Take 132 - Showrunner Frank Cardea, NCIS, Crazy Like a Fox, Shogun

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with jobs that we didn't get, projects that we thought were gonna go for shore, dozens of unproduced scripts literature.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

All of us are running into both major and minor failures in every single day. This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is and I fucking lost it.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

That's it for me. I think I want to shot what I feel like that will be.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

And I am your still in the entertainment business, co-host Noah Epsilon. For this week's podcast, I'm thrilled to introduce TV writer and showrunner Frank Cardia to the podcast. Frank has written and produced numerous TV shows and TV movies, including Bring It Back Alive, Crazy Like a Fox, the original Shogun miniseries, The Cosby Mysteries Hack, and over 400 episodes of NCIS, where he and his writing partner eventually rose up to showrunners. Welcome, Frank.

SPEAKER_03 1:54

Good morning. So this is one of those tricky ones where I'm not quite sure where to start because you seem to have 400 episodes of television plus all the other shows, it's quite a lot. Um, so obviously, we we want to try and find out about the rejection failure adversity stuff. But I'm I think I'm just gonna start with NCIS and maybe do a positive start just because obviously Noah worked on that show as well, and we've had we've had showrunners from NCIS on before. So, Frank, tell me about how NCIS began for you and whether you realized it, how quickly it was that you realized it would end up as I think the largest franchise in television.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Well, you know what? You you're starting at the end of our careers. Um by the time uh Shogun uh uh NCIS came into our lives, we were older writers, senior writers at the time. We're at that point in our career where we were no longer uh the hot pilot writers and we weren't under an overall deal. And we're helping a friend. Um Bobby Singer had a show called Hack, really a great show that should have lasted a lot longer than it did. And um, it was um Andre Brower and uh David Morris, great show. And um we got a call from uh a friend, Gil Grant, who was uh the head writer at NCIS. They were they just started, they were shooting episode four or five at the time, and um he said, I just got off the phone with CBS and uh Paramount, uh, and both shows, Hack and NCIS, were both Paramount CBS shows, and they said, We're in big trouble, and we asked CBS if we could borrow you to write a script because we have nothing to shoot next week. And uh, you know, if you have the time, we're gonna fax. Remember faxes because that's pre-emails. They faxed us a paragraph of a concept of an episode. It was like three lines. And my partner George and I read it and we said, God, this doesn't seem to make any sense. So about a half hour later, we sent them back another paragraph that said, We think we could do an episode based on this, and they said, start writing. And we said, Well, what's the time frame? They said, Well, we're in the fourth day of a seventh-day prep on the episode, and all we have is that paragraph. So uh it was a long weekend, and uh the day of the production meeting, which is the day before they start shooting, we had three acts. Um and we uh finished writing that script, and they they CBS came to us and said, Would you mind being on both shows at the same time? Working on hack and NCIS together. Uh and we did that for a few well a few months, and then hack got canceled. And they came to us and said, Would you consider going on um NCIS full time? This was still season one. So our first episode, we weren't there from day one, but we started episode seven, it was our our first episode. And um we ended up with a three-year, they signed us to a three-year deal. At that point, we you know, we had been showrunners for 20 plus years more. And uh the title that we were given was Consulting Producers. Uh, it's sort of a a title of someone who comes in to you know help other people out, I guess. And uh we did that for three years, wrote about 15 or 16 episodes in the three years. Uh, and it was a great job. It was uh we didn't have any of the um headaches of showrunning, which we can get into later on, what that entails. It's a full-time, full-time job, even even when you're writing with a partner. And at the end of the third season, um the creator of the show was to say, put it mildly, was a difficult person to work with. And uh he was really tough on all the young writers, and we we just hated what was going on. And we informed them at the end of the three years that we weren't coming back, and uh we were told by this person, you're coming back because I own you. And we were like, No, I don't think so. And and we left, and so we were not there for season four, was the hole in our NCS career, and during that year that we were going, George and I wrote a feature that got shot, and we were in New Zealand doing the feature, and um we got a text from Mark Harmon, the star of the show, saying, Hey guys, what are you up to? Uh the guy you had a problem with is no longer here. The network let the creator of the show go. Uh, and he said, When you get back, could we have coffee? And uh about a month later, we were having coffee with Mark, and uh he said they've brought in a new showrunner, and I don't know him. And I just we said, we don't want to run the show. We're you know, it's a young person's job. At that point, I was in my mid-50s. George was in his late 50s. Uh, we said, you know, we love writing, we love writing three or four episodes a year, five episodes, producing those episodes. And Mark said, I just want you to be here in case it falls apart to take over. So we came back in season five. We then became co-EPs, I guess was the title they gave us. And we had a great job for uh several years. Uh, we got to mentor a bunch of young writers and uh met a lot of great people. Uh the show really settled down and in season six became a huge hit, and for the first time became the number one show, sort of leapfrogged over CSI and became the number one show on television. And um a young guy about 20 years younger than us was brought in to run the show, a guy named Gary Glassberg, who was a great guy. And unfortunately, Gary uh went to sleep one night and didn't wake up and uh died of a heart attack. And uh we got a call from the network saying you gotta take over. Um, and that's when we start running the show, and we did for several years. Then George uh George retired four years before me. He was George's older than I was, and so I was here by myself for the last four years, and uh it was an incredible experience. Um, I mean, to produce, we were there for almost 400 and I forget 30 something episodes, maybe. They're approaching 500 now. And the NCIS Universe, which I'm sure Noah's aware of, uh recently had a milestone of a thousand episodes for the franchise. Um I had a party that I was invited to. Um, but it was a unique experience in the sense that uh almost till the day I left it. Um I left when Mark Harman left. We decided to leave together. Uh and um at that point, a lot of the department heads and people were there from day one. It was it was truly a family. And uh Mark was the the head of that family, and he's a great, uh, great leader and uh very involved, more than just an actor. He, you know, if there was a seven o'clock call, he was there at 6:30 every morning. And he and I had similar work ethics. We had breakfast together almost every morning at 6:30, quarter to seven, and we'd go off to start our day. Um and it really we had people who met on the show, got married, had kids, and those kids are in college now. It was just insane uh to be together for that many years. Um but uh it it it changed for me when George, George's wife was not well, and uh he really needed to be home. And um it wasn't as much fun after after having worked for 40 plus years together. Uh a lot of the joy had gone out of it for me. So I I lasted three or four years, but uh the time was time was right.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

