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Speaker 1: Welcome to desperately devoted Think of us as your favorite neighbors as we chat about life and relationships, all.
00:00:08
Speaker 2: While we revisit the iconic show Desperate Housewives together.
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Speaker 1: I'm Terry Hatcher, I'm Andrea Bowen, and I'm Emerson Tenny. You know how when you connect with an old friend that you haven't seen in a long time, and you have that feeling of where you just pick up right where you left off and the best, it's the best feeling. So today I have that feeling because and you super Desperate Housewives fans, you are going to be so excited for this. We have a guest here, a very special guest, somebody who you might not immediately recognize their name, but you will recognize the influence that this person had on the show because it was everywhere from the cast to the music, from the way it looked on screen, I mean, from dealing with the network stuff that went on behind the scenes that nobody's ever heard of. This person was one of two people that helped it get there and keep it there, and he was one of the two executive producers that had everything to do with getting this show made. Of course, everyone's familiar with Mark Cherry, right, So it's about time that you get to meet the man behind so much else that happened on this show. He has been my friend from the beginning, and I've missed him desperately. He went off after the first season to be the president of NBC Universal International Studios, which, by the way, produced a little show called Downton Abbey, among other great shows. So we are so very desperately devoted to him for being here with us today bringing his unique and encompassing perspective. Everyone please go crazy and welcome. Executive producer Michael Etelstein.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so great to see all of you. I mean, it's been twenty years. Basically until a couple weeks ago, I hadn't seen Emerson since what you were seven? Yeah, you were thirteen. Andrea, Yeah, and you look amazing. And then Terry it's it's I can't believe it.
00:02:06
Speaker 1: It's it's been so great to reconnect. It just it really and we're going to get into all the stuff that's come up for us. But I'm it's crazy kind of the timing of us reconnecting and us doing this podcast, and it makes so much sense for you to be here because by the way, Andrew and I don't remember anything. And not only that, Like, I think people have these assumptions that we know more than we know, just because we were on the show and we really were such a little part of it and really only in front of the camera, Like I wasn't even ever in a writer's room, do you know what I mean? Like, I think there's assumptions that I know much more than I know. So I'm glad you're here to help reveal stuff that I know our fans are going to want to know about.
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Speaker 4: It's like, the first season was centered around a mystery on the story of the story on the street. But this is kind of like our first season one mystery. We can't wait here everything you have to show.
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Speaker 1: To surprise us. So let's just can we just start at the beginning, which is, how the hell did you get involved with this thing?
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Speaker 3: So at the time, I was producing a show for Touchstone, which is Disney's television armor. It was then and my show, which was called Threat Matrix, was coming to an end. It didn't get picked up for another season, and the studio Josh Berry, who was amazing, sent me the script. I was so busy producing another show. I didn't read it for six weeks. Oh wow, and it sat on my desk and Josh finally is like, dude, are you're going to read the script? And so I read it then and I immediately thought, this is the most amazing pilot script i'd read.
00:03:39
Speaker 1: That's my recollection of I'm a little vague on where I was. I somehow picture that I was poolside. I think it was in Tucson. I was at a hotel. I don't know why that comes to my mind, but I do remember saying to my manager at the time, this is like the best script I've ever read. I'd do anything to be any of these women in this show.
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Speaker 3: Well, it's interesting because that script was so popular and as you know, in Hollywood explain to your listeners. So in Hollywood, you know, most times with big actresses like yourself, it was offer only. And what that means is the actor won't come in and read, and the only thing you can do is make them an offer, and you have to hope that you cast the show properly. We had decided Mark myself and the director had decided that everybody had to come in and read, which was highly unusual.
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Speaker 1: Can I tell you something. I actually love reading, I love auditioning. I've never been one of the actresses that had even for the smallest parts. And my reasoning is because I don't want to show up this on the set and have the director whose vision I'm trying to execute go, that's not how I see it like that's I didn't see it like that, right. I want to have the exchange of bringing my creativity and my talent to a producer and a director's so that we can be like, oh, yeah, she's going to be able to deliver what it is that you want.
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Speaker 3: Well, and you were absolutely fearless because I think we made you auditions seven times.
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Speaker 2: Wait yeahs wait why so many times?
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Speaker 3: You know? It was interesting some of the some of the decisions were instantaneous some of them. So you know, we saw Eva and I know you guys have talked about this. Eva was cast first. She came in. She was supposed to be a supermodel. She's obviously not tall, and we just decided, okay, aside from that, she's it. And she really, you know, wasn't famous at that point. Marca.
