Watching Studio60

As feared, the Broadway stagehands strike has indeed postponed the official opening of The Farnsworth Invention, Aaron Sorkin’s new play about the origins of television. The show has been in previews for weeks, and was supposed to have its big opening night last night, Wednesday, November 14.

Now? Who knows. The fact that Broadway producers feel the effects of closed theaters much faster than TV and movie producers do with downed shows may help move things along. At issue is the number of stagehands that must be hired for any play or musical. Currently, the union sets that number at four, whether the production needs them or not. Producers would like to have the flexibility to hire however many stagehands they darn well please. The union also wants a raise.

Doesn’t this sound like the sort of thing that would have made a great Cal subplot on Studio 60 — having to explain to Danny that the stagehands union requires them to hire a bunch of guys they don’t need? I can hear Timothy Busfield rattling off the rules right now, with that sort of resigned sarcasm.

Their theater may be dark, but the Farnsworth cast (that’s the whole enormous bunch above) seems to be taking things in stride. A cute item in New York Magazine tells of cast members walking the picket line on their in support of their stagehands Wednesday, and swigging champagne in honor of their not-happening opening. “Because what do you do when your show’s not running? You drink.”

And do lunch. In a New York Times profile, Alexandra Wilson, a young actress who was to have made (and surely will make eventually) her fairy-tale Broadway debut with Farnsworth, reports that “On Saturday [the strike's first day] Aaron Sorkin took everyone out to lunch. Saturday felt like a snow day, but now it just feels weird.”

This is the final installment of my summary of the DVD commentary on the Studio 60 pilot, with Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme. We’re picking up from yesterday’s Part 6, and again, since Sorkin and Schlamme are generally speaking as one creative entity, I’m not going to worry over who said what unless it’s apropos. To start from the beginning, go to Part 1.

As Matt and Harriet squabble in the hallway, the discussion turns to all the details on the walls of the set that the camera catches. They wish there could be a tour through the set to show how detailed it was. The lobby set included window cards and photos of 50 or 60 years of things in the theater. As soon as the set was finished and painted, Schlamme handed the crew Sharpies and had them write all over the walls. There’s all kinds of funny graffiti, and the set looks lived in.

Sorkin says that when he was writing the script, he would send eight or ten pages at a time to Schlamme. The writer was imagining just a genetic sterile soundstage as the backdrop, but it was the director’s and production designer Carlos Barbosa’s idea to make it an old vaudeville house that had become a movie theater and then been purchased by the network to become a live broadcast studio. That lived-in setting provides a lot of warmth.

Sorkin reveals that Schlamme was also the one with the idea for staging scenes in pieces of sketch scenery. It started way back in the teaser, where Wes and the standards-and-practices guy argue in half a subway car. So the half a taxicab that’s lying around is the perfect place for Matt and Danny to have a conversation. While they were designing the set and building things, they noticed that people would just naturally sit in that cab when they wanted to talk. In fact, Sorkin and Schlamme had a meeting there. It seemed like something that would happen in this world when people wanted to talk privately.

That seems typical to them of the theater, the sense that private conversations are always being held in public areas. The struggle to be private in public creates tension. It’s like being in a big family, you can’t escape, and so arguments happen in front of others. Privacy is not going into a room and closing the door, it’s going to some arena and hoping people are not listening to you. But in fact, you’re exposed

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Sorkin: Here, Tommy gets to direct another scene where nine people talk in a small space.
Schlamme: But notice, they’re not in a circle this time.

Welcome to the next-to-last installment of the DVD commentary on the Studio 60 pilot, with Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme. We’re picking up from Saturday’s Part 5, and again, since Sorkin and Schlamme are generally speaking as one creative entity, I’m not going to worry over who said what unless it’s apropos. To start from the beginning, go to Part 1.

As Matt storms in to Wes’s office to confront Jack and Jordan, we hear about the room they’re in. It was built just for the pilot, then torn down and rebuilt when the show got picked up. They knew there was going to be a pivotal scene in there, and so built it specially for that.

