Cybill Disobedience (34 page)

Dear Everybody,

     
Because we waited until we found just the right casting for Dr. Dick to complete the filming of the episode that featured him (#401), we’ve had to make certain adjustments in the production schedule. If you remember, we preshot two scenes from episode #403 to make room for the two Dr. Dick scenes in #401 that we postponed. Therefore, the following pages represent the scenes from episode #403 that have not been shot, as well as the remainder of the scenes from episode #401 that have not been shot.

     
Confused? There’s more.

     
The pages that are included under separate cover contain material that needs to be shot, as well as the material that it relates to, which has been shot.

     
Still with me?

     
Robert Stack appears in one of the pickup scenes from #401 that formerly featured Dr. Dick. No, Robert Stack is not playing Dr. Dick. He is playing Robert Stack, a friend of both Maryann and Dr. Dick.

     
What’s more...

     
I ask nobody to actually understand this. Just remember, we’re having fun.

Trust me,

Bob

P.S. We never did find Dr. Dick, which turned out to be a good thing. Really.

Audiences have always enjoyed seeing me send up my image as a perfectly groomed mannequin. But the network wanted me to be more ladylike: no more burping or spitting olives back into the martini glass. The message, delivered by Bob Myer, was “Can’t Cybill leave the sloppy stuff to Drew Carey?” What were they afraid of? That my show might get ratings as high as his? My sloppy eating, talking with my mouth full, and scenes of occasional burping consistently garnered some of my strongest laughs from the studio audience and those episodes always generated the highest ratings.

That November we filmed an episode called “Grandbaby” in which my character becomes a grandmothor the second time and is saddened that her daughter’s family is moving away to Boston. I had the idea of using as a lullaby to my new granddaughter “Talk Memphis to Me,” a song Tom Adams and I had written about my missing Memphis. I wanted to expand the lullaby moment into a brief music video showing what my character hoped she’d get to do with her granddaughter in Memphis if ever given the chance to take her there. The video included shots of my granddaughter at different ages as we visited our favorite places there. It had already been well established that Cybill Sheridan was born and raised in Memphis like I was. Also, the singing of the song became a reconciliation between my character and her first husband, who was also the grandfather of the newborn girl. That impromptu duet, which reflected their history of singing together, was a creative and emotional resolution to their prior conflict in the episode.

At first, Carsey-Werner refused to finance the video and I agreed to pay for it myself, but once they saw the footage, they loved it so much I never had to pay. What they and the network wanted cut, however, was thirty-five seconds of a helicopter shot pulling back from a steamboat on the Mississippi River showing a crowd of black and white Memphians rocking out to the song. The studio and the network said that it took us too far out of the story, that nobody would understand who those extras were, even though no one had ever questioned the presence of the extras who sat in the trattoria scenes on the show every week.

This was the seventy-third episode of the show. It was the first and only time I would ever try to pull rank and go higher up to an executive at CBS. I placed a call to The Suit in hopes of getting a chance to explain why that thirty-five seconds of blacks and whites dancing together should stay in. After six hours of waiting with no word from the executive, I received a frantic message that Bob was on his way to the stage and I was not to speak with anyone about this until he had spoken to me. When he arrived there, he told me that it was no longer a creative decision. Standards and Practices, the watchdog department for the network objected to the use of all the Memphis footage, saying it was a conflict of interest (meaning it was blatantly advertising my CD,
Talk Memphis to Me
).

I asked Bob, “So you’re saying we have to cut the whole song?”

“No, no. Just any of the footage shot in Memphis.”

“That doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical if their point is conflict of interest. Then they should insist the song be cut in its entirety.”

“Well, they’re not asking for that,” Bob replied.

That’s when I realized that it was not really about creative differences or conflict of interest. It was a conflict of power. Who was going to decide what stays in or what is cut out? It was not going to be Cybill Shepherd.

There is never a doubt in any sane person’s mind about who really has the power in the television business. It is and always has been the networks. But when an issue begins as a creative one, moves on to become a racist one, and finally ends up as a conflict of interest, it does not bode well for a star/producer or her show. I knew my days were numbered at CBS. I absolutely believe that if I had simply cut the thirty-five seconds that the studio and network representatives originally had requested, the issue of conflict of interest would never have come up and the lovely, moving footage of my character taking her granddaughter to the beautiful landmarks of her youth would have been included in the episode. When I asked Bob if he thought that was the case, he said most likely it was.

“Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” I began to hear a death knell in my heart for this show to which I had given so much. I knew starting in November 1997 (less than six months before cancellation) that it was only a matter of time. Two things came of this--a constant sense of dread and a constant sense of gratitude that I was getting to do the show at all.

When I returned from the Christmas break, my line producer, Henry Lange, told me he had gone into his office over the holidays to pick up messages and been surprised to see Bob Myer’s car on the lot. He was even more surprised when he went in to say hello and was told that Bob wasn’t in his
Cybill
office, that he was working on a new Carsey-Werner production starring Damon Wyans.

I was stunned. So much for my getting sick of all his information. “I heard there was a memo about it right before the hiatus,” Henry told me.

“Have you seen this memo?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, “but I’ll see if I can get a copy.” Until Henry showed me the memo, dated the week before Christmas, I had no idea my head writer was undertaking a new assignment that would mean being gone more than half the time (while continuing to draw 100 percent of his salary). It was unsigned, and no one would ever admit having been the author. With tears streaming down my face, I confronted him, asking if he was deserting a sinking ship. He didn’t dispute the time allocation but pledged his continuing commitment to my show. The only difference, he said, was that he would take my notes from the Monday table reading of the script and give them to the writers, then go to the Wayans show leaving the writers to work out the material.

