Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 14: Superagent Sue Mengers & the Groundbreaking Showrunners of TV and their heirs.

In the 1970s, there wasn’t a Hollywood agent more successful than Sue Mengers. Her client roster read like a who’s who of the hottest actors and directors of the time: Barbra Streisand, Gene Hackman, Ryan O’Neal, Ali MacGraw, Diana Ross, Michael Caine, Candice Bergen, Jacqueline Bisset, Mike Nichols, Peter Bogdanovich, and a glittering marquee of many other high- profile performers. Author Brian Kellow interviewed over 200 people, to collect all of wonderful moments in her often loud and abrasive life and career for his recently released biography Can I Go Now?: The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood’s First Superagent. The last twenty years has been referred to as the second golden age of television. Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, and The Wire were breeding grounds for the showrunners who are now bringing us smash hits like Empire, Girls, Madmen, Unreal and many more. Tara Bennett, who interviewed showrunners Joss Whedon, Ronald D. Moore, Damon Lindelof, Terence Winter, and many more for her book Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show, joins us to shine the light on the people making this golden era come to life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 47m
Broadcast on:: 28 Sep 2015
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

(upbeat music) This episode is brought to you by Skinny Pop Popcorn. Perfectly popped andlessly delicious. Oh, so light and crunchy. Skinny Pop Original Popcorn is the snack you've been searching for. Made with just three simple ingredients, popcorn, kernel, sunflower oil, and salt. Snacking never felt or tasted, so good. Perfectly popped andlessly delicious. Give yourself permission to snack and pick up Skinny Pop Original Popcorn today. (upbeat music) Before RE Gold, there was Sue Mengers, the agent who for a few decades pretty much ran Hollywood. Plus, who's running the show on TV today? All this on Pop Culture Confidential. (upbeat music) Hi, I'm Kristina Yarlin-Birot, thank you for listening. From Buffy to Sopranos to Mad Men to Empire. Later in the show, I talked to Tara Bennett, the author of the book Show Runners, the art of running a show. We talk about some of the heirs to the mighty throne of television creators, but first. (upbeat music) By the early 1970s, Sue Mengers was not only the most powerful female agent in Hollywood, she was the most powerful agent, period. Her key clients included Barbara Streisand, Candace Bergen, Michael Caine, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman and Cher, directors such as Mike Nichols, Peter Bogdanovich and Sidney Lumet to name a few. Sue Mengers was a trailblazer for women in a male-dominated field and totally uncensored. Mengers could say just about anything, funny as hell, but offending people left and right. At a party with guests, she apparently thought were not quite worthy of her. She once said, "This is Schindler's B-list." She was just as filterless as the cigarettes and joints she changed smoked all her life. And her parties were Michael Caine recounts mistaking a bowl of cocaine for sugar. Even after her career slowed down in the '80s, her parties were the most sought-after invitation in Hollywood hosting Brando, Coppola, Jack Nicholson, even Lauren Michaels. Mengers was born in Hamburg. Her Jewish parents fled the Holocaust to upstate New York. As a teen, she set her sights on a career and show business, and like so many women of the era, Mengers got her start as a secretary. In the 1950s, she worked at the agency MCA, and her brash, fearless style made sure she quickly moved up the ladder. And in the '60s, she was already a power player as a Hollywood agent to the stars. And just a few weeks ago, the new biography about her, "Can I Go Now?" by author Brian Kello, was released to stellar reviews, and I'm very happy for the chance to talk to him. For his exhaustively researched book, Mr. Kello is interviewed over 200 people in and around Mengers Circle. Even her star client, Barbara Streisand, notoriously restricted with personal interviews, agreed to talk about her often tumultuous time with Mengers. So even now, after her death in 2011, one could say Sue Mengers is still drawing the biggest celebrities. I had the start off by asking Mr. Kello about the time Sue Mengers plane was hijacked, an incident that must have been terrifying to most, but to sue it was just another day at the office. Everyone loves that story, it is awfully funny. In January of 1979, she was on a plane to New York from Los Angeles, and there was a hijacking. And the hijacker demanded that a message be read on television by Charlton Heston. This was part of the demand. And I'm a crazy person, obviously. And Sue, sitting in the first class section of this plane, was just appalled by this. And she later told her friends after she'd gotten off the plane safely. She said, "I can't believe that the hijacker "wanted Charlton Heston to read the message. "I could have gotten Barbara Streisand to do it." So she was agenting, even when she was in a situation of grave danger. - And then there's what you told Barbara