The soundstage they’re using is the approximate size of an airplane hangar, big enough to hold a couple of 747s. And inside it, they built a theater, with upstairs offices, hair and makeup rooms, everything. The basement set with the dressing rooms, as well as the corporate offices, are on a second soundstage.

It’s unusual to have the upstairs and downstairs on the same set. Ordinarily, you’d see people go up a staircase and when they walked into a room, it was on a different set. But in this show, with the show-within-a-show, they wanted people to be able to look down from the upstairs area onto the stage, and that’s something you can’t fake. So they had to structurally build a working second story.

That presented a challenge for filming, because the camera and equipment had to go upstairs, too. They were, at one time, going to build an elevator on the set, an old elevator that could be part of the show but also transport the epuipment. But they figured out other ways to move the stuff around.

Back to Wes’s office: The idea here is that he had been running the show for 20 years, he was the central figure of the show. In theory, he had an office that was like the king’s office, where he could look over everything – like the people who have apartments overlooking Wrigley Field, who have the best seat in the house. That was the design idea of Wes’s office.

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I’d like to think that anyone who’s a fan of Studio 60 and the work of Aaron Sorkin has enough appreciation for what writers bring to the TV and movie screen to support the current writer’s guild strike. I’ve been following news of the strike on various blogs, and am always amazed and a little hurt by those who take the position that writer are overpaid babies doing a job anybody can do. Those folks are clearly watching the wrong shows.

The folks on this LiveJournal message board, on the other hand, know what it’s like to watch good writing. In an effort to support the writers, and having dealt with some of the same attitude I mentioned above, the first poster asks “What quotes have Hollywood writers given you?” And other posters have chipped in with many great lines, including a fair amount from The West Wing and a few from Studio 60. Could any hack write that stuff? I think not, and I hope we won’t have to learn that the hard way.

Meanwhile, two actors who played Studio 60 network executives have been mentioned in the news as standing up for the writer’s guild. Amanda Peet hit the strike picket line with screenwriter husband David Benioff and their eight-month-old daughter, Francis Pen. I usually feel bad checking out celebrity baby photos, but if they’re snapped striking, they want to be seen, right? Meanwhile, Steven Weber was named in the Hollywood Reporter as one of the actors in attendance at a big WGA rally Friday.

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Continuing from Thursday’s Part 4 of the DVD audio commentary on the pilot, which shared Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme’s thoughts on the “The Big Three” segment, today’s installment describes the commentary over the fifth segment. Again, since Sorkin and Schlamme are generally speaking as one creative entity, I’m not going to worry over who said what unless it’s apropos. To start from the beginning, go back to Part 1.

No title card here. The segment starts with Matt outside the Studio 60 theater, jumps to Jordan and Danny in a hotel room discussing why he won’t actually be doing a movie and why he and Matt should take over the show, continues with Danny telling Matt about his movie-blocking drug problem, and ends with Matt running inside the building to give Jack Rudolph what-for.

Mention is made again of the fact that the Studio 60 theater is the Palladium in Los Angeles, with lots of CGI to add a second story and outer décor. The music editor and film editor are name-checked with kudos for their great work.

Wendy Phillips plays the head of PR who talks to Matt before he declares he’s going to wait outside for Danny. (Whatever happened to her character, by the way? She was in the show a lot at the beginning, and then sorta disappeared.) Sorkin and Schlamme talk about what an incredible actress Phillips is, with Schlamme mentioning that she played Robert DeNiro’s wife in the movie Midnight Run, and referencing the scene where he comes home with Charles Grodin. Sorkin remembers the scene but didn’t realize it was her. Personally, I particularly remember her from the series A Year in the Life, a one-season wonder from the ‘80s, but that’s neither here nor there.

