soda-double for her. I will even miss being coerced by her into the hallucinatory and riveting El Coyote, on the corner of the street we lived in the early 70's (in a house once owned by the manager of Grauman's Chinese Theater, and which had, to my nine year old eyes, two hundred million movie posters being ignored in the basement). I will miss the ritual of my mom invariably being greeted there like Dolly Levi returning in triumph to the Harmonia Gardens.

Mostly I will miss the odd icy freshness of a very rare ice-cold LA day, when you can see the white San Bernardino mountain tops, which as a kid with a shaky grasp of geography, I believed held the remains of the Donner Party. That glorious winter cold was what first made me want to live east, with layers and variegation, change, seasons, seasons, always changing, unlike the unblinking monotony of the L.A. basin. I will miss the desert in both summer and winter, and the Grand Central Market downtown, and the weird room atop the Farmer's Market where I have read and written since age 16. But these are not reasons to stay. Maybe an Englishman can live in moldy nostalgia, but I am an American, nominally, and my childhood LA is long, long gone.

At Disney, my parking space is now the Robbie Baitz Memorial Bike Park, named by one Rachel Griffiths, one of the most loyal and brilliantly committed actors and pains in the butt I have ever worked with. I will miss being on set late at night, gossiping with the crew and the cast, and I will miss the wine in my office on Fridays, when writers and assistants and a few actors - all were welcome - would come in for some cheese and a bottle or, more often, actually six bottles.

I will miss the freaked out staff writers barely in their twenties, and the wise old pros who write the hell out of the show without me. I am still one of the executive producers of B&S, still enjoy friendly relations with the entire writing staff, and entire cast, still read scripts avidly, and I hope to be asked to write an occasional special, "it's time for a weird Robbie episode" episode (like "Mistakes Were Made," which was co-written with my friend Craig Wright, another playwright who left for his own show, Dirty-Sexy-Money).

But I am no longer the SOURCE for any of it, no longer the instigator of plot, and no longer the voice of the thing. It is no longer in my dreams. I do not wake up and make notes about future episodes. I can no longer argue for tone and can only watch as the demographic demands that have turned America into an ageist and youth-obsessed nation drives the storylines younger and younger, whiter and whiter, and with less and less reflection of the real America, which is made up, to the sorrow of the research departments, of people over 35 years of age and of many ethnicities and incomes. Then again, I will never again have to do a notes call wherein the fear and sea-sickness of the creative execs always prevails over taking a risk, resulting more often than not in muddy and flattening or treacly-sweet compromises after a stolid and pointless series of writerly objections. (And note to execs on my next show: you won't wanna be giving me too many of them. Sorry, I shan't roll over ever again.)

This leads rather well to what I did pick up under the palms: knowing how to fight. Fighting was something I DID learn at Brothers & Sisters. I was not good at it before I got there. I demurred, deferred, moped. Not anymore. Doesn't work in TV. So I learned. Fighting to build something that gives people jobs is worth it. Hundreds of people, at that. Crews. Writers. Actors. Directors. Ask anybody who has created something from scratch, a Barry Diller or a David Geffen, to use people I know personally and admire for their fortitude (and bellicosity). They never give up. They fought and fought until they had built something irrefutable. Grand. Making TV taught me: Die trying. Try harder. And never, ever stop. Do not be the reason it fails. Be the last man standing, until the building is UP, the lights are on, and people are in it, working.

That lesson was the single most important one, and it applies to every part of being alive. In fact, I would suggest that the Moguls start realizing how they have inadvertently radicalized a somewhat complacent group of writers with their current execrable behavior. Now, a little like John Self in Martin Amis's brilliant novel Money, for me, the first straw is sorta, well, almost... uhm, the last straw.

There is the matter of how to live in LA, before the decision of leaving it. LA is the world capital of loneliness. In the age of isolation, this is a very special achievement. I could not crack it. I could only survive it. Many of the single (or not) gay men I know in LA rely on the internet for courtship/release. I have nothing against this at all. I have met incredibly interesting people through the net. I have availed myself of its charms. But used habitually it can easily turn romance into renting, with boys queued up like your movies (Indie french) on Netflix. (Such a bad metaphor on so many levels but true; and I don't like rentals, I prefer permanence, and permanence is forbidden now.)

The online world is followed by the high temple of the gym: In Los Angeles, the gym occupies a special place. It is the town square. There is no real centralized street-life in LA, unless you wander the Botoxed, pumped, hyper-sexualized, bargain-basement gay ghetto that is West Hollywood. And why would you, if you're over thirty?

