Fortysomething
Once again, Marshall Herskovitz defies and defines our so-called lives.

Written By Terrance Sweeney
(From the May 2000 issue of "Written By")

Occasionally a writer defines a generation's identity so accurately that the work becomes part of the cultural vocabulary. Hemingway did it with the Lost Generaton. Kerouac did it with the Beats. And Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick did it with the thirtysomething generation.

In 1987 Herskovitz and Zwick collaborated on the television series thirtysomething, which ran for four years on ABC. For that work Herskovitz received two Emmy Awards--for best dramatic series and best writing in a dramatic series--a Writers Guild Award, a Humanitas Prize, a Golden Globe, a People's Choice Award, a Peabody Award, the American Psychological Association Award for distinguished contribution to media psychology, and the John Rock Award for outstanding portrayal of family planning and sexuality.

Later, he and Zwick again captured a generation's identity when they were executive producers of the critically acclaimed series My So-Called Life. Adolescent angst became synonymous with that short-lived show, and it remains a cult favorite with cable reruns. Currently, he and Zwick are executive producing Once and Again for ABC. He addressed the Humanitas Master Writers Workshop without his frequent writing partner, Edward Zwick. The following abbreviated transcription of his discussion has been edited with Herskovitz's assistance.

Marshall Herskovitz, In His Own Words:

I've begun to think that being a writer is like a rare genetic disorder. It's this recessive gene, and every once in a while somebody's unlucky enough to have two parents with the recessive gene, so here we are. It just kind of comes at you, and you don't really know from where, but you have that mindset for it. I didn't intend to be a writer in this business. I always thought I would be a director.

The ability to enter into someone else's mind--be they male, female, from the 13th century, whatever--that's part of the fun of being a writer. It's also part of the pathology of being a writer, in some sense. We are condemned to be observers, condemned to really watch people and empathize and put ourselves in other people's minds. Sometimes that's a big weight to carry around. So, at least, let's make some money off it.

Last summer we pitched Once and Again to the network, and they really liked the idea. Then we wrote the script and just forgot that we were supposed to come back and tell them what the actual story of the pilot was. When we handed in the script, Stu Bloomberg said, "Uh, you were supposed to come in and tell me what you were going to write." I was really embarrassed and said, "We really just forgot. I'm so sorry. We didn't mean to be disrespectful." Luckily they loved it, so it was okay.

The truth is that the people who have great creative freedom, like David Kelley and even Steven Bochco, usually earn creative freedom. Usually you have to roll over to the studio and the network in the beginning. There's no shame in it; you just have to do it. The way you get past that is through success.

People sometimes ask to what extent we refer to thirtysomething when we write Once and Again. The truth is, both of them refer to us and our concerns as writers. One obvious difference is the black-and-white interview segments in Once and Again. I had written the first act of the pilot and given it to Ed to read. One of the less obvious differences between the shows is that these characters are less inclined to discuss in great detail what they're feeling. They're a little bit more reserved. And there was a way in which it was so hidden you weren't quite sure what was going on in their minds. So Ed suggested this technique, which has been done a lot in the theater and by filmmakers. It was really an interview.

At first I was resistant to it, but then I realized the power of it and grew to love it. The idea initially was that it's a form of narration. When you hear a voiceover in the movie, you don't ask, "Who is that person talking to?" We didn't see them as therapy sessions; we saw them as interviews.

Their best use was in the pilot, when they go out on their first date; then in the second episode when they're about to make love and you see them interviewed about what went wrong in their marriages. Then you realize what they're carrying into this scene and why they're so terrified of being with this new person. It's opening a window on what's going on inside at that moment.

People Skills

I have a particular take on how to look at human dynamics. I am deeply influenced by psychoanalytic theory and have been since I was a teenager. Psychoanalytic theory is a part of method acting as well. It deals in a continuum from that which is revealed, that which is not revealed, that which is a secret wish, to that which is unconscious. Most of our shows are about the process of finding the truth in yourself and in a relationship, that somehow a relationship works toward revealing the truth: Sometimes the truth is that two people have to go away from each other, and sometimes the truth is that they can find a way to accommodate each other. But it's always about discovering who you are in relation to the other person.