The hotel room in which Danny and Jordan confer is a converted West Wing hotel room set rebuilt on their stage. “Bartlet has been there.�

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According to the More4 site, “4 a.m. Miracle” was the episode shown on Thursday in the U.K.; it originally aired in February in the U.S. For those who want to read what was written about this episode when it was first broadcast, here are links to reviews, recaps and forum discussions on:

• Entertainment Weekly
• TV Squad
• Television Without Pity (recap)
• Television Without Pity (forum - R/O)
• Studio 60 Guide

For those of us who saw “4 a.m. Miracle” much earlier this year, it’s the one in which Matt, still rattled by Harriet’s smackdown of him in “The Harriet Dinner Part 2,” has a monumental case of writer’s block. It’s the one in which that struggle with writer’s block is interrupted by the arrival of a blonde lawyer who’s investigating a suit suggesting that a female Studio 60 writer was sexually harassed on the job (though not while Matt was actually working there). It’s the one in which Harriet was shooting Luke’s movie, and shooting, and shooting, and missing Studio 60 rehearsal time and Matt. And, most memorably and delightfully, it’s the one in which Jordan had a doll that was supposed to teach her how to handle an infant, and she allowed Danny to care for it for a little while, and they all learned the important lesson that you should never put a baby in a guillotine.

I spent most of this episode believing pretty firmly that the lawyer character was a figment of Matt’s imagination. I’ve always been kind of disappointed that she wasn’t. But she was, in fact, a real litigator who just happened to flirt with Matt like crazy, and she was something of a recurring character through the rest of the run of the show.

A run that was interrupted after this episode, actually. This was the last one to air before NBC tried out The Black Donnellys in its timeslot. The next episode, “The Disaster Show,” didn’t turn up until May.

Here’s a YouTube clip of the “4 a.m. Miracle” preview to remind you of the major plot points, and to never trust Cal to repair a broken baby.

Studio 60, NBC, 4 a.m. Miracle

Continuing from yesterday’s Part 3 of the DVD audio commentary on the pilot, which shared Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme’s thoughts on the “Matt and Danny” segment, today’s installment describes the commentary over the fourth segment, “The Big Three.” Again, since Sorkin and Schlamme are generally speaking as one creative entity, I’m not going to worry over who said what unless it’s apropos. To start from the beginning, go back to Part 1.

There’s a black screen with the title “The Big Three.” Then we’re at the after-party for the show-within-the-show, and it’s a place they’ve shot a couple of times before, for The West Wing. In fact, this nightclub where the Studio 60 cast members talk nervously about the future of their show is the same spot at which Zoey Bartlett was drugged and kidnapped. It sounded to me like they called it “The I Bar,â€? but nothing’s coming up for that in Google. If you know the name of the bar they’re talking about, mention it in the comments and I’ll add it here with credit to you.

Our commentators get back now to a story they started during the previous segment about how Amanda Peet’s Broadway schedule changed the normal linear way of shooting the pilot. It resulted in Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford having a lot of time to spend together before shooting, which they used to rehearse and to make up an elaborate back story for their characters so that they would really feel connected.

But that didn’t take a lot of doing, because back on the West Wing set, when they had scenes together during Perry’s guest-starring story arc as a White House lawyer, “these two guys were really funny together and enjoyed each other’s company immensely.�

They first met Sarah Paulson when she came in to read for the part of Harriet. The competition was heated, and they were seeing actresses with a facility for sketch comedy, because they knew they’d be having sketches or “shards of sketches� in the show. They were looking for sketch comedians who could act, and having them do some of their own material.

Paulson, at the time, was doing Chekhov at the Mark Taper Forum, and she had recently played Laura in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. They didn’t think they could ask her to do sketch comedy material, but at the third callback she herself asked to do it, and was brilliant at it. She knew from her agents that the only reservations to hiring her was her ability to do that show-within-the-show material, and she was bold enough to know she could do it well.

