from Entertainment Weekly, 5/00
As Chandler Bing might say: Could they *be* any richer? A play-by-play account of the Friends' less than amicable, down-to-wire, multimillion-dollar deal.
In the end, it came down to one simple phone call. The agents had had their say. The NBC suits had thrown their last hardball. The Warner Bros. brass had grown weary of scribbling zeros. Now it was time for Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, Courteney Cox Arquette, and Matt LeBlanc to make the final decision: Would they still be Friends? Like a Ma Bell-sponsored version of a Central Perk bull session, the six-pack convened around 1:30 a.m. Eastern standard time on May 14 via conference call to ponder the offer - $750,000 each per episode plus more profit sharing (a sizable jump from their current salary of $125,000 but still less than their $1 million asking price) for two more years. A thumbs-up would mean 48 more episoes of TV's top-rated comedy. Thumbs down would mark the end of Must See TV as we know it. Either way, one big question hovered over the negotiations: How in the heck did things get to this point?
JULY 1999 Two months after the fifth season of Friends wraps (averaging 23.5 million viewers), a clandestine meeting among the legions of agents, managers, and lawyers who represent the series' six actors is under way. Topic A: scoring raises for their ultra-successful but comparatively underpaid clients (don't forget, in 1998 Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser each nabbed $1 million per episode for the fading Mad About You, for crying out loud). Topic B: Kudrow. Specifically, how the actress had managed to persuade her five comrades to postpone renegotiations on their contracts until its expiration in May 2000 (when NBC would be desperate to announce another year of Friends). The problem was, the other actors' reps weren't exactly psyched about Kudrow's strategy. "Lisa's thinking that she's gonna have more leverage one year at a time," says one agent. "But why torture the network and the studio and get into a practical deal? It didn't make any sense. We got nowhere. It was a hostile meeting." Bottom line: Kudrow's game plan prevails.
SEPTEMBER 1999 The sixth season begins and Warner Bros. TV, the show's studio, is frustrated. It's been eager to secure a Friends future, even if it means signing only four of the actors. "We would've preferred to have done the deal early, but there wasn't an opportunity for the cast to be motivated," says Bruce Rosenblum, Warner exec VP of television. "Our sense was, until the cast recognized this was the final hour, they were not going to be able to successfully conclude the negotiation." Cut to...
APRIL 2000 Just as LeBlanc's struggling-actor alter ego Joey scores a plm role in a TV series called Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E., LeBlanc and his real-life cohorts are finally ready to hash out their own TV futures. Sticking to the admirable all-for-one, one-for-all approach, the actors' agents choose talent manager Sandy Wernick of Basic Entertainment (which reps Cox Arquette and Aniston) to speak on their behalf. Their request: one more year and a per-episode salary of $1 million each. (The sextet don't haggle over scheduling perks, since they already average a four-day workweek - two of which feature four-hour days. In fact, the production schedule is so abbreviated that sometimes "the actors don't know their lines," says a source.) The studio counters with $600,000 and episode for two years. The parties quickly reach a stalemate - the stars won't budge on their price. "It was like we were negotiating with ourselves," recalls one studio exec.
APRIL 14 The Friends wrap their season without a contract or a resolution to the series. It's clear by the finale how split the actors' priorites are: Cox Arquette, Schwimmer, and Aniston are already off working on other projects, making production on the hour-long finale much more labor-intensive (Schwimmer tapes his scenes a week ahead of schedule because he'll be otherwise booked during Friends' final days of production). "It never went into our heads until the season was over that there was this distinct possibility that maybe it wouldn't happen," says exec producer Kevin Bright. "Fortunately, we had a great season-ending episode taht might feel like a little closure. Still, that's not the way we wanted to end the series."
EARLY MAY NBC is bracing for the worst. In preparation for the annual trek to New York - when all six nets announce their fall schedules to advertisers - the Peacock's publicity department drafts press releases declaring the show's demise. Even a huge mural featuring the net's most popular actors had to be printed without the sexy sextet. "We couldn't take the chance," says one flack. Meanwhile, Warner is figuring out ways to meet the salary demands: The studio warns NBC it will have to pay a higher per-episode fee (just shy of $6 million, up from $5 million), while executive producers Bright, Marta Kauffman, and David Crane will need to sign over some of their back-end profit sharing to the show's stars.
MAY 12 NBC issues a Sunday-at-noon deadline to close a deal, and scuries to retool the Friends season-finale promos as America's last chance to tune in. "We took s*** for not promoting George Clooney's appearance on ER a couple days earlier," says an insider. "We weren't going to squander the opportunity of having three highly rated NBA play-off games and not run Friends promos." How resigned was NBC to losing the sitcom? "One of the things you have to live with when you're at a network is that you lsoe shows," says West Coast prez Scott Sassa. "They come and go. While we would have been disappointed, we would have moved on. That's the nature of the beast."
MAY 14, 1:30 A.M. After Warner ups the profit-sharing percentage, the offer now stands at roughly $20 million each annually - or $240 million total over two years). Now coems that pivotal call ("I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall," admits Bright). So what was said during the telltale call? Although the six actors - who are remaining publicly mum - were teh only ones privy to the confab, the overriding consensus of sources says that it came down to Aniston, Cox Arquette, Perry, and LeBlanc persuading Kudrow and Schwimmer (who, at the last minute, had either gotten jitters about kissing a full-time film career goodbye or simply wanted more dough) to stay on board. This wasn't the first time Schwimmer flip-flopped about staying put: He was also reportedly the last to sign on during the cast's 1996 salary squabble. Apparently, all this last-minute hand-wringing didn't sit well with the other negotiators. "It's an asinine time to decide whether to do something," says a source. "They've known about it for a year, and the night before they're deciding whether they want to stay? Lisa makes around $1.7 million a movie, and God knows what after [box office dud] Hanging Up. She'd have to make over 20 movies to break even. Here she'd work for two years on a show that's hot, the schedule's easy, and she wouldn't have to work the rest the rest of her life."
MAY 14, 3 A.M. Basic's Wernick notifies Warner that the actors are ready to sign. And there is a sigh of relief: "Because the deal came down in the last hour, you open yourself up to the risk that emotions take over rather than fortunate that rational judgment carried the day and everyone came away feeling like they made a very good two years, but it was really about the past six years, and what this cast has meant to this show. Our feeling is that the actors got everything they deserved. They're worth every penny."
MAY 15 Sure, Friends is the No. 1 comedy, but it's NBC that has the last laugh. As part of the net's fall schedule unveiling, Sassa introduces the six people instrumental in closing the deal: Enter a half-dozen briefcase-toting actors posing as the Friends' lawyers. As the first five playfully march across the stage, the sixth lags behind doing flips. Quips Sassa: "That last one is Schwimmer's attorney."
By Lynette Rice
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