So I I mean, as somebody I mean, listeners of the podcast know that I didn't have 20 years on NCIS, but I had uh three lovely years on NCS Hawai, and I can really go into the weeds on that with you at some point because it's was such an interesting experience, and obviously you had such a profound experience for 20 years. But um, let's back up a little bit because what I'm getting out of this conversation early is I I'm thinking a relatively unique relationship with your co-writer and writing partner because I know a ton of uh writing teams, and most don't survive uh the journey, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:52

At some point, we had a unique, I think we had I think we had a unique partnership. Maybe maybe I'll tell you how we got together.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

And that's yeah, that's where I was going. I'm really curious about that in your first well, I will confess something.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

I wasn't always a writer. Uh, I started out as a financial executive. Uh I uh right out of college, I went to work for one of the big accounting firms in New York City, um, and did that for three or four years and I given a great opportunity. They had a client uh overseas that required an American staff. So I got to commute between New York and the and the Middle East for uh a couple years, which is a great experience. And then they came, I got a promotion, they stuck me behind a desk in New York and I hated it, and I left. My parents thought I was a complete bum. Uh and when I came back after spent two years traveling, when I came back, I um went to work for Gulf and Western, the company of the owned Paramount. And uh um one of the companies they they there's a man behind the name of Arthur Barron, who was the CFO at Paramount Pictures, who I've always considered to be my mentor. Uh and Arthur approached Gulf and Western. They had some problems on the West Coast in the feature division. They had made a movie called The Great Gatsby. I don't know if you remember that with uh uh uh Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. And three years after its release, they realized that the picture costs twice as much as they thought it costs. And the chairman of the board of Gulf and Western exploded and said, How could this happen? And they so art came to me and said, We want you to go out to the West Coast, come to work for Paramount, leave Gulf and Western, and head up production finance, the production side of accounting. Uh, because we have to we want someone who knows nothing about the business, who will look at it with a fresh eye. So I came out and did that for a while, and it was a magical time at Paramount. Um and my my agreement with Art was, yeah, I'll do that. But I, you know, if you're gonna work for a company that makes widgets, before you can set up an accounting system for widgets, you have to know how to make a widget. I have to learn how to make a movie. And he said, You have carte blanche, you can talk to anybody you want to talk to, go anywhere you want to go. It was like a graduate course. Um, it was Chinatown, had just been released. Um, Godfather 2 was in Godfather 2 was the first thing I worked on. Um, it was all the major directors in Hollywood were working on the lot was magical. It was uh Slessinger was doing Day of the Locust and Marathon Man. Uh Ily Kazan was doing The Last Tycoon with De Niro. Uh Brooks was there doing Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Warren Beatty and Buck Henry were doing Heaven Can Wait. It was a truly an amazing place to be and to learn the business. And I got exposed to all these people. I was working for the legendary Bob Evans at the time. And after a couple of years, they asked me to take over uh television division. And the television, paramount those days in television was um Happy Days, Laverne Shirley, all the Gary Marshall shows, Taxi Cheers. The law, and the law was a very small community. You knew everybody, it was it was a great place to be. And I decided at that point I wanted to really make movies and not account for the making of the movies. And uh they rewarded me with a one-year development deal as a producer, but I had no credits, nothing. And uh I got put on a mini-series uh as the associate producer uh called Washington Behind Closed Doors. It was Jason Robarts, Cliff Robertson, and um uh got multiple Emmy nominations, and I was just the associate producer, but the producer got sick in the middle of the picture, and it was sort of a battlefield promotion. And um, at the end of that, they said, All right, you're ready to go out on your own. And we said that Star Wars had just been released. We're talking like 1978 at this point, and every studio was trying to do their version of a TV version of you know, some sci-fi. We love to copy the features, I guess. We did in those days. And there was this hot young sci-fi writer named George Skank. George was complete opposite of me. I grew up in a middle-class Connecticut family. George was Hollywood royalty, third generation. His father produced 90 movies, his great uncles were the founders of the business. Um, Joe Skank and Nick Skank at MGM at 20th Century Fox. Wow. And so Paramount had a title called uh War of the Worlds. They said, We're gonna redevelop it. CBS ordered, they were trying to save money, I guess. They said, We're only gonna order the script and a presentation really you're gonna shoot part of the script and six backup scripts. So they they asked me to meet this young guy, George Stank, for lunch. He just came off of Future World. He did the sequel to the Crichton West World. And we met at Musso Frank in Hollywood for lunch. And little did we know that would be the first of over 10,000 lunches that we've eventually figured out we'd had over 44 years. Uh and we just hit it off. And the pilot the pilot didn't get picked up. And this is what you know, I guess we're talking about rejection. This was so the ironic part of this wonderful