I think we also deal with the difficulties of communication, how hard it is for people to be truthful. The people lie a great deal in this show; sometimes they get busted for it, and sometimes they don't. I think it's hard, in the dynamic I'm talking about, to have characters be really irrational. It's hard because once someone becomes very irrational, they become objectified, and it's hard to be inside them. We try to be inside the character and let me tell you it gets difficult over time to create drama when you're inside everybody. It tends to make everybody be a little bit more socialized and a little bit more nice to each other.

There is this difference between real reality and dramatic reality. In real reality people do bizarre things. But in dramatic reality you can lose an audience very quickly if someone they love does something bizarre. They go, "Why would they do that? I don't like that." And you lose them. So we're always walking that line. A lot of our thinking is about how do we keep the audience from shutting down, how do we keep them open to what is going on so that they can be moved.

We try to map our stories for the year. During the first season of a show, you're still trying to find your way through the fog a little bit. Some shows work in disarray all the time, and that's just how they do it. The pages are coming in while they're shooting, that sort of thing. We can't stand to work that way. We must have a finished script by the start of prep. We'll still be making changes, but we like to have a very ordered production. It just makes everybody more sane.

When you're at this long enough, you have instincts, and you know to follow your instincts. There's an instinct I have when a character has reached critical mass, which means they are in some sense a person who you can set in motion and they're going to do something interesting. I felt that in the Once and Again pilot. I had created two characters who had enough inner-dynamics and history and psychology and pathology, plus I had some sense of the reality of why they were connecting, so I just knew we could take them interesting places. I couldn't necessarily tell you exactly what they would be, and I'm not sure I still can, as a matter of fact. But if you're honest with yourself, you can know whether you're at that point or not at that point yet. That's the improvisation part of it. You have faith that you'll find a path that is interesting if the characters are interesting enough.

It's a very odd process I find. You are creating something, but the process of creating is really trying to glimpse someone through the fog. "I think he's a little bit like this. No, I know he's not like that. Yeah, he might be like that." It's as if at some level it's already known, and I just have to find out what it is. When you're imaging two people, it's more complex, but it is a similar process. How do they fit together? I think we all use paradigms from people we know, relationships we've had. Lily really interested me as a writer because she's the first character I've ever created that is not based on a real person, yet I felt I knew her. I felt I knew her so exactly from the first minute, and I still can't tell you where she comes from. She just kind of appeared to me.

I knew that I wanted her to be this combination of someone who was a really good mother and a grown-up but somehow childlike, somehow not together, a little bit goofy, a little bit regressive, in a way that's not always attractive. Not always the best exemplification of what it means to be a woman today, somehow. She was flawed in that way, but I loved her; I felt protective of her. But there's pathology in that. There's narcissism and some wish to be a child that doesn't serve you as a parent in the world. I knew we'd have to come to grips with that. I may know some people vaguely like that, but I wasn't amalgamating them.

I think you get these particular handholds for characters, and you think, Well what would happen in real life if they met, how would they respond in some way. I had an image of Rick, and it's interesting because Billy Campbell has changed it a little bit, as casting always does. I saw Rick as a man who was really uncomfortable with his feelings but deeply emotional. He was tortured because he couldn't express what he was feeling. That's why his brother was an alcoholic. He was really at war with himself. I felt that a lot of men like that slip into being the rescuer, the strong guy--they're comfortable in that role because they don't have to reveal their own weakness and fear.

I thought that would be a good match between these two people, pathologically speaking. They would fit together. She would want to regress, and he would want to rescue her, and then they would hate each other for that. That seemed like a good dynamic to play with. None of this is rational. It's trying to be open to possibilities.

I have to say the experience of doing this show, for both of us, has been more open toward the unconscious, toward the instinctive. Toward not really knowing, but trusting, "That might just be a good thing; I'm going to find out later why." I don't think we could have done that 15 years ago. I don't think we knew ourselves well enough. It's the process of getting older and doing it a lot of times.

I'm going to admit something here that I've never said in public before, which is that almost every script I've ever done had a character in it that Ed and I called the Mouth. We always create this character, this guy, who has a big mouth, who's really funny, who says a lot of things that people wish they could say. The Howard Stern character. It was Elliot in thirtysomething.

We didn't want David, the character in Once and Again, to be that. He just sort of became that in the script. And we're still playing with that. I don't necessarily want it to be the same, but we all have our weaknesses, and that's one of ours.