The online thing is not just an LA thing by any means. However, in New York, the life of the street, the flirtation and ebb and flow of strangers getting off of the bus, makes for a perpetual energy machine. New York is just sexier, smarter, and better dressed, less vulgar, more diverse, filled with accident, and unexpected encounters, as a rule. There is the Neue Gallery across from the Met, down the street from the Guggenheim, which is up from the Whitney, just a twenty minute walk to MOMA, across Central Park, etc, etc, forever and ever. You will see, smile at, spy on, talk to, stare at, be enchanted by any number of utterly different kinds of people within twenty minutes of leaving your apartment in NYC. A barrage rather than the white noise of the undulating palms and brackish skies of the dream coast.

In a company town like LA (which with it's segregation often reminds me of Johannesburg in the 1970's), agents date lawyers, managers date set designers, etc -- you get the drift. The homogeneity of the movie making classes means that most everyone dates within the tribe. Writers date producers, and everyone dates actors. They are everywhere. They are the butlers of charm who flirt expertly, gorgeously, giddily at the restaurants and catering companies where they work while awaiting the next great thing. Instead of the vibrant grid of Gotham, you have little cantons in LA. The hills above Sunset are known as the Swish Alps and there is something precise about the peculiar sadness/silence of the decorator-beige homes occupied by mid-to-high level show biz homosexuals who reside there, trying to dodge the parties and paparazzi at the Paris Hilton House. Even the pools seem joylessly limpid in those houses. Going up into those manicured, depopulated hills filled me with dread. Disheartening too was the endless talk of the business, this while America eats itself alive.

In terms of cultural events, mostly it was the magical programing at UCLA Live, for me, which was always like a little trip to BAM, a life-saver of bracing and provocative art. Show biz in LA has a sort of Viennese like season -- not of Waltz, but of causes. Pet causes. Benefits where gift bags are handed out to the guests, gift bags that, though donated, should be going to the people for whom the benefit has been thrown. (Kiehl's anyone, while we have a party for Katrina, or literacy?)

But perhaps most disheartening to me, a man who adores women, is the daily LA visual horror show of how they are discarded there, no matter how desperately they try to cling to youth. LA hates and fears aging, and especially despises the revolting notion of women aging. And in LA, more than anywhere I know, women of a certain age, who should know better, are complicit in their own degradation, going to desperate lengths to dodge what should be taken for granted. No actress would dare present herself as proudly and as honestly as Simone Signoret, would they? No. Women should hate LA, and I will never understand why they endure it all. Why? If I were a woman, I would burn LA to the ground, and spread salt on the earth where the men all gathered. (I may do that anyway.)

In June of this year, I fell in love. It takes a lot for me to do that. Maybe it happened because it was the worst time for it to happen and I needed something, anything, anything other than show business, and internecine warfare on the backlot. I cannot write about what happened, because I still do not understand it. 'Okay...' I nodded when he told me that we couldn't bridge the gap between my needs and his reality, and he left, and I sat around crying like a child, which is not entirely my mode. Now, however, when I think of what went wrong, I am reminded of a section of an essay Leon Botstein once wrote for Harpers (in May 1983), about Leonard Bernstein.* Perhaps if one substitutes the word "Love" for the word 'music', my failure in this will be clear.

"Bernstein [Baitz] fails to understand the essential tool of the conductor -- restraint. Often subtle understatement is called for. Launching an exaggerated expressive frontal assault can rob the music of the very expression written into it. Music occurs in time; its logic is revealed over the course of a performance. If each single moment is milked of everything it alone expresses, divorced from the larger context of the whole piece, if every luscious line is played sempre con passione, with built-in increase in tension exaggerated (like flooding the accelerator of a car already going downhill), if restraint is never employed in the service of excitement and climactic power -- then the dramatic, expressive power of the music is subverted."

There you have it. An apt epiphany with which to consider the short and easy path to a broken heart. And with my show no longer actually even remotely mine, I had no reason to stay west.

It is the WGA strike that formalized my departure for good. Back in New York, I was honored to be asked to be on the emergency grant fund committee of the WGA East. At a meeting earlier this month, at which honorable and decent writers -- middle-class, by any definition -- came in, asking for help, I knew I was home for good. (Note: For all of the hot-shit HuffPost comment-writers whose pernicious attitudes about the strike can be summed up in "why should I care about the rich makers of electronic excrement?", I wish I could invite you to spend an hour at one of those fund meetings -- you would hang your glib, anonymous heads in total fucking shame).