relationship that developed was on the first project we did for the world, so we got fired. Uh we were we did this. George wrote the script, and we did this 15-minute presentation, and the studio head of Paramount at the time said, I do, you know, I I put I was in the business of putting teams together. You guys are the best team I ever saw. And when CBS didn't like what they saw, we got fired. Uh and uh but George and I still we while we were waiting to hear if the pilot was going to be picked up, we were kicking ideas around. It came up with some idea for a feature. And uh ironically, the head of Paramount who fired me and George called me about a month later and said, We've got this mini-series in Japan called Shogun. And Eric Burkovici, who wrote the first series, I had mini-series, I'd been on here uh washing behind closed doors, was in Japan writing his final draft. The whole thing was shot in Japan. And he realized that the thing was in trouble, and he said, Um I really need help over here. Can Frank come produce this with me? And uh at first, Paramount said, you know, he has no credits, he was an associate producer on one thing, he just did a failed pilot, and Eric stuck up for me. And uh the so the president of Paramount Television said to me, Okay, here's the deal you go over. And I said, Okay, under one condition, um, I want final word, I want final control. He said, Who the fuck do you think you are? He said, No, he hung up the phone. He called me the next day and he said, Listen, we really need somebody with your financial background. It's 10,000 miles away, it's out of control. We want you to really go over there and handle the money ends of it end of it. And I said, Fine, total creative control. Hung up the phone, fuck you. That went on for seven days, and finally uh on day eight, he said, Okay, asshole, you know, here's your plane tickets. And I ended up spending 10 months in Japan. But while I was gone, George sold one of the feature ideas we had. He was having lunch with a guy named Michael Zimberg. And uh he pitched this idea. It was called Sawyer and Finn. It uh Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry, Finn grow up. And our idea was Warren Beatty and uh Jack Nicholson to play Tom and Huck. And Michael said at that point the networks were looking for um there was a thing called the family hour. Everybody had to develop shows for seven o'clock Sunday night. And Vinberg, who was then a VP of comedy at uh NBC, said, George, hey, if you want to do this, this would be a great uh seven o'clock Sunday night show. So George called me, I woke me up one night in the middle of the night in Japan and said, We have a pilot at NBC. Um, if you want it. So we said, absolutely. And I said, he said, but we need to lay it off in the studio. And I said, anywhere but Paramount, because I had no visibility outside, nobody out in the business knew me outside of people at Paramount. So George uh went to Columbia. When I got back, George started writing the script while I was gone. And this is where uh George was an amazing guy, he really was. Um I started helping him, I was giving him notes as a producer on the script because the original concept was George is gonna write the script, and I was gonna be one of the producers with him. And George one day looked at me and said, You know, you're writing as much of this as I am, put your name on it. And I said, Well, you know, I'm not a writer. And he said, Yes, you are. And that was the beginning of the writing partnership. Um, I don't think anybody on NCIS, unless they watched this, ever knew that my background was in finance. And we became a writing team after that. Um produced this wonderful pilot, and this is another part where rejection and uh disappointment and failure comes into uh uh into how we deal with all that. Um we produced this pilot for Columbia Pictures, which later became Sony and NBC. Um and in those days they'd have they would have the upfronts in New York City, and it'd be a big deal. And we got a call from uh Michael Zimberg, said, You're on the schedule, congratulations. Sunday night, seven o'clock. Get on a plane, you want to be here for all the fun. So uh we were scheduled to fly out that afternoon. The announcement was going to be made the next day. And literally, as we were leaving for the airport, Michael called and said, Uh, don't come. We said, What happened? He said, I can't get into it right now, but you guys really got screwed. And uh what happened was the president of Columbia and the president of NBC, who at the time was the infamous Freddie Silverman, got into an argument over another project, not ours. They were going to pick up three Columbia pilots that year. And the morning before the announcement, they had this big magnetic board with all the shows on it. Freddie walked into the room and pulled the three Columbia shows down, dropped them in a waste paper basket, and said, We're starting over. I'm not buying anything from them. So, as a result of that, when the president of Columbia got back from New York, he said, I screwed you guys. He gave us a three year very lucrative development. Of a deal because he felt guilty. And NBC felt guilty, and they gave us another pilot. And that was really the beginning of the Skank Cordilla life. And uh and George, as I said, was the most upbeat in a relationship. Uh, you know, it's good cop, bad cop, there's you know, downer, upper. I I was the guy who was always like, oh my god, what are we gonna do? This is horrible. The show got canceled. And George would go, this is great, it's a great opportunity for us. Remember that script we wanted to write? Now we got plenty of time, we can do it. I mean, there's times you wanted to slap them, but it it uh it really worked. And um we sat in a room together for 44 years. We wrote in the same room, fought over every word, and had a it was a great ride. Um, I don't know if you know George passed away this pet this this year in August.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

