This week on the blog, a podcast interview with TV writer Phoef Sutton on writing for Cheers, the best way to replace characters on a show, and why it’s not a bad idea to keep your mouth shut.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Phoef Sutton Website: https://phoefsutton.net/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
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TRANSCRIPT
I understand that you wrote and acted in plays in high school and in college. Was that always the goal to be a writer or was acting a goal?
Phoef Sutton: Well, yeah, acting was a goal. When I came out here, I sort of thought I wanted to be a writer or an actor. And I decided I could only take getting rejected in one field at a time.
And I thought getting rejected as a writer was more pleasant, because they don't do it to your face. I just didn't get any traction as an actor. I'm really glad that I did it when I did it, because it's very helpful for a screenwriter or television writer to have acted—to have known what it's like to be on the stage and to have to say the words. I can communicate with actors, I think, a little bit better than a lot of other showrunners who've just been writers. Because I know what it's like. I can understand that.
And also, I think I learned—maybe from being an actor or being around actors—I learned how to write for particular people. I mean, when I know a person and I know their voice and I know what they feel. I could write for Treat Williams. I could write for Bob Newhart. I could write for Brian Dennehy. They have different cadences, different ways of speaking. Ted Danson, Kelsey Grammer, Woody Harrelson. And I was able to do that. So that stood me in good stead.
And also, being a playwright, I mean, there aren't very many writers who start as playwrights nowadays. I think, just because there isn't really much theater in this country, or at least not in this city anyway. And I was in plays I wrote, too, so, I mean, there you have nobody to blame but yourself. You can't say, “Who wrote this shit,” or, “That actor screwed it up.”
And the first thing that I did professionally—aside from some plays in regional theaters, where I got paid a stipend—was Cheers. And that was basically a play: the entrances, exits, one set, all that. And all the actors were theater actors. It was a play.
They do stage plays of various sitcoms over the years. They've done The Golden Girls and all that. And I'm surprised they haven't done one of Cheers, because it's a play.
And that set, that beautiful set, which was designed by Richard Sylbert, who did Chinatown and all sorts of other movies. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It was a beautiful set. It was a beautiful set. So many episodes of Cheers were just on the set. I mean, we're just on the bar, never left the bar. Never even changed days, because we found that when we filmed in front of an audience on Tuesday nights—and we filmed pretty much the whole thing in front of an audience—we found that (this was later on in the run), we found that when we would have them change their costumes to be a day later, you could never get them (the actors) back. They would go to the dressing rooms, they would start playing foosball, smoking pot, and you could never get them back.
So, there are plenty of episodes of Cheers that take place in one day that couldn't possibly have taken place in one day. But we just figured, we don't want to do the costume changes.
I remember hearing an interview with (director) Jim Burrows where he talked about Norm's entrance in the pilot. And he said he felt bad for the writers, because in the blocking, he put Norm at the far end of the bar. Which meant every time Norm came in, you guys needed to write a joke to get him across the room.
Phoef Sutton: Well, it was one of the trademarks of the show. And so, it was good in that sense. But yes, and everyone had to top the one before. At first, there were very simple jokes. But then they had to be, you know, very complex jokes or philosophical jokes.
We would go to great lengths not to have Norm enter; we would have Norm there at the beginning of the show. We didn't want to deal with it.
I wanted to do an episode where they put in a new parking meter in front of the place. So, he had to constantly go and feed the meter. So, there would be like ten Norm entrances in it. And people wanted to kill me for doing that.
Let's just back up real quick here. I want to talk about your playwriting, because I know you had sort of a learning experience, you got an understanding of how the business works with your play Burial Customs. About how things look like they're going to happen. And then they don't happen.
Phoef Sutton: I was just out of graduate school at the University of Florida, and I moved to New York for a brief period of time. I couldn't really get in, couldn't get an apartment, couldn't get a job. But there was a brief period of time when Ulu Grossbard, who was a big director, wanted to direct that play. And it was very exciting.
