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“Once in search of a story for an episode of a television series,
I found myself spending the better part of a night in a brothel...”
A good story, one which engages us and draws our interest in a movie, a play or a novel, is more than just a series of connected events. A story, as professional writers think about these things, is not simply: “This happened, then this happened, then this happened.”
A good story has a shape, a forward motion, which pulls us along as viewers or readers because we want to find out where it is going. It tells us something new and intriguing about the world in which we live. A good story changes people – the characters in the story and the readers or viewers who are exposed to it. But where a worthy story lies in any particular subject is not always obvious, so a writer will have to dig deep to find it.
The search for a story can be a purely cerebral exercise, but just as often it involves research in the real world, in places far removed from the writer’s desk. For me, going into the field and experiencing how other people do their jobs and spend their days has been one of the most interesting, enjoyable, and often surprising aspects of plying my trade. I am always deeply honored when people allow me into their lives and places of work, taking the time to explain the complexities of their professions, trusting me to make a good faith effort to get it right when depicting their private worlds in a story.
I have ridden through inner cities in the backs of police cars, tagged along on wilderness rescue missions, visited crime scenes and crime labs, hung out with dolphin trainers, toured NASA bases, spent hours in hospital emergency departments and inside locked psychiatric wards, ventured deep into urban war zones, prowled through print and TV newsrooms, interviewed FBI forensics experts, city mayors, members of congress and other politicians, and once, in search of the story for an episode of a television series, I found myself spending the better part of a night in a brothel. First, some context…
After graduating from college, I worked as a carpenter’s assistant and a gardener, taught in elementary and high school, was a shipping clerk in a sandal factory in downtown Los Angeles, and spent long, exhausting days as a “gofer” on numerous commercials and short films. Eventually I landed a few low-paying assignments on an early morning television show for kids, waking up while it was still dark in order to see my credit for the first time, after which I immediately went back to sleep.
After several years of trying, rather suddenly I broke into prime time with three simultaneous writing assignments, on the comedies Rhoda and Phyllis and on the family drama, The Waltons. Shortly thereafter, I had the good fortune to become the junior member of a team with four of the most talented people ever to work in television. Allan Burns and Jim Brooks had created the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, and later Lou Grant, the series on which I joined them. A third creator of Lou Grant was Gene Reynolds, a fine director as well as producer who had developed, with Larry Gelbart, the iconic series M*A*S*H. In the first year of Lou Grant, the creators had also hired as Executive Story Editor, the excellent writer Leon Tokatyan, whose credits included highly regarded series like The Senator and Kojak.
Lou Grant was an especially rewarding series on which to work because our protagonists were journalists, enabling us to explore a wide range of interesting topics. Yet, as we learned time and again, finding a topic interesting doesn’t mean that you have a story to tell about it.
Gene felt that series television often came across as false and artificial because the busy writers, cranking out multiple episodes on a tight deadline, tended to stay in their air-conditioned Hollywood offices and make stuff up, or even lift ideas from popular films. It was not uncommon in a writers’ room to hear someone propose as their original idea, “Hey, we could do Serpico!” Or: “Let’s use that set up from In The Line of Fire.” Gene’s alternative was to do real research, an approach that had served him well on M*A*S*H (he and Larry traveled to South Korea) and earlier on the high school series Room 222 (based on interviews and observations at a Los Angeles inner city school).
When the proliferation of massage parlors became a frequent topic of local news stories, it became my task to investigate this subject. Fortunately, before I was forced to troll Hollywood Boulevard in search of massage parlor girls to interview, our enterprising staff researcher made a creative deal with the legal supervisors of a group of hookers who had been busted, convicted and sentenced to do community service. She persuaded the authorities to count the time spent talking to me as part of the hookers’ hours of community service.
There are many legitimate places to get an actual massage in Los Angeles, but for some reason “Massage Parlor” always seems to mean a place where sex is traded for money, despite parlor being a word for the sitting room in your grandmother’s house. The hookers assigned, as their punishment, to spend time talking to me, all worked in massage parlors. In fact, they continued to work in massage parlors while doing their community service as a sentence for the crime of working in massage parlors.
I went to my first appointment at the office of an organization dedicated to helping “sex workers,” having no idea what story I wanted to tell. I met two young women, whom I will call Cheryl and Debbie, not their real names. Whatever I was expecting, Cheryl and Debbie turned out to be pretty, friendly, funny and extremely bright. I liked them both immediately. The cliché but also inevitable question, especially with two people with as much going for them as Cheryl and Debbie, was why? Why did bright, attractive young women feel their best option for making a way in the world was to sell their bodies?
For whatever reason, neither had much formal education, and they were undoubtedly correct when they argued that, with their limited skill sets, they could make a lot more money hooking than in other low-qualification jobs. Both had experienced difficult upbringings. In Debbie’s case, her father was a physician and distinguished professor of medicine at a prestigious Southern university. He was also a transvestite, hiding this fact from his professional community but not from his family. Debbie had childhood memories of his coming home after being out on the town in, as she put it, “full regalia.”
When I returned to the studio and briefed my colleagues, I shared how much I liked Cheryl and Debbie. They were, I told the group, terrific people. The reaction of all the men – every male on our writing staff, crew, as well as company executives (although none of the women), was universal. “Think about what you’re saying,” they responded with some heat. “These are prostitutes. You didn’t really like them.” It was somehow impossible for the guys to believe that Cheryl and Debbie were as nice and intelligent as I described.
“These are prostitutes. You didn’t really like them.”
Now I had a story. The intriguing twist was less about the prostitutes’ profession and more about the deeply held beliefs and prejudices others harbored toward them. But my research was only beginning. Cheryl and Debbie insisted that I couldn’t get a real feel for what their profession was all about without spending a shift in the actual massage parlor where they worked. Thus, one cool early fall evening, I walked up the steps to the porch of the pale blue clapboard bungalow in Santa Monica in which Cheryl and Debbie made a living.
[To be continued….]
