contend that its denizens just purr and purr and purr
by Rowland BarberDave Davis, co-producer of Rhoda, was trying to tell an outsider what it was like to work for MTM Enterprises, Inc. "Well," he said at length, "it's like this. We are all pussycats here. Out there they are all terrors."
From his adjoining desk, Davis's partner, Lorenzo Music (who doubles as the voice of "Carlton your doorman"), agreed. "Yeah," he said, "and it all came from these two guys who said, 'Trust us and we'll trust you.'"
At about this point in my purposeful loiter around the MTM premises at CBS Studio Center, over the hills from Hollywood, it occurred to me that the fittingest medium for telling this company's story would be needlepoint. In the center of a great sampler would be the pussycat of the MTM logo, the parody of the MGM lion. Prominently embroidered around the edges would be the words "Trust," "Friendship," "Love," "Respect," and "Excellence." For these words, straight out of McGuffey's Readers, come easily to MTM people--as easily as "credit arbitration", "guarantee", "exclusivity," "hype," and "piece of action" come to people in most other TV shops.
In the center of the sampler, surmounting the logo, would be stitched four portraits: Our Founder (Grant Tinker), Our Spiritual Leader (MTM herself, Mary Tyler Moore), and Our Creators (James L. Brooks and Allan Burns).
Brooks and Burns are "these two guys who said, 'Trust us and we'll trust you." Without them, the '74-'75 season would not have had six MTM comedy entries in the prime-time sweepstakes: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and Rhoda, all hits; Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers, and The Texas Wheelers, both of which disappointed their creators by failing to last beyond midseason; and The Bob Crane Show, which will begin in March. As a matter of record, Brooks and Burns created only three of the six: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Paul Sand, and Rhoda. But, as the company's two charter employees, they have set its standards and a professional style that is unique in the industry.
The pursuit of quality at MTM is relentless, just short of ruthless. Yet every episode filmed here is put together with the all-pitch-in good spirits of an old-fashioned barn raising. Blowups and ego tantrums are unheard of. Nobody has ever walked off the MTM set. The prevailing equanimity stems from Mary's own sunny nature, and from her husband Grant's respect for talent. The fact that it continues to prevail through exhausting rehearsals and all-night write sessions is in large measure attributable to Jim Brooks and Allan Burns and the people they've attracted to the company over the past five years.
Only one thing seems to ruffle Allan Burns consistently. Casual acquaintences persist in calling him by the wrong first name. "I've begun to think," he says, "that my name is Jim-I'm-sorry-I-mean-Allan." Which is wild. Because Allan and Jim are an odder couple than Oscar Madison and Felix Unger.
"They are," says Ed. Weinberger, co-producer of the Mary Show "hot and cold, sweet and sour, yin and yang." "A marriage of opposites," says Mary herself. "After all these years I'm still amazed by how well they work together."
A diligent researcher might find their images in a 1925 newspaper. Allan Burns would be the granite-jawed all American dude in the Arrow collar ad, Jim Brooks would be the character in the political cartoon: black-bearded, long-haired, a bomb fuse sticking out of his pocket, labeled 'Anarchist.'
Allan is 39 and has never been caught uncompromised. Jim is 35 and always breaking up; he has an unfettered long-range laugh. At his most casual, Allan will wear a white shirt without a tie, but his slacks will not be without a crease nor his loafers without a shine. At his most dapper, Jim will wear what he always wears: old sports shirt or sweatshirt, frayed-bottom blue jeans, tennis shoes. He does not believe in socks.
Under pressure, Allan will concede that he has become a "pretty fair" executive. With no coaxing. Jim will say that he has no money sense whatever. Allan lives with his wife and three children in fashionable Mandeville Canyon, up the road from the Lorne Greenes. Jim, divorced (he has a 3-year-old daughter) lives alone in a beach pad out near Malibu, up the strand from a somewhat raffish motel the Las Tunas Isle.
The two of them grew up about as far apart as two American boys could without leaving U.S. territory: Brooks in New York City, Burns in Honolulu. (Allan Burns is that rare show-biz bird who went east to Hollywood.) There were some surprising parallels in their early careers, however. Each was a college dropout. Allan's first job was as a page at NBC Hollywood; Jim's first job was as a page at CBS New York. And each of them landed a subsequent job that turned out to be a requisite to his becoming a producer of TV comedy.
The exuberant Brooks learned the stern discipline of meeting deadlines as a reporter-writer for CBS News. "I still, today, have warm thoughts about getting back into news," he says. "It was like being a kid in a toy store. There was no caste system, no bureaucracy, in the newsroom. Everybody shared their feelings with everybody else. Edward R. Murrow--Eric Sevareid--Fred Friendly--Hughes Rudd--emotional people with great, great integrity. Every day was a thrilling new experience."
Burns, on the other hand, needed to have a few disciplines knocked out from under him, or he would be doomed to the lifelong frustration of thinking funny while being to proper to be funny. He got his chance as writer-artist by Jay Ward, proprietor of Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right and Fractured Flickers. Ward, a puckish and unpredictable fellow, had more fun promoting than producing. "He got me working almost full-time turning out weekly mailers for the press," Burns recalls, and he game me my head. I could draw anything and write anything I wanted. Remember the 'Statehood for Moosylvania' campaign? That was mine. Anything went at Jay Ward's. No taboos. The more bizarre, the better. That was a great point in my life--it freed me totally."