How I Got Started

In 1981 I was having lunch with Ed [Zwick]. He had become a producer of Family and done a TV movie. My career was sort of stalled at the freelance level. And I said, "You know what? I'm just not going to do this anymore. I'm not going to write any more episodic shows as a freelancer." And I just stopped.

He and I structured a story, a vaguely humorous, romantic thriller. It took two and a half months to write, and then we sent it around. That script has yet to be made--it almost got made about four times--but everything that has ever happened to me in my career sort of started from that moment. It was a turning point in my life, certainly in my career, where I put myself on the line, when I said, "I just won't do this anymore. I would rather leave the business, do something else, but I just won't do this anymore because I don't like it. I'd rather fail at something I like than fail at something I don't like." There are these moments in life when your back is to the wall and you just say, "Okay, I have nothing to lose, so I'm going to do this."

That spec script got me the chance to write Special Bulletin because we had come up with this idea, and we took it to NBC, and they were very intrigued by it. They asked, 'Who's going to write it?" And we said, "Marshall's going to write it." They said, "Well, have you written long-form?" Because in those days there was a huge wall between episodic writers and long-form writers, as if somehow it was a different language. We were able to show them this script, and they read it and said, "Okay." So I wrote it, and once the film was made and on TV and so well-received, my life turned around. I'd never quite tasted what that was like before, to be in such demand.

I said to Ed at that time, "I feel like I'm the proverbial fat girl in high school who loses all the weight and all the boys want to go out with her and she doesn't know how to say 'No.'" I couldn't deal with the fact that I was in demand. I had worked on the theory before that you just say yes to everything. So I continued to say yes to everything, and it took me two years to work my way out from all the projects I said I would do. It's really funny in life the way even the good things can bring about a consequence. But it was a very exciting time. I was at a different level at this point: suddenly being taken seriously.

Then we were approached by David Gerber who ran MGM television. All I wanted to do was movies, and all Ed wanted to do was movies. On the other hand I was bogged down on a script I was writing for Ed; it had been like five months, and I still hadn't finished the first draft. I wanted to put a second story on my house, and I thought, "Well, okay, let's take a TV deal."

We had about nine months of grace before pilot period came around. Gerber said, "Well, what ideas do you have for television shows?" We came up with about six bad ideas, and we had the network meeting scheduled. Literally the day before the network meeting, I turned to Ed and said, "What if we sell one of these? We'll have to make it. This would be a disaster." That's literally what we said. "Is there any kind of series that we'd actually like to do? What would that be like?"

So we thought, Who are the people we know? After the fact it seems obvious, but in the moment, especially at that time, when we were thinking about something without a franchise--not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a private detective, not a cop, not any of that stuff--what could it be about? We have all these friends who are going through all these things, their parents are dying and they're having trouble in their careers. "But what would that be like?" Ed kept saying.

Our lives were very free form in those days, so we just went home in the afternoon to Ed's house. Ed said to his wife, Liberty, "Marshall has this weird idea; I can't figure out what he means." And Liberty said, "That's great. What about Gary?" We have this friend Gary, the only name that actually made it into the show. "Gary can't commit to anybody. And there's this girl, she's trying to get married . . ." And we just thought about a couple of stories. So we junked everything else and went in the next day and sat in the meeting with three executives, all in their 30s. One was pregnant. They were the perfect demographic. We told them this weird idea, and they looked at us and said, "God, that's kind of interesting." What we presented to the network was entirely verbal, but we wrote a pitch out afterwards as we were developing the pilot.

I should also say that I had finally finished that first draft for Ed. It had taken me 14 months, and I was pretty well completely blocked as a writer by that time. I had pretty much reached the end. Writing for me was very torturous, difficult, and anxiety-provoking. I would basically go into the office, sit down in front of the computer screen, and just fall asleep. I would wake up--and this was 1986, I had just gotten my first computer two years before--and I would create macros for WordPerfect. I created these brilliant macros. It was really an amazing amount of energy that went into that. But I couldn't write.

Now I was supposed to write the pilot. Two weeks later I had written one act. Ed came in, and we absolutely had not a word of discussion. He sat down at the desk with me, and we started to do it together. We never talked about it. We just did it. We wrote the rest of it together and had a great time. It was much more fun writing with somebody else. From then on it was easy.