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Speaker 1: She gives tall though.
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Speaker 3: Great energy, and we shot her. If you look at the runway sequence. We shot her from below to make her look taller, but again, it really doesn't matter. Once once the audience connects with a character, they do they don't really care. So Eva was cast first. Marcia came in for Mary Alice because Marcia was studying psychology if I remember, and really wasn't interested in being a full time actress again. And we convinced her as a group to you know, audition for for Bree and thank god we did it. It's unbelievab. Yes, we'll come back to the finale because there's a great moment for her, and then you know, let's see. We we cast Felicity. Felicity was the network actually said to us they didn't need to audition her. She was so hot coming off of an Aaron An Aaron Sorkin show. ABC was desperate for her, and we basically said, right, we're not going to cast anybody who doesn't read. So Felicity came into our little office in Burbank and she came in covered in like baby food, and literally I don't think she actually dressed for the part. I think she just came in as being a mom or a young mom walked in did the scene was like, oh my god, yes that's Lynette, and I literally ran out of the room, called the network and we started making her deal.
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Speaker 5: Wow that quickly, Yes it was and.
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Speaker 3: We we didn't have to take her to network. And then you know, there was there was one other person we were considering for you know, the role and for Susan. Yeah.
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Speaker 1: My memory of my last audition, which I feel like, is accurate. And I don't know if I went up the elevator at ABC with the other person that was trying to do my role, or if like we we traded off, like she went up as I came down or whatever. But I do remember my my last audition being so good that when I left, I was like, well, at least I didn't screw that up. Like if they don't cast me, then they don't cast me. But it's not because you like I forgot my lines or I didn't do a good job, or I was having a bad day, or like I recall it being a kind of a knocked it out of the park audition and just the kind where you can be like if I don't get it, I don't get it.
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Speaker 2: I remember you telling me that story, and I think about that. Sometimes when I pitch a movie, like the two times I've been hired, the two movies that I've really been hired, I guess it's been hired to write. I have had that feeling where I've left the pitch and I've thought of that moment because you've told me about it, and I've been like, well, I kind of already know that this like exists in the world in front of me, and now the pieces are coming into place, and if I don't get it has nothing to do with anything that I did.
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Speaker 5: Are we named that way? Are we naming the other actors?
00:08:27
Speaker 3: I will say this in fairness to her. She was brilliant. She was not American, and when she did when she did comedy with an American accent, she lost that twinkle. And she was really good and really surprising because you wouldn't have thought of her for that role. But at the end of the day, so I don't even remember us bringing somebody else to ABC, and I remember you know you you had canceled. We actually had an ABC audition set up for you and you canceled it, which was unheard of, Like actors never canceled network read throughs or auditions and you weren't whatever. I don't know if you weren't feeling well or whatever, but we wanted you enough that we rescheduled, I think for the next day or the day after, and you came in and the rest was history.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: Oh so grateful and.
00:09:19
Speaker 3: Well, listen, I mean we are. I've been rewatching episodes which I haven't looked at in twenty years. And the nuance, the subtlety, the vulnerability, the ability to be just hilariously hilariously funny. And I know you guys have talked about what it's like the naked scene, which was still one of the greatest moments I think in TV to pull that off in the complexity of it and also be completely charming and vulnerable and sweet and.
00:09:45
Speaker 1: So tell us about you were saying like that. There was a lot to the timing of it that I think I've totally forgotten that we You had the script in January, so.
00:09:54
Speaker 3: I got the script. So here's what happened. So, so you know, Mark Cherry had been a sitcom producer and had never produced a scripted drama, which is a very different way of filming. So you know, when you shoot a sitcom, it's multi camera, you shoot everything is sort of on a proscenium and you're done. As you guys know, scripted television, there's a whole other thing. You shoot in one direction, you turn around, you shoot the other way, Because you have to deal with all the lighting, etc. And it's technically just very, very challenging to make a drama. So the studio felt like Mark needed a partner, and the person who was supposed to be his partner got a job executive producing General Hospital because Chuck Pratt was a longtime soap opera guy, and because Chuck wasn't available, it created an opening. Mark met a few producers and I think to this day that I was probably the least offensive or the one And to be candid with you, the studio was very concerned about Mark being a gay man and me being a gay man, and I had to go have a meeting and kind of pitch my take on the show because they were honestly afraid at the time the show would become campy.