during the Manson murders. - Yes, exactly, famous comment. In 1969, after Sharon Tate and her friends were killed by the Manson family, there was, of course, widespread terror throughout Los Angeles, especially among the rich and famous and celebrated, because initially they thought that this was something aimed at the beautiful people. And Barbara Streisand was expressing great concern over her own personal safety, worrying that she might be on the list of the Manson family. And Sue said, "Don't worry, honey. "They're not murdering stars, only featured players." Now, this is the kind of humor that marked her entire life and career. It was a shark, sometimes harsh humor, but it was undeniably very funny. And she loved to go right to the edge. She loved to play very close to the line and throw people off balance, literally. It was one of the things that she took great delight in. - Reading your book, I wouldn't call Sue exactly discreet, except in one important regard that before her death, she ordered her entire business archive destroyed. So you had to rely on these interviews, but boy, did you get some. Besides Barbara, what are some of the people you talked to for the book? - It was interesting because she did leave instructions for her personal archive to be destroyed after her death. And so her assistant apparently carried out her instructions. So all those hardcore business records were not available to me. I had to find out about salaries and other concrete information through other means and archival research and things like that. But so I knew right away that I was going to have to find this book through the interviews. And it was going to be piecing together the puzzle in a very, very different way, really from anything I'd ever done before. So in addition to Barbara Streisand, who was my biggest get among the interview, is because as you correctly say, she does not speak to very many people about anything. I was thrilled to get Tuesday Weld, who I think is one of the finest actresses of the 1960s through the 1980s, and also somebody who is not known for giving very many interviews. She's a very private person. She was a fascinating interview. I think she's a great actress. And I was delighted to get her. I was delighted to get Michael Caine, who gave me a wonderful interview. He had a very, very clear memory of how his career developed under Sue's guidance, how his salary escalated at her urging. She was very, very keen that he really be placed on a level with a lot of the top American leading them. That was kind of her goal and her strategy with Michael Caine. I was thrilled to get him. So many people I spoke with, Candace Berg and Diane Cannon, Elliot Gould, Peter Bogdanovich. - Would you say that most people liked her? - Yes, I would. And I think she wasn't always easy to like. That was one of the most fascinating things about working on this book. She was a complicated woman. She was a very good friend, a very loyal friend. But she could also be hypercritical. She could also be downright cruel at times. She thought that her constant scrutiny and criticism of her friends and clients was always in the service of their careers and their lives and the betterment of same. I mean, she was everything that she said to them was for their own good. But I think sometimes it's a little hard for people to process that. - Can you give a few examples of some of the harsh criticism she gave to her clients? - Well, yes. She would, you know, she would tell Candace Bergin that she hated the way she was wearing her hair and that she looked awful and she shouldn't do it that way. She would tell people that they were getting fat, that they were getting old. You know, Barbara Streisand in fact told me that she said Sue really knew how to push your buttons. She, if she wanted you to accept a certain role in a certain film and you weren't quite sure that you wanted to do it because maybe the script wasn't the best or, you know. Barbara Streisand said Sue would say, I don't know Barbara, you're getting older. You'd better do this. I mean, she could be quite manipulative. She had a very strong belief that movie stars needed to keep working in order to remain being movie stars. One of my favorite stories that I found was in 1976, Martin Scorsese was putting together Taxi Driver, his landmark movie starring Robert De Niro and there was a part, a supporting part in it that the producers and Martin Scorsese said that they were looking for a Sibyl Shepherd type and Sibyl Shepherd happened to be a client of Sue's at this point. And she had unfortunately had a bad run of films recently and Sue said, well, you're looking for a Sibyl Shepherd type. Why don't you just take Sibyl Shepherd? And they said, well, we're only offering $25,000. This is a very low budget film and she went to Sibyl Shepherd with the offer and she said, honey, she would call her clients honey. She said, you'd better take this offer. You're lucky after your last two pictures to be getting an offer of $25,000. You're as cold as Baskin Roberts. And Sibyl Shepherd listened to her because Sue knew that this was a very good script and in fact, it did lead to a resurgence in Sibyl Shepherd's film career. - You know, at the height of her power, which