I can see the love in your eyes as you speak about him, and and uh we just to just so you know, you see Dan and I typing every now and then some of how the sausages are made of this podcast. We're writing, we love this great story, great story. You really are getting to the heart of what we like to talk about here. But can we I wanna I want to press down a little bit because the um you know you've been in Hollywood through so much of it, and later on I think I want to talk about the differences between Hollywood today and Hollywood, you know, back then where it was so exciting. But like what what was the what was the worst moment for you and your partner? Not not you know fighting with each other necessarily, but you know, fighting against the machine or losing something or going, what you know, taking out those golf clubs that are behind you and going, like, we're just we're just gonna play golf for a month. I'm I'm giving up on it.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

You know, the the the the great the safety net for us in those days, and we spent many years after that first development. We ended up at Columbia for like six years, and then Crazy Like a Fox was a huge hit its first two years, and then got canceled. It was like things that wouldn't happen today at television, I don't think. And I think that was the real low point for us uh when Crazy Like a Fox got canceled. We were a top 10 show our first year, but you know, you always had the development deal to fall back on. You had this overall deal. You were being paid, you were being paid a lot more when they had a show on the air, but you had this sort of safety net. And George and I used to refer to it was like the win-win situation, because if the show got canceled, we got our lives back because showrunning, especially we were good, we were hands-on showrunners. We got we got involved in every aspect of it. We could get into what the day of a the life of a showrunner is. It's you know, it's it's a 14-hour day if you're lucky. Um, and it's great when you have a partner because uh, you know, on days you don't want to be in the editing room, you know, you could say, why don't you go handle this? Or on days when somebody didn't want to go to casting, the other one would handle it. But anyway, uh I think that was the low first because we had created something we were really proud of. It was a top 10 show for the first year, and then it was the beginning of the end of network television, and they start, they said, We're gonna use you to establish a Thursday night. And they took us off of Sunday nights, where we were a highly rated show, and the second and going into the third year, we had seven time slots. People thought the show was canceled, they couldn't find it. And the day we got the call saying it's off the air was like, you know, my God, what do you have to do to get a hit? Uh and it was an ironic twist. Um, about six months after it was canceled, we got a call from uh the president of CBS saying, We think we made a mistake. And would you guys consider doing a two-hour movie version uh of Crazy Like a Fox? And Jack Warden, I don't know if you remember Jack Warden, great, great character actor, was the start of it. And we called Jack, and Jack said, Yeah, I I I I consider doing that. He said, But you know what? Let's do it under our terms. Uh he said, I love England, let's shoot it in England. So we we called CBS back and said, Okay, yeah, we'll do it, but we've got to shoot it in England. They said, Why? We said, We'll come up with a reason. It's just gonna be a two-hour movie. Uh and then this uh the the craziness of the business. Um the president of Columbia Television at that point was a guy named Herman Rush, a wonderful guy. And Herman uh had inherited us and Crazy Like a Fox when he got there. And we had three, you know, we're around for like three years and had these huge deficits. Shows the way the business used to work in those days, is they would run up these huge deficits. They would cost them much more to make the show than the network was paying them. And the big payday was when you got into syndication. Well, Crazy Like a Fox wasn't a syndication. He had this huge deficit on the books, and he he didn't want to have to write it off to his corporate bosses. Uh, and he said to us, if you guys do this TV movie, I can tell them it's live again and it may get picked up, and I don't have to write it off. So he was a big fan of the movie. And then the the the movie of the weak people at CBS said, you know, we it's this is a fail series. We don't want to do it. Herman made this a deal. He called us up and said, it's Greenlit, you gotta go. He said, but here's the deal CBS gets to air the rough cut. And if they don't like it, they don't have to pay for it. George and I said, that is the stupidest deal we've ever heard. If the network is given this opportunity on 90% of what they develop, they wouldn't buy it, they wouldn't pay for it. And he said, Well, you know, uh you've got carte blanche because the the movie people said this really isn't a TV movie, it's a failed series. And the series development people said, we don't want to redevelop an old show. So we got to go off to England knowing that we'd be making a movie that maybe would never air, but we said we'll do it on our terms. And it was a great experience because we had no network involvement. We had this wonderful time. It was uh we were shooting it in the winter, and as you know, Dan, it gets dark really early. And it uh again, again, I mean it gets light late and dark early. So we had these really we had 33 days to shoot a two-hour movie, and we came back, and the day we went to air it, we showed it to the head of the movie division at uh CBS, the MO used to be called the MOW, Movies of the Week. And he just is he said, Of course we're gonna air this. It turned out to be the highest-rated movie in television that year. We got like a 40 share, which is, you know, these days. And then we got a call from and he said, Darius, we're gonna go, we're back on the air. This is gonna be great. And then the the new, while we were shooting it, there was a change of regimes at CBS, and Kimball Masters became the president of CBS television. It was a friend of ours, and Kim called us and said, Guys, I can't pick the show up. He said, I inherited it. The word he used was ossified, an ossified network. I've got, I've inherited Barnard Use and uh sitcom. He's like 80 years old, and I've got a show called Oldest Rookie Detective or something, and uh the Dick Van Dyke show had just been picked up, and he said, I can't put another 75-year-old on the air. He said, But let's do a series of movies. We'll do you know, one or two a year, crazy like Fox. And we just we talked to Jack Warden about it. And at that point, we were still other studios were trying to get us to come over to them. And um we made the deal of our lifetime, which turned out to be a nightmare. But uh, we left Columbia, went to MGM for a feature and TV deal. We had two separate deals, and uh so we never and Jack said, you know, the next movie is not gonna be the highest-rated movie of the year again. Let's you know, let's let's let's go out on a high. So it was it was the low point of our life and turned out to be one of the high points of our life. So I guess the lesson is stick with it.