By the mid-60's, both Brooks and Burns had become free-lance TV writers. Jim Brooks had been lured to Hollywood to write documentaries for the Wolper Company--work that he "hated from the very beginning." Burns had departed Jay Ward's cartoonery because, well, "How long can a grown man keep writing for squirrels and mooses?" Although they already knew each other socially, their careers did not collide until 1968. Jim had written the pilot episode for Room 222, at 20th Century Fox. He urged Allan to write for the show, which he did, and so well that Burns became fill-in producer for the last eight episodes that season.
The VP in charge of television production at Fox, at that time, was Grant Tinker, whose wife's career was at a time for turning. Nothing had gone right for Mary Tyler Moore since she'd retired the character of Laura Petrie on the original Dick Van Dyke Show. What had particularly not gone right was a Broadway musical version of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," in which she was starred and in which she was buried when the show went bust before opening in New York. But CBS had just reunited her with Dick Van Dyke in a special, and the nationwide response was tremendous. So tremendous that the network committed itself--in negotitation with Tinker--to a full season's worth of a Mary Tyler Moore series. Without so much as a script, or even an idea for a script.
Tinker told Brooks and Burns about the CBS commitment, and said he had a hunch they would hit it off as partners. they said, "Wow!" and he hired them.
"All I had to start them off," says Tinker as he recounts the story, "was the premise of Mary being single and 30 and living in Minneapolis--which on the face of it is a pretty dull thought! I just told them to go away and create. They had complete freedom. You can't produce producers."
Allan Burns picks up the continuity: "We hadn't even met Mary yet. What trust she had in Grant--to let him put two total strangers in sole charge of relaunching her career. A good thing she wasn't in on some of our first sessions. Boy, did we come up with some lousy ideas! Like, Mary was going to be a gossip columnist. Mary was going to play the field, dating two guys simultaneously--which one will get her? Then we latched onto Divorce, and we knew we had a winner. Every writer in town had a story on the drawing board. But we had the lady it would work with!"
Other elements of cast and storyline fell rapidly into place. The Ch. 12 newsroom, and the characters of Lou and Murray, came straight out of Jim Brooks' days at CBS News. "Rhoda," says Brooks, "was based on this terrific girl I used to know named Rose Goldman. Allan and I brought Phyllis to life out of the whole cloth. Ted was a bigger-than-life prototype of the vain newscaster. Mary, of course, was Mary; contemporary, bright, but vulnerable. Allan was uncanny with the Mary character--always knew exactly how she would move, talk, react. We thought we had it all."
The partners put it all in a briefcase and flew to New York to pitch the show to the network brass, headed by a feisty kitschmeister named Mike Dann. "I got the feeling that we were not exactly stunning them," Allan says. "But when we got through, they all patted us on the back and said, 'Wonderful things are going to come out of this meeting.' Later we found out what happened when we walked out the door. Mike Dann turned to the rest of the VPs and said, 'Get rid of those two clowns'."
Network pressure was applied, but Tinker stood by "those two clowns." He and his co-creators compromised only on one issue: divorce. If Mary is a divorcee, their reasoning went, people will think she's divorced from Dick Van Dyke, and nobody divorces Dick Van Dyke.
"As it turns out," says Burns, "a career woman of 30 who's never been married is a more radical, more liberated concept than a divorcee."
After the dress rehearsal of the first show, in front of an audience, Mary was in tears. "It was a total disaster to me," she says. "I did not understand the newsroom or anybody in it. I did not understand Rhoda. I did not like Rhoda. But that was the first and only time I felt panic on the show. Because the boys stayed up and rewrote all night, and when I saw the rewrite the next morning all my faith returned. Now I know. A new script may read like a real bomb. But then the magic beauties go up to their office and rewrite until 2 in the morning, and when I come to work there's a little package under the tree--all the pretty new pages. It has never failed."
The Mary Tyler Moore Show got painfully off the ground, in terms of ratings. But before the first season was out, it had become something quite special. It was not only popular, it was endearing, to critics and public alike.
Now that Brooks and Burns are executive producers, they are the deans of the interlocking staffs of some 30 producers, script supervisors, and story consultants--all, not so surprisingly, in their own professional image. And now that they are the hottest creative team in the hottest comedy shop in Hollywood, exactly what are they up to this Thursday afternoon of their fifth winter at MTM?
Allan Burns is in his office, reflecting. "It was a sad day for everybody, not just Jim and me, when we got word that they'd cancelled Paul Sand. Death in the family brought us all close together--just like we'd all cried when Rhoda got married. Maybe it was all for the best. I was working 17 hours a day when we had three shows going. Tell you my dark secret--I'm not really a producer. I'm a writer. Now I'll have time to write something for myself...
Across the hall (the only hall in Hollywood with an autographed photo of itself, signed "Sincerely, The Hall"), Jim Brooks is in his office, projecting. "I probably shouldn't say this, but I've never thought of myself as a producer. I'm a writer, period. I've just started on a screenplay, and I'm riding high." His teeth gleamed through the black copse of his beard. "That great feeling when you're getting a run! You're stuck, then suddenly it all breaks loose, and you start dictating like crazy, laughing all the way...."
Reflection and projection time was abruptly over. Allan appeared, to summon Jim to an emergency story conference. "You'll have to excuse us, " he said to me, "but there's a problem with Rhoda's reaction to Joe's reaction to Charlie's exit, and Charlotte (Brown) and Dave and Lorenzo need us." I understood. When you're hot, you're hot.
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