was like the 70s, give me an example of what some really big deal she did for a client. - Well, the first really spectacular deal that she pulled off was in, I mean, she'd been working as an Asian, very successfully for a number of years and pulled off great individual deals for people. She, for instance, got Gene Hackman, the leading role in the French connection. When he was not in any way a front runner for that part and it was just her hammering and persistence that managed to persuade William Freed come to cast, Gene Hackman in the French connection for which he won an Oscar, of course, and did not thank her in his acceptance speech, which enraged her to the end of her life. But the first kind of really spectacular thing she pulled off was in 1972, she put together the comedy "What's Up Doc?" because she represented Barbara Streisand, Ryan O'Neill, and the director of Peter Bogdanovich. And she packaged the whole deal quite brilliantly. And "What's Up Doc," of course, was an immense box office hit in 1972, huge. And so she became known as a great packageer. Now, packaging, putting a whole bunch of people in the same picture had been around for a while. It was not a new concept, but she kind of elevated it to a different level. And "What's Up Doc?" really made her stock skyrocket in Hollywood. And then everyone wanted to be represented by her. I mean, she was just having people beat down the door practically to become clients. And she represented many, many of the top stars at that time. She also, just shortly after that, Jean Hackman again, there was a picture called "Lucky Lady" that was being put into production. In fact, it was ready to go to shoot on location down in Mexico. And George Segal, the leading man, dropped out very abruptly. And they were stuck. I mean, they were ready to go. They were ready to shoot. And she got Jean Hackman cast in the film for $1 million because she knew she had them over a barrel. $1 million was not a salary that actors were making in the 1970s, especially for a movie that turned out to be this bad. I mean, it was "Lucky Lady" when it was released in 1974, was a box office disaster. Do you have you seen it? No, I haven't, but... Don't waste your time. Well, now I know that it cost a million dollars just that one. Just one salary. But one person she never got was Paul Newman, right? No, she never did. But they were good friends. And that's a very interesting thing. There were certain people who I think liked her, admired her, but didn't want to be too closely associated with her. And I never knew Paul Newman, but I did know Joanne Woodward quite well at an earlier point in my life. We were together at the National Endowment for the Arts a couple of times. And these were very elegant people in their own way. They were very down to earth people, but they were not the kind of people I think who were probably going to be comfortable around somebody as rough as Sue could be. Did that piss her off that they had that sort of feeling about her? Well, I think so. I think she wanted everybody. I think it was almost like an addiction, you know. She wanted them all. I was told that Diane Keaton had very similar feelings about her, and Diane Keaton's sensibility was not really a good match for Sue's. Diane Keaton didn't really trust her. Jane Fonda resisted her blandness for many, many years. So she wasn't everybody's cup of tea by any stretch of the imagination. On that note, let's go back a little bit into her background. What was her relationship with her parents? It was very trouble. Sue came to the United States in 1938 when she was about not even six years old. And the family had escaped from Germany, from Hamburg, where she had been born. They spoke very, very little English, and they were sponsored by another family to come over, and they settled in Utica, New York, which is a very remote spot upstate. That was, at the time, kind of a thriving industrial town. It was right in the Rust Belt, as they call it, a lot of manufacturing went on there. But it was far from glamorous, and it was a long, long way from New York City. And they settled there, the father, George Mingers, was a not very successful salesman. And he was also an inventor at gambler, and often in debt. And in 1946, he was quite badly in debt, and he couldn't get himself out of it. And he came to New York City, checked him to a Times Square hotel room, and committed suicide. And Ruth Mingers, his widow, and Sue, who was their only child, shortly afterward moved to New York to the Bronx. And Ruth, the mother, got a job as a bookkeeper, and they struggled along as best they could. These were years that never left Sue. She was terrified of the memory of these years, because they were very hard-scrabble years. And this is when her entire fixation on the best, the finest, the most glamorous, the most celebrated began. There is definitely an element of pathology in all of this. She, as time went on, and she became more successful and famous herself, she really didn't want to be reminded of anything other than the A-list. She didn't want to be reminded of her past in any way. She did not want to associate with ordinary people who were not famous. She was really haunted by this. She was depressed by