00:11:03
Speaker 6: Oh that's so interesting, yeah.
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Speaker 3: And so it was like that was the elephant in the room that I addressed in my meeting, And to me, when I read the script, I had two images in my head it was American Beauty meets Edward Scissorhand.
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Speaker 6: Love the references.
00:11:18
Speaker 2: Wow.
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Speaker 3: And so when you see the show, because American Beauty kind of showed us what was lurking behind our neighbors doors, and it won the Oscar and it was such a presence. I mean, it's hard to remember because it's you know, we're going back, you know, twenty plus years. I remember that, and yeah, it was brilliant. And then the idea of this suburban world that Tim Burton created with Edward Scissorhand, where it was you know, we're going to take you to some very dark places, but if we keep it really bright, we can take the audience there. So that's what I pitched.
00:11:47
Speaker 2: Wo wait, I have a question. Is that why Danny Elfman did the music?
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Speaker 3: I mean Danny Elfman we got very lucky because at that point in time, he'd only done The Simpsons for TV. So Danny did only the main title. He didn't do any of the episod Yes, so he did our main title, which was you know, iconic and absolutely amazing.
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Speaker 2: I just associate him so much with Timberton, and because he's scored so many of his films that that's so interesting that that's a reference.
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Speaker 3: And he got it and it's his first take on the theme song was a little less resolved and a little darker. And we sat with him and talked with him, and he's such a genius. I had to go. I was sent with the network notes to go, you know, give notes.
00:12:25
Speaker 1: To explain to a musician that you want it subtenly changed.
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Speaker 3: It's so interesting because the way he built it was it kind of built without a resolve a musical and what he did. So I had to go give Danny Elfman, like one of the greatest composers of all time, musical notes and like you go over and I went to his house and in the basement and to Danny's credit, goes, oh, yeah, yeah, you just want to resolve, and he just looked at me, not up and down. I watched him change one hundred lines of music, Like he literally sat there, changed one hundred lines of music, you know, instrument parts right, and then push play and I'm like, yeah, that's good. Wow. He just did it right in front of my eyes in like the space of a half hour. And then it came back to bite me a little bit because when we went to go score the sound. You know that that opening. We did it on the Warner Brothers a lot on their big orchestral stage, and Danny wanted twenty more musicians or something like. His agent called me because Danny needs more musicians and Disney which week we can get into, you know, before the show had gone on the air, Disney was very very conscious about spending.
00:13:32
Speaker 1: Money, right, Okay, So, which is why.
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Speaker 3: You were in Flip.
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Speaker 5: Flops history solved? Can we also touch on how Charles McDougall got involved.
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Speaker 3: Sure, that's a good story.
00:13:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, great, let's talk about Charles McDougal so much you can see.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, So in January I'm hired, Okay, and then you know or maybe it's yeah, I guess beginning of January or late so it had to be late December. I think I was hired because we started filming like the third week in January. Yeah, we delivered in March. No, No, we started prep in January and then we started filming in March.
00:14:05
Speaker 1: Okay, that sounds right.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: So yes, So I was probably hired in January, and the first job I had was to go with Mark to a director's home and talk about the script, and this was a big feature film director who was who had a huge, huge romantic comedy movie that everybody knows. And we go and have a meeting and then my phone rings about five or six hours after he says, right, you seem like a lovely guy, but I can't work with him. Oh okay, and so we quit. Wow, And we were in that frantic And what people don't realize, and what's changed so much about TV now is that you know, pilot season. Every studio was producing pilots, every network was producing pilots. So you are chasing talent like crazy.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, your case was always it was always built around this.
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Speaker 3: You would January to March.
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Speaker 1: In January to March, you would find out if you got picked up in May. Then you would start shooting your year series like August, September earlier. Yeah, and then you would do that through April. You would have a little break and then you would do it again.
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Speaker 6: So you're chasing your cast.
00:15:17
Speaker 1: It's all getting shot at the same time.
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Speaker 3: The hunger games of hiring people.
00:15:22
Speaker 1: Now, of course it isn't like that because everyone is desperate for a job. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, anyway, started to cut your no.