Tasting the Forbidden Apple

When the May thing came around and all the executives went to New York to decide what was going to be on the schedule, MGM demanded that Ed and I go to New York and sit in a hotel room for a week in case anybody wanted to meet with us. We were basically hoping that the show would not be picked up because we wanted to do movies. There is no better bargaining position to be in than not to want something. Halfway through the week we're sitting in the hotel room, and we get a call from MGM, "They might order the show, but they hate the title. You have to change the title." We said, "Well, no, we like the title. We're not going to change the title." So two days later the call comes: "You're picked up--with the title." I swear to God we literally looked at each other, shook our heads, and went for a walk up Madison Avenue.

It's not that we were unhappy. It's John Lennon's line, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." How did we get into this? It's not that we didn't love it; it's just that we thought we should be going over there, not here.

Months later we brought the rough-cut of the first episode to the network. They had their notes: "We think the show is too dark, literally and figuratively. Why not this; what about that?" And we said, "Sorry. If you don't like it, just cancel it." We didn't say it in a mean way. We just said we don't know how to do it any other way, sorry. They went, "Okay."

That was an arrival on a stage where I still am in some way. It was the first time we were fully in charge of something on an on-going basis as bosses, creatively trying to keep something going over a period of years. It was extremely demanding and amazing and crazy and wonderful.

But we writers are not exactly psychologically suited to being around anyone, let alone dealing with 150 people on a daily basis. Both Ed and I were very uncomfortable in the beginning being bosses. People project on to you all sorts of parental things. We were terribly afraid of that. They used to call us the boys. We would sit on the floor, and we would try to be democratic, but it didn't work.

Here's a perfect example: For the first month we were in production on the series, we would set appointments with people. Then disasters began to happen, and we would start getting into these situations where a script was not ready and it had to start shooting in three days, but we had a meeting with this person, and we had to keep the meeting because we had made that meeting, and it would be rude to cancel. We were basically going insane. We finally realized it can't work like this. We must have an entirely loose schedule and people have to understand that when they make an appointment with us, it can be broken at anytime. So you are forced to use power whether you want to or not when you're in that position.

It was scary to think that we had to do 22 episodes a year and that they had to have some comprehensive movement and growth and that we somehow had to service these seven main characters. You train yourself to think in a different, more long-term way. Structuring stories is the hardest thing to do anyway.

When you start developing the scripts in May, begin shooting in July, and you're not on the air until the end of September, it's tough. You don't begin to learn anything about the series objectively until you're on the air. You go on the air, and it just looks different. "Why did we do that?" By September 21 you're shooting episode eight. Or seven. There's a huge lead time. It's like turning one of the big oil tankers; it takes a long time to make a change if you realize you've done something wrong or you've miscalculated. We realized that at the beginning of thirtysomething we had overdone the verbal anxiety level of the characters. We had to endure eight airings' worth of audience complaints: "God, why are they so whiny?!"

Freudian Something

By the time we came into year four of thirtysomething, we knew we had virtually nothing left to say. We felt that we were repeating the psychological dynamics that had happened before. We were tired, and we desperately didn't want the show to be bad. I kept having this image in my mind: Willie Mays stayed on one season too long, and there was this horrific game--I think it was his last game--where he dropped a ball and later fell running from third base to home. It just broke my heart to see him not be able to do it anymore. I kept thinking, Let's quit while we can still feel good about it.

We wrote a final episode that wasn't the final episode you saw. It was the same story, but in the end of that unseen episode, Michael and Hope decide to get a divorce. She was going to move to Washington, and Michael was going to move to California. We handed in that script, and within 10 hours we received a letter from the legal department of the studio telling us that we had 36 hours to give them a new script that would allow for another season, or there would be an injunction against working for anyone else. We were interfering with their ability to do business, claimed the letter. You're not allowed to destroy someone's economic enterprise, and we were destroying their economic enterprise by saying we were going to end thirtysomething after four years.

We had sort of said to the network that we wanted to end the show. They hadn't responded one way or the other, just saying, "We're still thinking about it." So we called our lawyers, and they said you've got to change the script. So we made the changes immediately, and we had to write this letter of apology, saying, "We didn't mean it. We're sorry. Of course, we're willing to render services." We handed that letter in, wrote that episode, and the network went into its conclave. It was toward the end of the season, and they decided, mercifully, to let us go. So we didn't come back anyway. But the head of the studio was just furious at us for two years afterwards for doing that.