it. And I think this is, I designed this book as a comedy, as you can probably tell, and it's just chock full of funny stories about Sue, but there's also a real undercurrent of depression throughout this story. And it made me think when I was writing it, she was a fabulously witty woman. But they always say about the great comedians, that they always had an undercurrent of sadness about them. - And her mother was a very difficult woman. - Oh, God, doesn't she ever. Yeah, the mother Ruth Menger is, I did find mostly a very unsympathetic character. I tried to understand her as best I could, but I did talk to a lot of people who had known her. Ruth was, I think like many, many refugees who settled here. She was very, very afraid of rocking the boat. She wanted to be safe and settled. And she did not encourage her daughter's aspirations to a life of glamour and money. She was afraid of that. I think she just wanted her to settle down, be a secretary, get a nice job, and marry and have children. And she couldn't really embrace her daughter's success. It was very alien to her. She was a very fearful woman all her life and a very, very critical one. Sue picked up on her mother's criticism and scrutiny and used that technique on her friends all her life and could never seem to see. - Yeah, was she self-aware of this? - No, interestingly, she was very deeply in therapy. And I was telling somebody the other day, I would give anything to know what those therapy sessions were. - Those are probably burned. (laughing) - I hope so. (laughing) But Barbara Streisand did tell me in our interview that one time she said, Sue, lay off. You're sounding like the mother that you professed to hate. And she couldn't seem to get her mind around that. - But Sue worked her way up. She became a secretary and she kept this dream you were talking about and she landed these huge clients among them, Barbara Streisand. She was working in this very, very male-dominated field about the time. What would you say was her sort of point of view of that situation for women in that day? - Well, that's a good question. I went into this assuming that she was this trailblazing feminist because she came into all this as the women's movement in the US was really gathering steam. That was not really the case once I got into the research. Sue liked very much being a woman in a boys' club she liked manipulating the men, she liked playing them. And she was not in any way a great mentor to other women. I think she was very happy for the success of her women friends and she certainly her closest friends were women for the most part, very, very loyal friends. But she didn't self-identify as a feminist. I mean, I think she just kind of rolled her eyes in a lot of ways over the whole feminist movement. As long as she herself was making a good salary and a competitive salary, she didn't really see herself as somebody who was breaking down the walls for others. And I think she was too self-involved, too narcissistic. Her own ideas about men and women really veered back to an earlier time, her big expression with her friends if a woman friend of hers was dating a promising, prosperous guy in Hollywood. Sue would say, "Honey, close the deal, "get him to marry you and you won't have to work anymore." So that was not really 1970s, 1980s. - It's hard to put those two sides of her together because it seems like she didn't live that way but she wanted the other women to. I don't know, it's very hard to consolidate that. (laughs) - It is, well, she was a mass of contradictions. And I think she enjoyed being a mass of contradictions. I think she enjoyed being somebody that people couldn't quite figure out. - Let's talk about those parties. What were they like? - They were wild. She entertained at home and she did business at home. And this was a fantastic thing because she would have these both large parties and then more intimate dinner parties at her house in Beverly Hills. And she would serve comfort food because she thought that despite the fact that all these people were rich and famous, this was what everybody liked. They liked roast beef and brisket and chicken pot pie and lasagna and home cooking. And so she would serve these very kind of tasty down-home meals. And there would be a lot of pot and some cocaine and deals would be made at these parties. She would invite a director who was casting a new picture and she would invite her actor clients and she would seep them together and often by the end of the evening, the actor had walked away with a card in the new film. This happened a lot. - Going into the '80s, the new Hollywood started to emerge. You have a new generation, the Lucas is the Spielberg's new type of management agencies, Ovets and Ari Gold and all this and where did this leave soon? - Well, she wasn't happy about these developments. As the real hardcore money man began taking over films in the 1980s and the multinationals were taking over the studios right and left, it ceased for her to be a creative game. For all of her toughness and roughness, Sue really prized creativity and she loved creative people and she understood them. I mean, she was a very smart woman. And as it became more about numbers, she lost interest, she lost heart. And as