If I'd known more about the business, I would have been more excited [LAUGHS] because he just done Crimes of the Heart on Broadway. And he was really, really big and he was really into the play. I went to his office on—I don't know, on Times Square or something like that, I don't know where it was—but I felt like I was a part of the Broadway scene.
And then he just sort of lost interest and it went away.
And that sort of thing happens over and over and over again with people in the business. Even if you're very successful, there are millions of times when things look like they're going to be great and then they fall apart.
And my initial reaction to that was to say, “I'm not going to get excited about anything until it's real. Until it's really happening.” So that if I sold a script, a pilot script, I wouldn't get excited until they agreed to make the pilot. And then when they did the pilot, I wouldn't get excited until it was on the air. And then when it was on the air, I wouldn't get excited until it lasted. And then I realized that I was putting myself in a position where I never got excited about anything.
So, then I changed my attitude to get excited about every little victory of what comes on. I was right to be excited about Ulu Grossbard doing the play. It was a wonderful opportunity. It didn't pan out. There was nothing wrong with being excited.
You know, you aren't punished for being excited about something that doesn't come to the ultimate conclusion. I mean, even when we won our Emmys for Cheers, I basically wouldn't be excited, because I would think, “Well, I’ve got to go back there tomorrow and do it again.”
So now I allow myself to be excited about things.
That's a very good lesson to learn. To find that balance.
Phoef Sutton: It’s a hard lesson to learn.
So, what happened with playwriting that got you into TV writing? What was that connection?
Phoef Sutton: I wanted to write for movies. I wanted to write for movies and I wanted to write for television. I wanted to write for theater and I wanted to write books. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a writer, in one form or another.
So, as I said, I couldn't get into New York. I couldn't get a job, couldn't get an apartment. And in LA, I had a relative that I could stay with. And my brother was with the Crown Books chain. So, I knew I could get a clerk job at a Crown Bookstore. I knew I could get a job.
So, I moved to LA with my then fiancé. And I just wrote plays, wrote screenplays. I had a friend from college, Barbara Hall, who was on Newhart at the time. She's since gone on to do everything. She did Madam Secretary and I'll Fly Away and all that.
And so I wrote a spec Newhart (script), because she was on Newhart. And that was what got me the freelance Cheers job.
I didn't know anything about writing for television. I didn't know anything about writing with a group, writing with a room. I was a very private writer, wrote by myself, didn't talk to anybody about what I was writing until it was done. So, I had to learn all that stuff.
I had to learn how to pitch. I had to learn how to pitch in the room during the rewrites. It was really my graduate school, Cheers. And it was a good graduate school, because obviously there were the best writers in the business on that show.
So, you're learning from some really, really good people.
Phoef Sutton: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it was very tense. It was very stressful. It was a hard room.
Why was it hard?
Phoef Sutton: Well, because you had to be funny. You had to be good. You had to say the right thing. You had to do it. I mean, there were long silences in the room, where people were thinking and crafting and doing stuff, and trying to do it.
I didn't speak for the first six months in the room, I think. And I think that was probably a good choice. Because the year I joined the staff, two other writers joined the staff too. And I was the only one who made it all the way through the year. They were both let go. And I think part of the reason was that I knew my place. [LAUGHS]
I didn't talk first. And then I would try a few jokes and they got laughs. I would try a few more jokes and they would get laughs. And then before you know it, you're doing it and you're just in the zone. It's a difficult thing to describe.
Were you breaking stories as a group?
Phoef Sutton: Yeah. Oh yeah. Every story on that show was broken as a group. We never came in with a story.
At the beginning of each season, Glen and Les (Charles) would come in and we would talk about what to do. And it was very clear that they hadn't thought about it for an instant over the break. And everything was, you know, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do?
And nobody—no freelancer, no staff writer, no producer—nobody ever came in and said, “I've got a story,” and pitched it. Everything was pitched in the room. And when a story is being pitched and formed and all that sort of thing, at some point—in the early stages—you would get assigned it or another writer would get assigned it. That was the way it worked.