The commentators point out various actors on the screen during the party scenes. Nate Corddry, who read for the part of Tom a few times, and did his routine of Stephen Hawking doing stand-up comedy. Simon Helberg, “a wonderful sketch comic.� Nate Torrence, “who decided to step down and do series television.�

D.L. Hughley came in and spoke to them about the part of Simon and said he was interested. He didn’t have to read, because they were already huge fans and find his humor extraordinary. Hughley’s also the nicest guy in the world, they say, and in fact everybody in the cast was wonderful to work with, showing up every day to play. They loved coming to work with this group.

This section ends with Harriet, Simon and Tom – the “big three� of that title card – conferring outside in an alleyway. They had to shoot it fast because the sun was starting to come up. They could only shoot at the club late at night, and there were also only certain times they could shoot on Sunset Boulevard.

Go on to Part 5.

_{Photo by Terri Mauro}

Studio 60, NBC, DVD, audio commentary, pilot

Continuing from yesterday’s Part 2 of the DVD audio commentary on the pilot, which shared Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme’s thoughts on the “Jordan” segment, today’s installment describes the commentary over the third segment, “Matt and Danny.” Again, since Sorkin and Schlamme are generally speaking as one creative entity, I’m not going to worry over who said what unless it’s apropos. To start from the beginning, go back to Part 1.

There’s a black screen with the title “Matt and Danny.”

Then we’re inside for the Writer’s Guild Awards, at which Matt and Danny sit at a large table of people. Interestingly, the interior scenes of this awards dinner were shot inside the Palladium, the outside of which (heavily augmented by CGI) serves as the exterior of the Studio 60 theater. The creators mention what many of us were no doubt thinking the first time we saw this, which is that it’s unusual to have actors like Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford starring in your show and not introduce them until this late in the pilot.

Sorkin tells a story about Matthew Perry reading the script for the first time. The script was on the Web, encrypted, so that people who needed to could read it. Perry was staying in a hotel, he went to a computer, he put in the codes, and he started reading. And he really liked the script, but thought there was no part in it for him. Then he got to page 41, and there was a character named “Matt.� He called his agent and said he wanted to do it.

A story is started about how pilots are usually shot – as much in order as possible, usually, but this time they had some difficulties due to Amanda Peet’s schedule, because she was doing a play on Broadway.

The story is interrupted when the awards emcee starts talking, and we’re informed that it’s screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who had just won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. He also wrote The DaVinci Code and Cinderella Man among many other things. Schlamme comments that it was wonderful to have him at their imitation Writer’s Guild Awards because it makes them seem legitimate. “This is a world we somewhat knew. We’d been at these dinners before and wanted it to feel exactly like what it feels like.�

Sorkin then mentions that he’s “given Tommy another challenge� by writing a scene in which a dozen people all have lines going back and forth, sitting around a table, with extras in the background.

The actress handing Danny the phone with the news of Wes’s outburst is Donna Murphy, who’s famous on Broadway. They would have liked to use her more.

Go on to Part 4, “The Big Three”

_{Photo by Terri Mauro}

Studio 60, NBC, DVD, audio commentary, pilot

Continuing from yesterday’s Part 1 of the DVD audio commentary on the pilot, which shared Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme’s thoughts on the teaser, today’s installment describes the commentary over the second segment, “Jordan.” Again, since Sorkin and Schlamme are generally speaking as one creative entity, I’m not going to worry over who said what unless it’s apropos.

This segment starts with a black screen and the title “Jordan.” The first scene is the dinner party Jordan’s attending with Ed Asner’s character, Steven Weber’s character, and various other NBS bigwigs. Our commentators explain that it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and is also known as the Black Dahlia house, because the doctor accused of killing the Black Dahlia in a recent book lived there. The current owners have made it a more contemporary version of Frank Lloyd Wright, but it was still strange to be there.

And now, we get the secret of that tight sleek bun Amanda Peet was wearing throughout the episode. She was doing a play on Broadway when the pilot was shooting, flying in after the Sunday matinee, working Monday and sometimes Tuesday, and flying back. She was so excited about doing Studio 60, and so loyal to her play, that she was determined to make it work. But the play was “Barefoot in the Park,� which takes place in the ’60s, and for the part she had ’60s hair, with big bangs. So they slicked the bangs back and designed the hairdo to disguise the inappropriate look.