the '80s went on, she just wanted to dial back the clock. It just wasn't fun anymore. - So Sue didn't really, she didn't fit in after and what happened to her? - Not really, well, of course there was also a big emotional break with her. It was really traumatic. She lost her star client, Barbara Streisand. In 1981, over a film called All Night Long, co-starring Gene Ackman and it was a film directed by Sue's husband, Jean-Claude Tremont and who was a kind of an interesting fellow, a very intelligent man, Belgian born, to whom she was quite happily married and he didn't work very much. Jean-Claude was kind of, he was almost the male version of a lot of those famous Hollywood hostesses, like iconic bald and people like that, you know, because his wife was the big player in Hollywood and the breadwinner and he sort of, you know, supervised the parties and sat on the sidelines and he was-- - Another way that her sort of feminist theory didn't really stick. - Absolutely. She encouraged all-- - Her own life to go after these power men but that's not who she picked. - Right, right. - Yeah. - Sorry, continue. - So anyway, Jean-Claude had put this picture together called All Night Long which was a very interesting comedy about people in Los Angeles who work at night and it was an initially cast of an actress named Lisa Eichorn who was very much on the rise in the early 1980s and they started filming with Lisa Eichorn, it didn't work out and Sue had her replace with Barbra Streisand at a salary of $4 million for a little under one month's work. And I mean, Barbra Streisand told me, she said, "I loved the idea that I was getting more money than any woman or man had ever made." She was very careful to put it that way. It was a history-making salary and Sue thought because every movie Barbra Streisand made practically turned to gold that this was going to be a great success for her husband. Well, in fact, it was not. The movie was a very unusual comedy, not the kind of thing people expected from a Barbra Streisand picture and it died at the box office when it was released. I can remember, I was in college and I was going to go see it. I thought, well, I've got exams this week, I'll go see it on the weekend. Well, by the weekend, it wasn't there anymore. And Barbra Streisand, shortly after this, there had been tension between the two of them because Streisand had become very involved in developing Yental at this point and Sue thought it was the most ridiculous idea she ever heard of. She made fun of it, she ridiculed it in front of other people and Streisand's feelings were quite hurt by this. And so after all night long failed at the box office, Barbra Streisand called her into a meeting and said, "You know, I think we don't have the same taste and I think we should continue to be great friends but not Asian and client at anymore." And Sue said, "Well, if I can't be your Asian, I don't want to be your friend." And Barbra Streisand was quite shocked by this and she had assumed that they would be able to segue very naturally into a new kind of relationship. And Sue wouldn't really allow for that. It was devastating to her not to have the biggest star in Hollywood on her roster anymore. And again, there you see the fragility of the whole construct. She felt utterly threatened and vulnerable all of a sudden. And after that, she lost heart for the whole business very quickly. - And it was quite a long time because she died in 2011. So she had quite a lot of years that she was, seemed according to quite nostalgic for a time that wasn't anymore. - Yeah, she did. And she became a little bit of a, in some ways, a little bit of a normative figure. She would kind of sad thing that I found it was. When new people, there was a constant parade of people coming to the house and current new people. They knew about her legend. They wanted to seek her out, get her advice, which was always very astute. - It was like people like Tina Fey and things like that. - Tina Fey, Abz, Kathy Griffin. I mean, young directors and producers, John Goldwyn. They really beat a path to her door. And she had very good advice to give them for the most part. But when people would, these younger people would come, it was like they were getting a guided tour of a museum, almost. She would say, all right, well, first of all, you have to come in here and she would turn on the VCR and show them her 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace from 1975 when she was at her peak. She was very proud of it. And she wanted people to know that this was when she was a big deal. She used to say, this was back when I was alive, which I just, so sad. - Yeah, yeah. - It's so touching, I think. But she never lost her sense of humor. - Before I let you go, Mr. Ko, to end on a morse who mangers note, why don't you tell me one of the stories or one of the things she said that you found the funniest during the work on your book? - Well, one that just pops to mind because I was talking about it last night at a reading idea at a bookstore here in New York. She helped put together a pretty woman, which was a complicated genesis of a movie, which I go into in some detail in my book. And it wasn't at all sure at first, Julie Roberts had the leading role in the