People with tuitions and mortgages came in to ask for much earned and deserved assistance, just before Christmas. It was the coats and layers that had to be shed by the applicants that did it. The cold weather I had craved looking east as a kid in LA, the seasons I missed and wanted more of, I realized they were indispensable, a vital check and balance against the Siren call of perpetual warmth that lulls Angelenos into soporific lassitude. On the subway back to Brooklyn, after we gave out what grants we could, I started to jot down notes about Brothers & Sisters and living in LA. And how I would relate to it if I had to go back. I was not good at much of it.

The second show runner was right, and he saved the show. Mr. Ausiello, in his wispy blind-item, called the wrong one of us a genius. I'm not so smart, just have empathy-sickness, intuition, and a sense of smell, so to speak; a playwright who can be trained to heel for the moguls, up to a point. But Trained Professional Number Two is a TV genius. Born to it. And efficient and indefatigable in his ability to repair and streamline, and force change. At any cost. What. So. Ever.

However, I cannot help but dream about what my version of Brothers & Sisters would have looked like, had I been given the chance to try it my way (in an alternate universe). Perhaps not on a network, my version would fly. On Showtime or HBO or FX. A show that could simply hold on the aging and real face of Sally Field, and reflect the sorrow and rage there, and reflect the cold and funny sexuality of Patty Wettig's Holly, the perfect reconstruction of the LA mistress. A show that would hold on the eyes of Ron Rifkin, and reflect the wisdom, joyous childishness and the melancholy. A show that could explore the lives of the low-income workers whose well-being depended on the fortunes of the family business, Ojai Foods. A show where we could have followed the youngest, prodigal son to Iraq, where he was wounded. Shown him there, in the field. Shown his fellow soldiers, dying. A show that allowed Calista Flockhart's character to be actually truly political -- still a commentator, fully articulate and unashamedly bitchy about what she knows and thinks she knows, and to be wrong as often as she is right. A show that allows her to be as smart and funny and comically mercurial as she really is. A show that would go even further in dealing with Kevin Walker's internalized homophobia and his fear of contact with others. There is nothing that Matthew Rhys is afraid of, no wordplay gives him pause; he is capable of anything. A show that followed Rob Lowe's black charm down the rabbit hole of American politics and revealed the ugliness that lives there. That followed Balthazar Getty in his father's amoral American male footsteps, and allowed that actor's virtues to shine more fully. It would show the quiet love that lives under the surface in a family, and unifies it just when pride and rage are tearing it apart. Even to speak about it, I would be shut down for trying to trade in angst -- not something I am known for as a playwright, or a person. It would never underestimate the intelligence of the audience and their interest in adult life. A show that could go deeper into the complexity of modern sexuality, without shtick or cute-meet, or cutesy whimsical music, where the "Actual" should be.

When I signed on, that is what I thought I was making. I was naive, totally naive. When I left, my friends watched in helpless agitation; there was nothing to be done. They needed the job. But me? Maybe the problem is that I have never been afraid of being fired, so I have to take on faith what that kind of fear looks like, or rather, I don't have to -- my dad lived with that fear his whole working life and turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, something I refuse to do.

As for what happened while I was there, and what I created: It's funny and smart and warm, and I am proud of it. I am proud of the acceptance of sexuality in the show, and of the love the Walkers have for one another. I am proud that Kevin Walker is a viable portrait of a fucked-up, flawed, scared and articulate man, whose sexuality is only one facet of a very complex persona. I'm proud of the way we put what is funny right next to that which is not. We come closest to that balance, in my opinion, in dealing with the reality of Rachel Griffith's life and loves, and the struggle of women to be mothers and have jobs, and a love life all at the same time.

At the first meeting I had with the lovely Francie Calfo (head of drama), who has left the network after making sure we made it on the air, I said: "I want to write a show that proposes that the dead American patriarchy is being replaced by a vibrant matriarchy." The people in the room smiled. They let me talk and spin and screw up and they let me fix it and then they made it. My idea. And the show is that. Not so bad, right? In that sense. My first TV show. Learned buckets. On the day the third show runner -- the well-paid guardian -- asked me to step back (after imploring me to stay the week before: "I can't face the thought of you gone"), my producing partner and dear friend, Ken Olin, looked at me, totally pained, when I said I was going to fight to hold on to what I had created. "Robbie, you don't wanna fight for this, do you? Why? For this?," he said, looking around. "You don't wanna be doing this, do you? You're a playwright. You wanna keep fighting...?" I thought about it, and shook my head, no. No, I did not. I have not been back to my office since. No, I did not. Besides, I had been told that I sucked at it, and in fact, I did. That was my last day there.