SPEAKER_03 30:04

Amazing. Um, Frank, a question. You have obviously had one of the longest tenures at the top in an industry where people, it's a very difficult industry to stay at the top, and you've managed it for so long. There's gonna be two parts to this question. You can probably guess the second part. What is the thing you think that you are particularly good at that has allowed you to be able to do this?

SPEAKER_00 30:34

I think we were realists. We realized you go through different phases of your career. So for a while, we were the new kids on the block, and then we became the really solid pilot. We did George and I did like six pilots scripts that all went to film, which was a crazy track record. Because in those days the networks would do 40 pilots and shoot seven or eight of them. So to get that many in a row to go to film, and five of them went to series. I was a great track record. But then, you know, we got to be in our 40s and 50s, and a lot of people would just say, Well, you know, we had our run and get the golf clubs out and go play golf. And then, you know, we became, we went to the phase, we realized that was not who we were anymore. And we still we enjoyed working so much, we weren't ready to retire. And you know, you get into that, you know. I I guess I don't know if it's still true. They used to consider the over 40 the protected class in the writer's skills. You know, you know, writers over 40 really don't work. And suddenly you're pitching to you know, young kids, the network and stuff, and we got into the period, everything always evolves into a sports analogy. Uh in baseball, we became like the long distance relievers. So someone would sell a show, and you know, six or seven episodes into it, the network would realize, oh my God, this uh 27-year-old we just bought the show from doesn't know what he's doing, and he needs lots of help. And they'd call the bullpen and the old season showrunners would be called in. And you know, a lot of people we we didn't uh you know, we stepped over our egos. We knew who we were at that. We were, you know, still considered strong showrunner writers. And we were willing to come in and and help somebody and take over, or some cases, just take over a show. And we did that for a few years. We did, you know, we came in and took over our several shows. That's how we got the Cosby Mysteries, uh, which was a strange, unique period. But anyway, so we were we we stuck around long enough to do that. And then we got on this crazy, this NCIS crazy show that went on forever, and we did 14, 13 or 14 years as like the emeritus writers. We eventually got executive producer credit. And when when Gary passed away, and they said, you gotta, you know, we were saying, why would we want to do this? Why do we want to, you know, this is a young person's job. And we were at that point, you know, well into our our set our 60s. And George, George is in his late 60s. I was in my early 70s when we took over NCIS. And uh, so I think that the answer is we were willing to adapt. We were willing to uh, you know, and then in in those dark periods, we sold a couple of movies, we sold a, you know, did a couple of movies of the week. Uh, we had a couple of pilots, one of the strangest pilots we ever had, a script that never got shot, I think, is one of the best show shows where we were, and Michael Zinberg came into our lives again. Michael at this point was president of NBC Productions, and we pitched him a show called Eagle Eyes, a pilot, and he bought it. And uh, this is a period where we weren't under an overhaul, we were sort of just picking up jobs as we can get them. And you have that day where you go into uh, you know, they've signed off on the concept of the show, but you have to go in and pitch the story for the pilot episode. And it's an early morning meeting, we show up at Michael's office at Burbank, and he said, Listen, guys, um, we're we're gonna get to this meeting eventually. Uh, will you pick me the story? I'm sure you guys came up with a great story. But he said, I have a favor to ask. Could you go home and pack a bag? Get some clothes. Uh, and uh, I've got us all booked on a flight to New York this afternoon. And there's a show called The Cosby Mysteries. It's supposed to be a comedy mystery, it's not working. Bill, Bill Cosby is not happy. We told him about you guys. He wants to meet you tonight. So we went from a pitch meeting to uh an airplane ride to ending up at the Cosby Mansion in New York until 4 a.m. in the morning. And uh we left there. Uh got to go back home. I stayed, George went back home. Um we were told we there were half this was like just before Christmas. It was there were the show was shutting down. It was the last day before the the show shut down for Christmas, the mystery show. And uh so that's how we end, and we were told going in, we don't care if the show gets picked up. We just want you to, we know you guys will make a good show, and you guys can handle stars. And we want Cosby to be happy because we want his next comedy. And so we ended up finishing out that year in New York. Tagged, and we both had I had little kids at the time. George had kids in high school and college, I think. And um we were told you don't have to move to New York, one of you has to be there at all times. And we literally tagged him. So I'd be in New York, and when things got crazy, I'd call George and said, You're up. And he would get on a plane, and we'd spend like two days together, and I'd go back to the writing staff in LA, and he'd go back to deal with the craziness on the show. But uh, and we realized after we were there a week that he was Cosby was never gonna do another show with NBC. He didn't like the people, and so anyway, and we never got to shoot the uh the pilot that we really loved.

