Read B004YENES8 EBOK for Free Online Page B

several movies for television, a three-hour special, a daytime soap, one-hour dramatic shows, half-hour comedy shows, and an after-school special. My mandate was to get something made, to get some show on the air.
    In those days, networks made very few of the shows they broadcast. Most were contracted for and licensed from studios or independent producers such as Spelling/Goldberg. This was all before the U.S. Congress abandoned the financial interest and syndication rules and the resultant vertical integration of the entertainment industry, which not so long ago led to Disney acquiring ABC, Viacom CBS, and GE taking over NBC and Universal. Unlike today, fortunes could then still be made by independent companies in the television business; Mace wanted a piece of that action. Our overhead was small, and we were one Waltons away from becoming a Lorimar. 3
    Despite his lofty ambitions, Mace was, in my view, a bit of a dilettante. He attended a total of three network meetings in the two and a half years we were together. At the last of these he arrived late; his avowed purpose was to take pictures of the auspicious moment when Brandon Stoddard gave us a go to film our miniseries of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden .
    The previous meeting had been in Jonathan Axelrod’s office at a critical moment with our one-hour dramatic series pilot American Dream . There he made but one single statement. I was in a battle royal for the life of my favorite project of all time. We were on our third major rewrite. While Avedon had taken a much-needed vacation, I had teamed Corday with comedy writer Ken Hecht to create this show when it was to be developed as a half-hour comedy. Now we were attempting to go forward as a dramatic series, which had brought about substantial changes in format, along with changes in the creative team. I had followed network executive Jonathan Axelrod’s instructions, and now the pilot script was in deep trouble. I was determined to turn things around at this meeting, to go the way I wanted to go in the first place: to hire the writer I had initially fought for in vain. Finally, I wanted to undo yet another piece of Axelrod meddling by resetting the locale. The network executive had insisted on New York City as the backdrop, and I wanted to return the concept to its original locale: Los Angeles.
    Axelrod had been through a rough afternoon. Our meeting with him, as luck would have it, had been scheduled right behind one with the irrepressible David Gerber. “The Gerb” was one of the best salesmen in the business. His vocabulary ranged from the colorful to the fanciful. (I think he actually made up words and phrases as he went along, but who could know? That would require actually being able to keep up, not only with the syntax of what was being said, but the manic delivery as well.) Axelrod, the network executive on the receiving end of this verbal onslaught, was a beaten man before I even entered the room. Thanks to Gerber wearing out the exec about some project of his own, I was winning point after point on American Dream .
    OK, go back to the original concept. OK, get rid of the writer they had foisted on me. OK, hire Ronald M. Cohen to rewrite the fine original (but too soft) script by Barbara Corday and Ken Hecht. The only point that remained was locale. American Dream was my story. The kids were my kids. The hero of this piece was me. I wanted it set in Los Angeles. After all, it was conceived by me, an L.A. native, while trying to find an alternate route to the Coliseum to watch a USC football game. Axelrod wanted the same story set in the East—his place of origin. This was an urban tale, and to Axelrod urban meant the vertical landscape of an eastern city, not the low-profiled megalopolis that dominates the West Coast.
    It was the only issue unresolved between us; I had won everything else. I didn’t want to give in on this. Not only did I have passion and creativity on my side, I had economics as well.