There’s an observation that it’s nice that, within the first five minutes of the show, they have both Judd Hirsch and Ed Asner, “two icons of television.� Then the commentary drops out so that we hear Jordan say, optimistically, “Nothing bad’s going to happen on my first day, right?� Followed by a roomful of cellphones ringing with news of Wes’s speech.

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As I did with the DVD documentary, I’m going to do a rundown of the only other special in the set, an audio commentary on the pilot by writer Aaron Sorkin and director Thomas Schlamme. Rather than do it in one long piece, I’m going to break it up into parts to run throughout this week. For starters, today, the teaser:

As the episode begins, Sorkin and Schlamme jump right in talking about the set. (In most places here, they’re talking as one creative entity, instead of giving individual points of view, so I’m not going to sweat identifying who said what unless it’s appropriate.) Of the outdoor establishing shot of the theater, they mention that it’s the Palladium on Sunset Boulevard, heavily augmented by CGI – including the second floor, the Studio 60 signs, and the searchlights.

The camera moves inside, and they talk about the fantastic indoor set. Schlamme recalls that when he read the pilot script, he reflected that it “wasn’t necessarily the history of television, it was the history of people putting on a show.� So it seemed necessary that it should be taking place in an old theater, like David Letterman working out of the Ed Sullivan theater. Schlamme and Sorkin and the designer and crew visited old theaters and came up with the idea of building their own two-story theater. The basement would hold the dressing rooms, the first floor was production, and the second floor were offices for the writers. And thus the basic set language for the show was established.

Now we’re seeing Judd Hirsch on the screen, and they’re talking about his participation in the episode. The actor was on loan from Numbers, and for that reason was not able to appear on the show again. He was the original choice for the part, but the producers assumed he would not be available, and went through a long list of alternatives. Finally, “as with Martin Sheen in The West Wing,� they went back and actually asked their original choice, and CBS let him do it.

Hirsch had only a little time to shoot the scene, and a script with “a lot of language.� He had to do that long speech over and over, and “every time got a huge round of applause from the extras.� Speaking of those extras – the lead actors were very good about hanging out on the set for twelve hours just milling around in the background, to make the show really look like a show. Another reason, mentioned later, is that the show had to look like something they had been doing for years and years, and so the actors started hanging out to live that experience.

More on the set: After they started building it, it became clear that financially they could not complete it the way they wanted to for the pilot. So construction continued as the show went on, but not everything is there in the first episode.

When it comes time for Felicity Huffman’s little moment – Sorkin points out that she’s as good at playing herself as she as at playing a character – the chatter stops and we’re left to watch the scene in silence, from Huffman being given a choice of the slutty dress or the very slutty dress, to her conversation with Hirsch’s character over the awfulness of the monologue, to his resigned and not very comforting assurance that her instincts aren’t wrong and it really does stink, to her declaration that she needs “the very slutty dress, and somebody else to wear it.� Even knowing that line was coming, I still laughed.

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According to the More4 site, “The Friday Night Slaughter” was the episode broadcast Thursday night in the U.K.; it originally aired in February in the U.S. For those who want to read what was written about this episode when it was first broadcast, here are links to reviews, recaps and forum discussions on:

• Entertainment Weekly
• TV Squad
• Television Without Pity (recap)
• Television Without Pity (forum - R/O)
• Studio 60 Guide

For those of us who saw “The Friday Night Slaughter” much earlier this year, it’s the one in which Matt, still rattled by Harriet’s smackdown of him in “The Harriet Dinner Part 2,” starts popping pills and wandering down memory lane. In flashbacks, his younger and less-troubled self learns the ropes of Studio 60, falls for Harriet, and befriends a writer with a drug problem. Trouble is, in the present, nobody remembers that particular writer. Turns out Matt’s doing a little projecting of his current self into his past, and that screwed-up guy whose name is an anagram of Matt’s is a figment of his own messed-up imagination.