SPEAKER_03 36:16

We did write it, but uh um extraordinary answer. So um obviously this well, whatever the answer to this question is, it kind of held you back very much. But what's the thing you're probably worst at, do you think, in uh in the show running skill set, which is a big and complicated one?

SPEAKER_00 36:41

What's the thing I am worse at?

SPEAKER_03 36:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Writing. You know, without George was that George loved writing. I am the most distracted writer in the world. Uh you know, the phone would ring and oh, I better run down to the set. You know, George is okay. George would just keep me focused. And uh, we did, we literally would write every word together. Uh, some writing teams will, you know, break a story and take scenes. My I got more involved as a writer as you know, we started as we talked about in the in the late seven early 80s, it's when we really became a team. We were still writing on typewriters. And then when computers, George, as brilliant as he was, was a Luddite when it came to computers. And and so as we started, I remember our first one of our overall deals at Warner Brothers is when really people start writing on you know computers. And um I sort of start getting in the driver's seat uh because George is a great typist, and I would be dictating and he would be telling me, oh no, and he'd write what he wanted to write. But then what you know, you know, scripts are not as we all know, we're not written, they're not written, they're rewritten. And so as we I would, you know, George would put down like the first pass on a scene, and then I would jump in the seat because I could control the computer better than he could, and I wouldn't scream at the screen and throw stuff. And uh, so I got more, but but writing to me was always painful for George, it was he was at his hat, he was his happiest. And uh, but I I I think that there, you know, as a showrunner, you're involved, and we were very always very involved in every aspect of the show. We were very much hands-on, hands-on showrunners. Uh and uh so it's great to have a team because I don't know how one person would do it if they were involved. A lot of people hire a strong uh line producer and leave a lot of the production. And on NCIS, we had the best line producer I ever worked with, a guy named Mark Orwood. And uh made my especially when I was, you know, after George left, made my life very simple. But uh by taking all that, you know, all the problems would happen and disappear before I even found out about it, you know. But uh you still spend, you know, hours a day in production meetings, uh editing is a huge part of your life. And one of my one of my favorites. It's like the last, as a writer, it's the last time you, you know, get to save a script or save a show, or so you'd spend, you know, and a lot of times, and if you're also writing episodes, George and I, I don't know what the actual count was. I think we wrote 40-something originals, maybe close to 50 on NCS, and rewrote you know, 100 more. Um yeah, you know, you always got to write when everybody else went home. So, you know, the the crew would wrap at seven o'clock and we'd spend there, you know, we'd be a little 10 trying to get a script ready that we were writing, or the last polish on the script.

unknown 39:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 39:49

Or you know, we've done um 130 episodes, and one of the things, key things that I've learned over that time for sure is what you are, you know, talking about here is that showrunning is not a one-person job. Um, it's definitely you know a two or sometimes three-person job. We had three showrunners on NCIS Hawaii, and that was helpful to alleviate some of the work. But this is leaning into this a question I have for you, which is about you and your partnership. When George retired, and now it's you, and I I have a question about your process because you mentioned that your writing was the hardest thing for you. So you have to do this by yourself now.