What did you learn about story in that process?
Phoef Sutton: Well, I mean, you learned everything.
I mean, obviously the stories for a sitcom, particularly a sitcom like Cheers, are fairly simple: There's a problem that's presented. Halfway through, it takes a turn and then it's resolved. [LAUGHS] And usually—for the first five years of the show—it’s getting resolved involved something to do with Diane, because she was pivotal.
But I think more what I learned was that when you're first a writer and you write something—and it's good, it's bad, whatever—you generally think, “Well, that's it, that's what it is, and I can't come up with anything else. That’s what it is.”
And when people give you notes or object to it, you resist the notes. And the main reason you resist the notes, I think, is that you can't think how to change it. You can't figure out anything different. And I just learned very early on that there's always a different way to do something. Anything, anything. Nothing is perfect. Everything—always—has a different way to go. There's always a different way to look at it. Always a different approach to take to it.
And maybe that approach won't be better. Maybe it'll be a linear move. Maybe it'll be worse. On Cheers, it was almost always better. It almost always got better. I'd say it always got better in the room.
Cheers is well known for—unlike other series where major cast members left—you guys handled it better than anyone ever. Do you have any idea what was the magic powder that made it work where you guys did it?
Phoef Sutton: Well, there were a couple of things. First of all, the cast always changed. The cast was always changing. It was never the same. I mean, there were the people who were replaced, left and were replaced. But there were also the people who came in. Frasier, Lilith.
One of the reasons the show lasted as long as it did was that when you were writing, if you were writing year eight, it was a way different show from when we were writing year three. A very different cast.
I'd say the biggest thing that I learned—and I got to do this, because on Chesapeake Shores, we lost the star of the show too, and I had to replace him—was just to make the character as different as possible from the one you're replacing. So that nobody thinks, “Oh, this guy isn't as good as that guy,” or, “This girl is not the same thing as that.”
When Coach died and they brought in Woody, there was still the dumb aspect of him. But in general, he was a very different character. He was a young character. He was a naive character. He was from the Midwest. Whereas Coach had been from Sam's life, and he was a ball player, and he was kind of old and kind of brain damaged from getting hit in the head with balls. And they were very different.
When Rebecca came in, they made her a completely different character. And one of the reasons they were able to do that was, I think, just luck. Because they had the character of Frasier. And so much of the show was the intellectual versus the blue-collar type people. And Frasier was able to take that on. He had already taken it on from Diane, but he was able to take that on entirely.
So, the new character didn't have to be an intellectual type, snobby type. What was originally intended was a hard-nosed businessman who clashed with Sam. It didn't actually turn out that way. She turned out to be more of a basket case, but that was because of the actress and playing to the actress's strengths.
And that, I think, is the main thing I learned from that. Because really, when Diane left the show, the show had been on for five years, which is the run of most shows. No show had really survived the loss of its star and she really was the star. I mean, she was the pivotal point of every episode. She was the one, the audience was coming into the bar and seeing it through her eyes. Ted was certainly the costar, but she was really the focal point of the show. So, when she left, we were really scared. We did not know whether it was going to work.
And the show shifted then, because it became much more of an ensemble show, because Kirstie—although she was a wonderful actress—she wasn't quite the dominant force that Shelley Long had been. The show really became about Sam and the bar. It had been moving that way already, but it became that way.
If you were to describe the show when it first started, it would surely have been: it's a love story between Sam and Diane and will they get together or not? And then it became a show about a bar, about the patrons of a bar and their lives.
I think there's a really good lesson in your story about your first year on Cheers, where you didn't say much, and you just absorbed.
Phoef Sutton: I think the world would be greatly improved if people didn't say so much. People talk way too much. You know, there's that old saying, I don't know who said it, Mark Twain or whoever: “Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak up and prove it.” Just don't talk. [LAUGHS] Just take it in. Be the strong, silent type. [LAUGHS]