You know, I like the idea of going backwards to see the origin of the Matt-Harriet romance, and seeing the way in which the dynamics of their relationship have really not changed very much over the course of many years and arguments and swooniness, but … man, flashbacks are hard when your actors basically look the same. I guess you have to just go with it, especially since these turn out to be more Matt’s imagination of the past rather than an actual accurate view; but it always takes me out of the story a little bit to see acting or wardrobe choices trying to make people seem younger and “different.”

You could see what I mean in this YouTube clip if it wasn’t so blurry. Blurriness — now that’s a way to make people look younger. Or drugged.

Studio 60, NBC, The Friday Night Slaughter

So it looks like the Writers Guild is going to go on strike, throwing TV into turmoil. Late-night talk shows and daytime soaps will be the first to suffer, but if this thing stretches into the New Year, it’s going to get hard for people who enjoy scripted entertainment to find much worth watching. Any chance NBC will put on some Studio 60 re-runs to fill all the empty time they’re going to have? No? Alright, then. We have our DVDs to keep us amused.

In reading about the upcoming labor unpleasantness, it’s hard not to think about what a really great plot this would have been for a Studio 60 arc. Basically, we’re talking about Matt striking against Danny, right? Granted, there aren’t a lot of show-within-a-show writers to walk out with him, but what would the show do in the meantime? Improv theater?

There’s lots of stories of the ripple effect these sorts of union actions have on everyone associated with the entertainment business, and Sorkin might be able to do a pretty powerful job of telling them. You’ve got Jack to articulate the network’s position; Matt to express the conflict of someone who lives to write but also requires respect, which in this particular venue equals money; lower-level writers like Lucy and Darius who don’t stand to get a windfall from a new contract but stand to lose their livelihood if a strike wears on; and lots of friends and loved ones and little guys caught in the middle, crossing picket lines or losing their own jobs and businesses as Hollywood shuts down.

I have my own very small story about the far-reaching effects of a strike. The last time the writers walked, in 1988, I was a writing a column for a magazine in the Los Angeles area. Before moving to the East Coast that August, I turned in my final freelance article, a rundown of the upcoming TV season … which never happened, at least not on schedule. Publication of that column never happened, and neither did my paycheck for that piece of writing. It’s hardly on a par with people losing their houses due to loss of entertainment revenue, but it gave me an excuse to buy the T-shirt above when all the nastiness was over. (Typed on the paper in the typewriter there is, “Let’s Do Lunch Again.”)

If you have some thoughts on the strike, some past experience with entertainment union actions, or maybe some great fan fiction about a strike on Studio 60, share it in the comments.

_{Photo by Terri Mauro}

Studio 60, NBC, writer’s strike

I was looking on Kristin Chenowith’s IMDb page last night — wondering just how short she is after seeing her character as a former jockey on Pushing Daisies (four-foot-eleven, as it turns out, just an inch taller than my own short self) — and found a quote there about the Studio 60 character allegedly based on her, Harriet Hayes.

Here’s the quote, attributed to a New York Times story about her giving sometime boyfriend Aaron Sorkin permission to write her into his story: “I said O.K. I was happy to give him that gift. And I watch every week because I’m supportive of Aaron; whether we’re together or not, I love him always. I think it’s a genius show. But … it is weird when I see her behaving in ways that are different from me. I’m really not that judgmental girl. But you have to let artists go where they go.”

Yes, you do. And where else are they supposed to go than into their own experiences, thoughts, and beliefs? Writing is torture enough, if you can’t be allowed to use it to win old arguments or settle old scores or say those things you couldn’t quite think of to say in the moment, what the heck good is it? Plenty of sit-com writers have mentioned that they’ve recycled arguments with their significant others into dialog for the couples on their shows. Apparently, if you do that in a drama, you just get grief for using your art to air your dirty laundry. It’s nice that Chenowith has the grace to go with it; I wish critics had done the same.

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