SPEAKER_00 40:28

What was that first year like without you know the the full was I I miss George, but uh and we convinced George, even though he was gonna be home to write a script. Okay, and we would send him scripts and he would read them. And so he he had like a step-down, you know, consulting deal. And um, and I did the same thing when I left. CPS said to me, Why don't you stick around for another year? So even the year after I left, I still read scripts, gave notes that everybody they used to live in fear of my notes and then they ignored them. But uh the life of a writer. Uh um, I forgot what the question was now.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Uh just about that first year without George writing.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

Yes. Uh, you know, I we elevated Steve Steve Binder, uh, who would, you know, the the fortunate part was at that point, this even the writing staff was very uh, you know, but there were writers who'd been there for years. Everybody knew what they were doing. It it wasn't like a first-year show or a fourth year show that was struggling. We were still, you know, we were number one from season six all the way to last year, maybe. An incredible run. So yeah, you had the writing was easier. You know, everybody was knew what they were doing. Uh, and you had a great staff that you could depend on. Uh, you didn't have to rewrite all the scripts. There were people who had been there, several of them are still there. Scott Williams is on the show since I think season seven, he's still there. Um Chris Whale started as a uh PA, became a a staff writer, probably around season seven or so or something. He's still there, an executive producer now. Binder had been there since season two. So it was like, again, not only was the crew very family-like, the writing staff was. So, in the sense that I, yeah, I missed George, but the writing half of the job, I had a lot of great people to fall back on. And, you know, I still got very involved with notes and had final approval of stories and stuff like that. But um, and Steve's role took more and more as the years went on, got more involved. And Steve took over the show and I left. And uh, you know, I got to meet a lot of great writers. Like there's a new NCIS that just premiered uh last week called NCS Origins. And I'm really too proud, those the two writers who created that show are you know, two writers that we watched from infancy, David North. Um David North was a I many people don't even remember this. NCIS was a um spin-off of JAG. And David North was the PA on JAG. And in those days, we used to the the show shot in Valencia, California, which is about 30 miles north of LA. It's from inception, but the writers and editors were all uh in Hollywood for the first five years, six years. And we didn't move up to Valencia to season seven. Uh and David, who was the PA on Jag, used to hang out in our office and pick our brains and stuff. And one day he gave us a script. He said, I you know, I wrote a spec script for curb your enthusiasm, which was nothing like NCIS. And the next morning, George came and said to me, Did you read that script, David gave us? I said, No, he said, You better read it. Stop what you're doing, read the script. And I read it, it was brilliant. Well, he said to David, you know, you really you can write. Uh you know, you read a lot of spec scripts as a showrunner, and 90% of them are just like, And so David said, I'd like to try and write an NCIS. So we said, fine. So he would, in his spare time, he was writing an NCIS script, and George and I would sort of well, this was still season one, end of season one, maybe beginning of season two, I don't remember. And um he um got to the point it was okay. The first three years in NCS were chaos before we left to go write our future. And uh there was nothing to shoot one week, and we went to the showrunner and said, Read this. Here's three acts of a script that David's working on. He said, David, the PA. And he said, Yeah. It was the nicest thing this the showrunner, the original creator showrunner ever did. He called David into his office and said, I want you to go down to Starbucks and get me a cup of coffee. And David ran down and got him a cup of coffee. He came back up and he said, To David, you're fired. And David said, Why? He said, Because I can't have one of my writers get me coffee. And he put him on stuff. And we all helped David write the third, the fourth act. And David was there for years. David left around season 10 or something, and he and I stayed, we stayed very close. And then when George and I took over the show, the first thing we did was we brought him back. And so Chris Sober came back.

SPEAKER_01 45:14

Oh, Chris.