film. There were many complications. It was finally all worked out with Disney and it was a go, and Julia Roberts came to her and said, well, I have one problem. And they all said, well, what's that? And she said, I don't do nude scenes. And Sue said, but she's playing a hooker for God's sake. What did she expect? And then she called Julia Roberts when she got this out. And she said, honey, if I had your body, I would be shopping naked down the aisles at Gilson. And that's a very good example of how she did business. You know, she disarmed people with her wit. And what did Julia say? Julia laughed and then, you know, agreed to do the picture. But not the nudity. Not as much as they wanted. Yeah. Mr. Kel, this is so great. And thank you for the book and thank you for your time. Great. I enjoyed it too. The duties of a TV show's head honcho, the so-called show runner, often combine those traditionally assigned to the head writer and executive producer. And more often than not, she or he is the creator of the series to begin with. During what is often referred to as a golden age of television, the early 2000s, we watched many big showrunners at work. David Simon's The Wire, David Chase Sopranos, Joss Whedon's Buffy, Judd Apatow, freaks and geeks. And already today, you can see many of the talents fostered by these showrunners. Marty Knoxson, the showrunner of this year's breakout hit Unreal, wrote for the cult TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer with showrunner Joss Whedon. And one of my favorite Buffy actors, Danny Strong, is a co-creator on the mega hit Empire. Mad Men's Matthew Weiner wrote for David Chase's Sopranos and Ronald D. Moore, showrunner in Battlestar Galactica and Outlander, started on Star Trek. You get the picture, many of TV's biggest creators right now are following in the footsteps of some real greats. How have the writers and creators on the newer show has been influenced by those showrunners they worked for and watched? And where are we now? What are the major trends? And are we seeing more women in the role of showrunner? I wanted to talk to Tara Bennett about this. She's the author of the book Showrunners, the art of running a show, which is also a documentary. For the book, Tara Bennett interviewed some of the biggest showrunners, Joss Whedon, Damon Lindelau and Ronald D. Moore. Ms. Bennett is also an adjunct professor in film and television. And she's written several books on TV shows, like for example, About Lost and Sons of Anarchy. Thank you so much, Tara, for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. What would your definition of the Golden Age of Television be? Well, I think we're kind of in our second one. I would say the Golden Age that originally happened was in the '50s when television really hit its stride, figuring out that it wasn't just radio programming with visuals and that it really found its voice with plays, one act plays, with a variety, comedy. And then we really, I think, have come through to our second kind of Golden Age, where shows like The Sopranos and The Wire. And now, just the dense quality of television that we have in front of us. I think the thing that most people will say nowadays is not that there isn't good television, it's there's too much television. And a very large amount of it is excellent. So if you were writing part two of your book show runners right now, who are a couple of people you'd feature? That's a great question. Obviously, we've got shows like Empire. We've got Lee as the show runner for that. We've also got Dan and Dave from Game of Thrones. That show's been such a success, especially pushing into genre and fantasy, which has not really been a mainstream type of show. It's actually creating a not unlike horror with The Walking Dead, a pathway for people to actually want to find more programming that of its likes. I still love The Kings. The Good Wife has been on for seven years, but that's still a network show, which is very hard to keep the quality that the Kings have held for that show for years. And that's, in and itself, kind of an amazing thing to achieve of 22 episodes a year of the quality that they've done for as long as they have on network. You've got a lot of really great show runners doing 13 episode seasons with Steve Denyte with Daredevil, which came on Netflix and had a great debut season. You've got Damon Lindeloff with the leftovers going into its second season. So you've got a lot of show runners that have gone to the shorter model. They don't get paid as much, but they get to tell more concise stories where they don't have what they would consider the bloat or just the overwhelming amount of work of doing 22 hours of a TV show every season. I'd like to talk a bit about Joss Whedon, the creator and show runner of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Pretty much every show you see these days, you can find a writer from Joss Whedon's writer's room on Buffy, working on a new show. You have like Marty Noxon Unreal, Danny Strong doing Empire. You have David Greenwald Grim and David Fury, who did Lost in 24. And that's just a few. Why was Joss Whedon so good at fostering talent? Two things with Joss, and yeah, one, I was just a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer these days. That's actually the show that launched my writing career. So I was really in love with the show, the structure. That was probably one of the first shows where I really paid attention to how they wrote the show. It was really one of the first shows where the writers became kind of rock stars along with the cast, Sarah Michelle Geller, David Barranis for the stars. But then you also knew the names like Jane Espenson if she wrote some of your favorite episodes, or Marty Noxon, or Steve Denite, or Drew Goddard who went on and now has a huge movie career as a screenwriter. I'm going to give you all a nice, fun, normal evening. If I have to kill every single person on the face of the earth to do it. - Yay. - Joss really won, was very exacting with the standards of what he wanted from his writers. He wanted them to be able to do the tone of his show, which was multiple voices. Some episodes might be more horror-centric, some might be extraordinarily emotional, some episodes might be more comedic, and he really liked to foster talent in his room with people that could do all the facets of what he wanted to achieve in his shows. And that wasn't just Buffy, it was Angel, it was when the show went on and Firefly became the short-lived kind of iconic show that is now. He really wanted a multifaceted room and really fostered people's voices to be able to achieve that. And then the other part of it was that he wanted to mentor very, very specifically, have his writers become producers on his shows so that when they were producing an episode that they wrote, they were on the set. They learned how to answer the questions, make the creative decisions, we're involved in casting their episodes because he wanted them to go on and do more than just be writers. - That's amazingly generous to do that. - It is, and it's rare. There are not a ton of mentors out there because it is a competitive business. - I interviewed Maria and Andrei Giacomet and were executive producers on Mad Men a while back, and they were talking about that they both had worked on Star Trek and that the reason why they could go on from there, that they learned sort of everything from there, every human emotion and conflict is contained on that bridge in the cockpit of the starship. So if you've written emotions in there, you can take it out into any like the Mad Men world, for example. - I feel like so many of the genre shows really have helped breed kind of multifaceted writers. Star Trek, the Whedon shows, Ron Moore, he came from the Star Trek world then had his first show running success with Battlestar Galactica and then now is doing Outlander. Shows that do a lot of metaphor are really a great training ground for people to be able to really focus and hone in on what the thematic emotion is that they're trying to put forth. And once they learn how to create metaphor in an environment, they're able from my conversations and interviews with many writers and just observations of those that I tend to like a whole lot. They feel they're much stronger at being able to get to the through line of what they're trying to say emotionally or thematically. - What's this all about? - I've learned from observing lieutenants, tourists in Paris that humans sometimes require a pretext for being intimate with one another. - Intimate. Resistance is fuel. - You know, I think Star Trek was a huge breeding ground for a lot of people that are working today. The various iterations, you've got Brian Fuller who came from that who went on to Heroes, so another metaphorical show. And then he's gone on to create many of his shows which often have death at the theme. At the heart of it, dead like me. He did Wonder Falls. Of course, Hannibal's just finished. It's called the very successful run. Pushing daisies is one of my favorite all time shows. And so you've got these places that bred writers that were able to kind of really hone in on how to get to the emotion, even if the surrounding package was maybe distancing to some viewers, the emotional heart would grab somebody and have them watch. - What about someone like Judd Apatow? What does his legacy now? - It's interesting because I think what he had been really great about him is that he's been trying to foster talent, you know, with Lena Dunham and what girls did. And, you know, that's a very-- - What about Judd Apatow is freaks and geeks? - Yeah, yeah, and that's one of my favorite shows. You know, Paul Feig and him did freaks and geeks. What a great little time capsule of the 18 hours of a television show that really captured a time and place in an era and that feeling of, you know, trying to grow up and figure out who you are. And, you know, it was, I think, definitely a show that was ahead of its time. - I love being told not to drink by a pothead hippie guidance counselor. - It's probably a bar in the teacher's lounge. - Yeah, probably. Hey, stroker, 10 bucks for the cage. Don't weasel out on me. I'll cut that hair off and I'll sell it. - So who are the some of the people that are following him sort of? You mentioned Lena Dunham. You know, he saw somebody that's a comedic voice and a voice of, you know, her generation and reflecting her type of experience, living in New York City