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Speaker 3: You're not, and so it's it's so what happened was there was a vacuum and the network wanted a big film person and I'm like, you know, we make TV. We need someone who understands TV. And then we had to go a little bit deeper because going back to two thousand and four, no one had mixed drama and comedy on American television. And I know we won, you know, awards and comedy categories, but you know, the show was really not a comedy and it wasn't a drama. It was entirely its own thing. And so I started to think about who knows how to mix comedy and drama, and the Brits and watching British television had been doing it for years absolutely, and Charles had directed a British program called Queer as Folk, which was a really complicated mix. It was a realistic look on sort of gay life, but it was funny, it was real. He'd also done Sex in the City, and so the fact that he'd done sex in the City made me and I checked with my friends who were producers there, and they said they were very happy with the film. They had everything they needed. The challenge with Charles was at Disney. He'd done some directing for them and had gone wildly over budget, and the studio didn't want to hire it, okay, and so and everybody wanted to feature film person and somehow, some way, I kind of just kept twisting arms until they agreed to hire Trump.
00:16:50
Speaker 1: You know when Desperate Housewives was at its best is when it was writing this tone of I love your examples of American beauty meets Edward Scissorhands is sort of surreal, comedic but also grounded and emotional. And when I think it wasn't great is when it dipped off into sort of more slapsticky, less consistent, you know, with the characters.
00:17:18
Speaker 4: Like too much of one or the other, because that balance that that's where it's magic, really lie.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: And Charles was just all over that. I think he's so tremendously talented.
00:17:27
Speaker 3: It was so brilliant. He came to set every day with a shot list. He handed it out to us, he handed out to the camera team, and he was wildly prepared. I mean, at one point I saw him skulking through the bushes looking at angles and things like in his suits. Because you guys talked about he always wore suit. English directors wore suits. I mean the thing I love about English directors. And I went over to London and you know, and built NBC's business there. English directors are trained both in camera and in acting. And a lot of times in the US TV directors either come out of the the the talent acting part and then become a director, or they come out of the camera world and become a director. But the English directors really have both raft and in fact, when we did the thing with Oprah where she came on our show, yeah, you know, Charles, I brought Charles back because we had to cut Oprah into all these scenes from the first season and it was so technically challenging that we needed a director who could actually understand the technical challenge and do all that. And so remember we we had we worked Oprah an eighteen hour day.
00:18:33
Speaker 6: Oh my, I'm so excited to see this.
00:18:36
Speaker 3: So it's on. You could google it to Oprah Winfrey with Stereia Lane, folks. So we made it. We made an eight minute movie where Oprah came on. It was for the Oprah Winfrey Show. And I took the guys and that's where the guys went on Oprah with that movie.
00:18:49
Speaker 5: Oh Okay, and then we didn't get to have Charles back.
00:18:52
Speaker 3: Charles, I think was a brilliant pilot director, and I don't think Charles had any desire to to kind of be an episodic director.
00:19:01
Speaker 1: It's a different beast like the directors of pilots, and this is not unusual. They'll put their stamp all over it, and because they have that bit of extra time to almost treat it like a mini movie. But then the pace of episodic television, it just doesn't offer them the room to create I think the way that they want to, right, That's why it's a different It's almost like a I don't want to say cookie cutter, because I love some of the really great episodic directors we had on our show, but like it definitely is you get less time and less ownership of your vision.
00:19:38
Speaker 3: Well, the pilot, I think we shot for fourteen or fifteen days, Yeah, which was a long for a drama pilot. Then now it's nothing because the whole world has changed. But you know, a typical episode of Desperate was supposed to fit into eight days, and it never really did, so we ended up having second units.
00:19:54
Speaker 1: And we you know, okay, so since we're there, and since we're not going to spend five hours on this episode of the podcast, you don't know about it, even though I think there's stuff to fill it. But since we're there, I know, you and I when we were having dinner, you mentioned and I had kind of forgotten about this too when the thing kicked off. So when we got picked up and we re started shooting the season, that was in June or right June or yeah, I.
00:20:25
Speaker 3: Think it was probably June.
00:20:26
Speaker 1: And so it was, you know, it was shooting episodes of the show from June until September before we knew that it was a hit.
00:20:35
Speaker 3: It went on the air in October the beginning. It went on the air late, so the beginning of October.
00:20:39
Speaker 1: Okay, And so all that time, and you can talk to this better because you reminded me, and I think this is insane. In the beginning. You know, people think that actors are like so spoiled and so like they get all the glamour things. They had the housewives sharing a double trailer, like honeywagon kind of trailer, so like we just had these half room trailers that were connected. But because we were so far behind because it was such a huge show to shoot. They added a second unit, and the trailer would go with whoever was on the first unit, and the second unit wouldn't have a trailer, And so there were or a hairdresser or there.
