Not long ago, when I was producing a television sitcom, one of the lead actresses asked me for a meeting. She had, she told me, some thoughts on that week’s script.
That’s always a terrifying announcement. When actors want to talk about a script, it could mean anything. Maybe they want to talk about wardrobe or something equally trivial. Maybe they want the character to have a cat. Sometimes, though, they want to talk about replacing a co-star or getting more lines.
What this actress wanted to talk about was aspirin. Her character in that week’s script was suffering from a headache, and in one scene, we had written a short moment in which she takes two aspirins.
“I’m just really uncomfortable,” she told me, “taking aspirin. My personal philosophy is very anti-that.”
Apparently, this actress had a personal philosophy, and that philosophy was hostile to the generally accepted practice of taking pain-relieving pills. I must have looked baffled because she started to explain her reasoning.
“What Big Pharma is doing to us and our gut biome…” she began. But before she could continue, I held up my hand.
“Totally get it,” I said. “No explanation necessary. We’ll cut that moment out of the script.”
I was thankful it wasn’t something bigger. In fact, it was an easy compromise to make. The aspirin-taking wasn’t a central or even terribly interesting moment — the line we had written for her wasn’t really getting the laugh we wanted — so why not? She was nutty, obviously. But she is also extremely talented, and a big part of being a successful executive producer of a television show is recognizing that great comic talent and irrational beliefs about ordinary things often go hand in hand.
So, as I said, it was an easy decision to make. They’re not always that way.
Henry Louis Gates, for instance, is a professor at Harvard University who hosts and produces terrific television series for PBS. His most recent series is The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, but for the past five years, he has hosted and produced a fascinating show called Finding Your Roots that investigates the ancestry of ordinary people and celebrity guests, taking them on journeys around the world to discover their heritage.
The ordinary people, of course, are a lot easier to handle than the celebrities.
The actor Ben Affleck, for instance, discovered while shooting his episode that one of his forebears was a slave-owner. He didn’t like discovering that, of course — who would? — but he also didn’t want anyone else discovering it, so he asked Gates to snip that segment out of his episode.
In other words, he told the executive producer that he had some thoughts on that week’s script, but instead of aspirin, his problem was slavery.
Because Gates is a professor at Harvard and not a seasoned television producer like some people I could mention, he wasn’t sure what to do. So, he emailed a friend of his, the CEO of a large movie studio, and asked him for advice.
What the studio chief told his friend to do, and I hope this won’t shock you, was give the star what he wants. “Cut the aspirin,” in other words.
That’s pretty much the standard operating procedure for a Hollywood studio executive — whatever the star wants, the star gets, as long as it doesn’t cost too much money.
That’s also the standard operating procedure for a Hollywood sitcom producer — whatever the star wants, the star gets, as long as it doesn’t mean a lot of rewriting or taking out a laugh line.
This is all usually handled quietly, and it would have remained quiet until the associated emails were made public by the website WikiLeaks and it all came tumbling out into the open. The result was that the third season of the series was suspended for a time, and the episode with Affleck was pulled from distribution.
Sometimes, when the star makes a demand, you give in. Sometimes, you don’t. Knowing which to do and when is headache-inducing work, for which aspirin is needed. Unless you’ve got a problem with aspirin.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