and what she experiences with this, you know, the 20s. And I think that, I think what's great about him is that, one, if you look back at freaks and geeks, he and Paul Feig pretty much cast all of this generation of Hollywood in that show. You know, there's nobody on that show that hasn't gone on Jason Siegel, James Franco, Lisa Cardellini. - And now he's working with Amy Schumer, another super powerful writer. - Exactly, yes. And so he's finding the new voices and finding and being able to help back them, you know, and say, hey, you know, these are talents that you should be paying attention to. And, you know, even if I'm not the guy that's gonna be doing the day-to-day writing of it, I'm gonna put my name on it. - There were so few women. I mean, they're not even one we mentioned in that one, how are things now? - It's still really slow. You know, it's really not a place still where, you know, we are 50% of the population and that's what you should be seeing in terms of showrunners, in terms of directors. Obviously, television is definitely known as a place where more female women, especially female actresses from the film world, can find really strong material for them to be the lead characters for, but you are not seeing still, you know, maybe 12% of the entire pool of showrunners and writers that are out there that are female. - You have Genji Cohen with "Orange is the New Black" and Jill Soloway and Shonda Rhimes, of course. - Well, yeah, she's an empire, yeah, absolutely. She's got so many shows. I mean, there's a whole Thursday night lineup of everything she's, you know, executive producing, which is great, but in the same token, you know, those successes are fantastic, but they're not a, you know, we're seeing some movement in basic cable. We're seeing definitely some movement in streaming, but then, you know, places like HBO, they don't have a single show, female show runner on any of their shows yet. And, you know, that's like, are you serious HBO? Is no of our, you know, it's quality programming. So, you know, to know that statistic is still, it's kind of dumb-founding to think that that's actually the case. And so it's-- - Oh, what's girls on? - Well, she's a show runner for that, but it's, they're not, she is a show runner, but it's also Judd has got the co on that. And, but there's, there's no dramas. Let me clarify that. There's no dramas with a female show runner. So that's, you know, and that's, you know, their wheelhouse still. You know, obviously HBO has some great comedies, but it, you know, their drama is, you know, what premium-based television, they've built their reputation on that and how many Emmys they get. And so to not have a female drama show runner on HBO is still, it's troubling. - And finally, the shows from that, that "Golden Age" were so often about the tortured male character from Tony Soprano to Walter White to Don Draper. What would you say is there a theme or a trend right now that you can see? - Obviously adaptation is a huge trend. And it's a little scary because, you know, film has really gone to this place where, for example, you're doing titles and properties that are already known. So it might be based on comic books. It might be based on books exactly. So, you know, you're, you're diving into the superhero world on television, you're diving into books that have known fan bases. - Then the other trend I'm seeing some people talk about is that, you know, it has been so dark for so long that more hope is something that people are finding in a lot of the scripts that have come in in this last round of development, that you can have dystopian, but you have dystopian with less bleakness. You have, you can have, you know, the kind of angst of main characters, but there is more of a kind of warmer, or softer, fuzzier kind of overall kind of outlook to the show. And that's interesting. And that's, you know, that's a natural balancing of the scales, you know, people do get a burnout of, you know, well, if all of my options make me feel like I need to take, you know, a Vicodin and then take a nap afterwards, you know, that's not good television programming. So trying to find, you know, the balance, obviously after the recession, comedies, you know, kind of bounced from that. Obviously the Big Bang Theory is still a powerhouse in terms of ratings and being the kind of warm comfort food that people like. - Tara, thank you so much. This was so interesting. Thank you for taking the time. - It was wonderful to talk TV with you. It's always a pleasure to do that with somebody that knows television as well as you do. So thank you. - Thank you to all my guests, Brian Kilo and Tara Bennett. And thank you for listening. Check out popcultureconfidential.com for more info. This show was edited by Tom Hanson, music by Call Boy, and produced by Renee Vittishtatt and myself, Christina Yerling-Biro. Thank you so much for listening. - Hello podcast fans. It is I, Bruce Valanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards. So you didn't have to. In that time, I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win, why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars, what were they thinking? Available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]