00:21:26
Speaker 3: You'd have a hair dresser. You wouldn't have somebody who knew how to do your hair.
00:21:32
Speaker 1: This is unheard of for the leads of a show to not have the hairdresser and the makeup artist and their trailer with them when they're working on a regular basis. It wasn't like a one off one day, can we get through this? It became a like and you remind I totally forgotten about this, and you reminded me of all this, and it just it brings back how from the beginning there was drama that that created that we had nothing to do with.
00:22:05
Speaker 3: There's no question. And I think part of what's interesting is is in retrospect, you know, the show was a massive hit once it hit the air, but if you go back and look at Disney and ABC in particular, they hadn't launched a successful show in five years. The company was losing probably hundreds of millions of dollars a year on pilots and TV shows that weren't getting picked up to future seasons. So from their point of view, you know, they they they were really struggling financially. And I went on to run a studio, so I understand the pressures of making your budget work and hitting your numbers. The thing that was interesting was we never had enough money in those first thirteen episodes to actually make the show.
00:22:48
Speaker 1: We finally have answered why I had my own wardrobe and.
00:22:51
Speaker 3: Why so there was never enough money? It was there was we were. We were George Perkins, who I know you guys have talked about who is our amazing line and who you know built the crew with Charlie Scurris. I mean there are two of like the nicest, most honest, hardworking people and super talented because they would try to figure out ways to make things work. But we were making that show with like scotch tape and holding it together any way we could.
00:23:18
Speaker 1: I put some on my boobs for that.
00:23:22
Speaker 3: Small house after we went into the say yes, it was.
00:23:27
Speaker 1: A very small amount of tape I was allowed to use.
00:23:29
Speaker 3: I mean, as I understand that you were the fearless one who kind of decided how you wanted to do it.
00:23:35
Speaker 1: I did because I mean my motivation though, and this is kind of how I look at everything was kind of in being considerate of the director of that. I wanted them to be able to shoot it from any angle that they I didn't want the steady cam guy to have to be like, oh I caught her underwear, that's not that SHOT's not going to work. You know. I just wanted to be like, let me just make this easy on everybody.
00:23:56
Speaker 3: I'm amazed the camera crew could even pull focus that day. I mean everybody, everybody was, you know, in awe, and and the film speaks for itself. I mean, it's got to be one of the great comedy performance, isn't you.
00:24:09
Speaker 1: Oh thank you? So. Circling back to there wasn't a lot of money there was, you feel like, how did that.
00:24:22
Speaker 6: Affect your experience, you know, in the studio and on set.
00:24:26
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I was young, and I was in my mid thirties. I mean I'd produced you know, two pilots previously, and I had a show that had made sixteen episodes. But we really wanted this to work. And you do what you have to do, and you have to figure out what battles to fight, what battles not to fight, And it's like anything else in life. But we George and I were really holding the show together with the money we had. Every week was a fight. Every there was stuff with a studio breathe, you know, coming and like you know, standing there by the t rock, you know, to buy the to pull the plug you know on the generators. Wow, because we were shooting you know things next days. Yeah, And in fairness, we didn't do anything wrong. The show had a massive appetite. It was a big show, huge cast. I mean really unusual that you know, you'd be lucky to have two or three leads on a TV show. We had a bunch of leads. Then we had a bunch of co leads, and we had I think fourteen series in some capacity series regulars, whether they were a series regular in their deal or not, but we had to track them. Plus we had a bunch of young kids, which presents its own challenges because you can't shoot that. You can't work an eight hour day with a bunch of young kids, let alone a fourteen hour day. Yeah, And so at the time we were just doing everything we could to get to air because we thought that we had something unique and special and then fortunately, you know, the ratings came out and I think they were the biggest ratings in er It was enormous.
00:25:57
Speaker 4: Wow. So with that amount of oversight when it came to budgeting and things like that. I know we've we've talked about it from how it felt as actors on the show, and we've talked about like the little bits that we sort of surmised, Like we mentioned Terry and maybe Nicolette's nipples being a problem at one point that maybe you've got notes on Uh huh, do you have more to say on that?
00:26:17
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I think they were concerned about advertisers and they and so so and I at the time pushed back and I said, we're doing a show about women, but we don't like women's bodies. And you know, I didn't win that argument. And what we ended up doing was in post production blurring them out a little bit, or painting them out.
00:26:36
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh, wow, you had your nipples blurret out.
00:26:39
Speaker 6: I wonder who had that job.