This was not a good idea. The people who created my dialogue, essentially translated my voice, needed to be hearing my notes directly from me. So I asked for several writers with whom I could communicate personally in Bob’s absence. He seemed to be okay with this and asked “Who would you like?” I chose Linda Wallem and Alan Ball, both of whom had been on the show the longest. Bob added two new writers, Kim Frieze and Alan Pourious, and the four choices felt like a good balance. The first story line they pitched involved having the gay waiter at the trattoria come out. I had pitched this story line months before to Bob and he had rejected it because he felt that gay characters coming out was happening so often on television that it was becoming a cliché. What I didn’t know was that Alan and Linda had pitched the same thing to Bob and had also been turned down. Bob bowed to the pressure of being outnumbered on this issue and we got our waiter coming-out episode after all. But when it came time to assemble the episode, it didn’t seem as good as the others. Editing had always been one of the things Bob did best. We had worked happily side by side for most of our collaboration. Perhaps in this instance he was biased by his original rejection of the material. I felt we needed the input of Alan and Linda who had actually written the episode, but Bob declared that it was unnecessary. I insisted.

I called Marcy Carsey and proposed that she keep Bob Myer on the new show full-time. We didn’t seem to need him anymore, and there was hostility all around for deserting us in the first place. I could justifiably never trust him again because he had broken a solemn promise that he would inform me about everything by not telling me he had begun working on another show.

For the past year or so Alicia Witt had been acting like a spoiled brat, so pouty and truculent that when she wanted time off to have a bump removed from her nose, Bob Myer said, “Get rid of her,” and some writers asked if they couldn’t write her out of the show. When Peter Krause was hired to play Rachel’s husband, he and Alicia became romantically involved and they barely spoke to me.

In April Carsey-Werner received a letter from Alicia’s representatives, detailing her “creative concerns” about “character development and participation” and calling me tyrannical, abusive and demeaning. But her fit of pique turned out to be fair warning for her demand that she have time off to make a film. When we granted her permission and worked around her absence, she wrote me a note, this time detailing my “generosity.” I found out later that she got a raise after complaining about me. I also found out, by reading it in the press, that Christine had asked for a secret meeting with The Suit and subsequently got a raise too.

THERE ARE TWO OR THREE DAYS OF MY LIFE I’D LIKE
to rewind and sa
y “I need another take.” One was the day that Christine Baranski walked off the set during the rehearsal for what would be the final episode of
Cybill.

I recognized the first real death rattle of the show quite circuitously when I asked CBS for a raise. Word came back from the network: “We’re already paying through the nose for that show. She doesn’t get another penny.” The rumor was that C-W had made an extraordinary deal in which they didn’t pay any money on my show until it went into syndication, making
Cybill
disproportionately expensive for CBS. Two things are curious about this deal: it was made while Peter Torrici was president of CBS Television; he later left to join Carsey-Werner. And it was made at a time when C-W had enormous leverage, having developed a new show for Bill Cosby that had to have been a useful negotiating chip with any network and, in fact, landed on CBS. Toward the end of the 1998 season, Marcy Carsey had assured me that Cybill would be picked up. “CBS doesn’t have anything else this good,” she said, “but Carsey-Werner will have to eat dirt,” meaning the company would finally have to pay its share of the bills.

Marcy suggested that the CBS brass wasn’t really watching my show, and that the two of us might take some tapes to The Suit to show him how good it was. That never came to pass, although now I’m not sure it would have made much difference.

The Emmy Awards were on CBS that year, and the second highest rated Emmy broadcast of all time had been emceed by Jason Alexander and me three years before. My manager called The Suit and said, “Cybill would love to host again.”

“Bryant Gumbel is doing it,” he said.

Okay. Bryant Gumbel had a highly promoted magazine-format show premiering on CBS. But this was the first time since my show was on the air that my own network was airing the Emmys, and I wasn’t even asked to be a presenter.

“We’re not having stars from old CBS shows, only new CBS shows,” said The Network Representative.

The network had been screwing around with our time slot almost from the start, as networks are wont to do. Twice episodes of Cybill were pulled off the air to be supplanted by a new series starring Jean Smart of
Designing Women
, but both
High Society
and
Style and Substance
were dropped after one season. There followed pilots for Faith Ford (of
Murphy Brown
) and Judith Light (of
Who’s the Boss
?), neither of which captured the public imagination. But in 1998 there had been relentless preempting: In February Cybill was replaced by both the Nagano Olympics and a new Tom Selleck show called
The Closer
. (I read about this change in the
Los Angeles Times
and a few days later on a talk show, I “accidentally” misspoke and called it
The Loser
.) Three times my show was pulled during “sweeps,” those weeks in November, February, and May when the networks schedule their most aggressive programming in an attempt to generate high Nielsen ratings and demand the best rates from advertisers. It was hardly a demonstration of support.

When it seemed manifest destiny that the series was on its way out, Bob Myer came to me and said, “Could you ask Bruce Willis to come on? It might help.” I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned, but Willis’ answer came back: too busy.

During the last hiatus week before the filming of what would be the final two episodes, Christine Baranski’s forty-eight-year-old brother dropped dead of a heart attack. She was on the East Coast when it happened, and we didn’t know if or when she was returning.

I had no intention of shutting down production. As John Wayne says in
The Searchers
, I knew as sure as the turning of the earth that this would be my last season, and for the sake of the fans I wanted to get in as many episodes as possible. It was not about money--I would have gotten paid anyway. Despite the stress and infighting,
Cybill
provided the best part, the most fun, and the biggest creative opportunity I’d ever had.