SPEAKER_00 45:14

Chris was there season two or three and got fired by the showrunner for reasons we never understood. Chris wrote like four great scripts, got fired. It was a crazy time. And uh then Chris came back, and then when NCIS New Orleans started, Chris went on to that. And then, as you know, Hawaii. But uh, so we got like, and then Gina Monreal came in around season seven. I I always tell everybody, probably the best writer we ever had. And she and David partnered for this new show, Origins. I'm so proud of them. It's like the kids have grown up and have their own show. And uh, I think it's gonna be a great show. Um, it's a period piece, it's set in 1991. But anyway, your question was about George. So I had a family around me to help me recover from George. And then, you know, George still was consulting for a year, and then you know, COVID hit. That was really, you know, in my third year there is when we got into the COVID years, and that wasn't fun at all. You know, I was up there by myself every day in Valencia. I drive up there, sit in an office by myself. The entire writing staff was at home. I had an assistant I didn't see for two years, other than on Zoom. I had flashbacks when I summed onto your Zoom this one. Uh and I would have production meetings with the product the director and you know, casting meetings, and I'd be sitting in this off hallway with nine empty offices and me in one PA. And uh when I went down to the set, I had to put on a mask and a shield and rubber gloves, and then the COVID officer, these horrible people we had to hire, would tap me on the shoulder saying, You're standing too close to that actor, back up six feet. It's like you know. Lunch was always a big thing at NCIS. We would all eat lunch together, everybody. And Mark Carmen was the best. He would he would bust the tables after he was if you had a guest visiting the set, he would be bringing them food and come pick up their dishes when they were done eating. It was just like, you know, Mark, you're the star of the show. Don't worry, but he was that's who he was. And well, we all had to go down and get our food, and the caters were behind a plastic shield. You had to tell him what you wanted, and then you had to bring your tray back to your office and eat. And I just finally said, and that's when Mark and I both said, This is not you know what we signed up for. And so we did four more episodes. Uh, and I was asked to stay on for those episodes, and then I consulted for the rest of the year, and then that's when I left. But so there were a lot of the family up there helped me get through the year without George, but George was always in the back of my mind, and unfortunately, George's wife uh never really recovered, and she passed away about a year before him. And George kept saying to me, Don't do what I did. George is four years older than I was, don't wait, don't wait to retire. Do it. There's a there's a life beyond television. And uh so I probably retired a year too early. I think you know, COVID sort of ended, and I could have done another year. And I had another year left in my contract. And um, I had when I negotiated that last contract, by the way, George's son was my lawyer at that point. He was saying to me, Don't listen to my dad, this is a great deal. You gotta stay here. And uh I said, you know, let's but the last thing we held out for was mutual options. And so the beginning of the third year, when they called me and said we picked up your option, I said, I don't think so. And uh I really it's time. And uh I I don't look back. I it's hard adjusting. Um and uh I thought George and I would go back to writing again, but um George George just got to the point where his health had deteriorated, he couldn't do anything more. Anyway, um so that's how the partnership ended. But it's uh friends to the end.

SPEAKER_03 49:12

Um Frank, this has been unbelievable uh as an episode. Um I'd like to keep going, but that's not how podcasts work, unfortunately. So we do have to end it. We'd like to end it with our final question, which we ask every guest, which is if you could give a single piece of advice to somebody wanting to enter the industry, what would that single piece of advice be?

SPEAKER_00 49:37

Don't be afraid to be wrong. Uh and what I mean by that is don't be afraid to fail because you're gonna come up, especially as a writer, when you're sitting in a room by yourself and you come up with an idea, you're working on a script, you come up with an idea, you're gonna think to yourself, well, this is stupid. People are gonna hate it, you know. Uh, you know, we all have self-doubt, we all do as writers, and even as a team. One of the benefits of being a team is you, you know, I can say to George, God, this is stupid. But you know, but how about if we get out of this situation by having him slip on a banana? You know, you'll go, that's just you know, it's no, maybe it's not that stupid. It was, you know, you you end up trying things that work out, some of them don't work out, but but you we all have failures. We've had uh, you know, uh George and I have had a great career. We've got to mentor a lot of people who have gone on to Oscar nominations, and uh you talk to them, and they've all had, you know, Terrence Winner. I don't know if Terry is. He did uh Terry, we gave Terrence his first job on a series we had called Great Defender at Warner Brothers. And uh you know, Terry we all when we got fired from that, Terry came with us to the Cosmic Mysteries and then went on to the Sopranos, and you know, his life turned around. He's a great guy you should probably talk to. Um but you know, it's you you're gonna fail. We all we all fail. So don't be afraid to try something. Make the show you want to make. I think that's why when you asked earlier on what the high point was, was maybe that crazy like the fox movie, because we didn't have anybody, we had no, no one wants, we were like the orphan child. We got to make the movie we wanted to make, and it turned out to be the highest-rated movie of the year on network television. Um and and and the other thing is the other we talked about earlier, be it be adaptable. Um do your thing, know when it's time to stop doing your thing, and maybe move on to the next phase. And for some people, they don't want to move on to the next phase, and that's fine. And we were at the point where we didn't have to move on to the next phase, but we chose to want to work and want to be together. So that's my advice.

SPEAKER_03 51:53

Amazing. Um, well, I mean, given this is a failure podcast, that piece of advice is uh a great piece of advice um that uh I think we have taken on board uh and created the show to be able to talk about that sort of thing with people. Um, Frank, thank you very much for taking us on this extraordinary journey across decades of Hollywood and your journey. It's been uh it's been really fascinating, and we really appreciate your your time. You've probably got a tea time later, so uh we'll let you go. But thank you very much indeed.

SPEAKER_01 52:24

Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 52:25

Thank you. It's great meeting you guys.

SPEAKER_01 52:27

Thank you so much for listening, and thank you, James Launch, for the music. And for putting up with our time today. As always, each episode is brought to you by scriptations. If you want to support the show, please tell us a copy at www.scriptation.com www.scriptation www. If you want to find me on social media, find me.