Maybe the network guys, the execs (not to mention the roving and dead-eyed show-runners-for-hire, a breed who can no longer afford to believe in much except for keeping the trains running) know how badly my version of the show would do, and even if they wanted to greenlight it, they couldn't. Maybe that's why this strike is so vicious. The studio heads know that the model is changing, and that the old conventional modes of storytelling are being replaced by fresher and bolder models. They have one that works, and they do not have the luxury of my experimentation and it's results losing them their share. I get it. They have to hold on to what they have, while they still have it. And I don't care to do just that. I hope to push the boundaries so I can look Matthew Wiener and David Chase, David Milch and Larry David and Sara Colleton (Dexter) in the eye.

I am ever mindful of what happened to Clifford Odets, whose son is a friend of mine. Odets got trapped in Beverly Hills (not hooked on the money as has been breezily reported). No, he had to survive, bring up children, and he never made it back to New York. There was no living for him in New York. I do not want to let that happen to me. New York playwrights cannot be New York playwrights anywhere but in New York. The scene of the crime. Or the crimes, actually. So my decision was made. My heart broke. Could not work with the system, and I loved and lost someone and incomprehensibly that became a mirror of the loss of B&S, and the two merged into one.

An interesting five years under the mast of Hollywood, all told. A few subrosa movie re-writes, a few dozen lines of mine in a movie I am proud of being anonymous on, a series on the air -- love and work, work and love -- the cornerstones of human happiness, the cornerstones of human sadness, the cornerstones of human business.

I am happier here, back in New York, the essential grown-up city. I am skeptical about romance now, unlikely to lose myself ever again in the same way, life being too short for Hamlet-like walks across the Brooklyn Bridge, looking for the perfect spot to send oneself off from. In my first days back in Brooklyn, like Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up, I made lists of things to avoid: Movie people, TV people, long conversations of any sort, television entirely. The telephone. Late nights. Things to do: Run, five or six miles a day, and lift weights, and drink lots of water. A little wine. Anything with the dog. More time outside. And as I feel stronger and more settled here in Brooklyn, finishing a new play, I actually am somewhat calm, knowing I will do more TV (I owe ABC two pilots, which shall be writ and executed more my way than theirs should there be interest in doing them at all).

I used to have a thing about powerful people, men in particular. I was in awe. In dreams, I would have conversations with guys like Rudy Giuliani in which he or McCain or Hillary (sorry, joke) would say things like "You're not so bad" and I would, in the dark treacle dream state, think, "Oh thank god they understand me." I had to pay fealty, defer. Now, I'd rather die, which is a happy change.

I marvel at the near-sighted boorishness of the moguls for refusing to negotiate in good faith with the complicated and idealistic people who put their inner lives on the line (in ways that a rapacious Murdoch or a vulgarian such as Redstone would never have the balls to do). The media moguls remind me of nothing so much as Steve Wynn (who seems nicer than they do), blindly backing into priceless art and virtually destroying it. It's okay, they own the house, so they can fix it. But respect itself demands that you be careful, and the moguls have been unforgivably careless, unforgivably crass. (Not that most of what goes on TV is anything near priceless.) But still, when writers create content, it is not just for the money, but also because we believe in the medium, the message, the audience, and the goddamn possibilities when all those elements come together when we sit down to watch television.

As for me, it will come to no surprise to anyone (say, the six people, not including Mike Ausiello) who manages to reach the end of this essay, that I have concluded with a small, small, smile that, in 2007, I was too emotional -- which is either always a mistake, sometimes a mistake, or never a mistake. Choose one of the above. I can't.

* I remember the Botstein quote so well because I followed his trajectory after he accepted me personally to Bard College (in 1981) where he was -- and still is -- president (after an admissions interview in which he talked about Ellison's The Invisible Man, and I about Saul Bellow, unlike the other hippie kids), and he was my hero. The only college -- other than Antioch, I guess -- that would have me. I didn't go. I didn't have the money. Pop declined my request. For the best.)

Read Part One of Leaving Los Angeles (Work)