00:26:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:26:41
Speaker 3: By the way, so the audience understands the women were wearing clothes, it's just you know, they wanted, you know, in scenes I guess where you didn't want to wear a bra. You didn't feel it was appropriate to.
00:26:51
Speaker 1: It was always wearing a bra. But I think when it's cold, your nipples get hard and then you know they poke out through the shirt. I mean what is interesting is as we were watching it, and maybe you listened to this, I did bring up like, wow, I kind of loosely remember being told can we put your nipples away somehow because they're causing a problem and it costs extra money to have to air brush them out, like and me thinking, you know, from my point of view, I'm not doing that, Like that's not a big deal. But it's because I'm in my body, like I'm wearing a bra, I'm wearing a shirt like that feels normal to me. It did like asking me to put like, you know, gauze over my nipples or something like that, it starts to feel.
00:27:37
Speaker 3: Like what, I just have an issue with it. And in fairness, listen, I I can't say it enough. We're doing a show about women. There's nothing wrong with the woman's body. These are dressed women. This is not a nudity issue, right, So for me, it was something that you know, I lost that fight. You don't win fights with standards and practices. I've only won one in my entire career when I was at CBS, and it came back to bite me in the bus.
00:28:03
Speaker 2: Well, I'm curious. So you're for the first you know, thirteen episodes. You're doing this on a shoe string scotch tape budget. You don't know if it's going to be successful. Then the ratings start coming in, then the show blows up. How did that change your working experience?
00:28:20
Speaker 3: It helped, and it made everything harder because suddenly the cast, in particular, there was not a free moment of time. ABC had not had a hit in so long, and that year, as you guys remember, it's been written about, Bill Carter wrote a book called Desperate Networks, and it talked about how ABC went from fourth place to first place, and on the back of Desperate and loss, and then Gray's Anatomy came mid season, and so you know, suddenly we were so in demand. So we did two Oprah show, we did every weekend. You know, the girls were being in Forgive me for calling you the girls. I hope that's OK. They were back in twenty twenty two thousand and four, so I guess, you know, you gardeners can have you know, we could have pedophilia and not talk about it because it's two thousand and four, and God did that make me uncomfortable.
00:29:12
Speaker 5: Watching those Yeah.
00:29:14
Speaker 3: So we can come back to that. But but suddenly everybody is in demand. And you have to understand, ABC went from like not having any water running to being like gushing in success. And suddenly it didn't just translate to you know, for Desperate Housewives or Lost or Grays. It was also Good Morning America. So you know, Diane Sawyer did a special. They would they wanted everything they could get of the women, and and you know, I felt terrible at the time because you know, we forget that we were in a paparazzi era in two thousand and four. You guys had no privacy. You were followed off the studio lot, followed to your homes. I mean, you'd had success before, so you were aware of how to manage it.
00:30:01
Speaker 1: And we were followed home from the hospital when Emerson was born, like they've literally followed us in.
00:30:07
Speaker 3: And so you at least had like, you know, gates around you, you had a private area, you could go home to Marsha had a little picket fence, I mean, and they would just stare and shoot pictures of her through the windows. And so, you know, I don't think anybody was prepared to take care of you guys properly, to give you the rest you needed to make sure you had security. I mean, I think it would be done so differently. But we live in a world where we don't have mega hits like that anymore. There's no show that everybody watches at nine o'clock on Sunday night.
00:30:39
Speaker 4: Were there was conversations being had or not even I try to.
00:30:44
Speaker 3: I mean, I think it was a different time. And again, I you know, it's it's hard because everybody felt like, well, they're lucky, like they're lucky because they're on a hit and this is great for them, and everybody feels lucky to be on a hit. But you could be lucky on a hit, and you can also be exhausted or be you know. You know, Marcia couldn't go to the supermarket, you know, she was being followed. She had to go in full hair and makeup because Papa Razzi were dying to get a shot of the women not looking like they were perfect and it was a lot of pressure forever.
00:31:22
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can imagine.
00:31:24
Speaker 1: So you I know, you were talking about Danny Elfman and he only did the the trailer, I mean, the main title music. But I felt like, first of all Wassteria Lane itself was a character in the show as strong as any cast member, and I would love to know how Universal got chosen and how that street in particular became Wasteria Lane. But also, like I know, you were really involved with the music throughout the show, and I feel like that has such a central part in its success of it the way it looked. Can you tell us about that?
00:32:03
Speaker 3: Sure? So, I mean, I think going back to my initial statement about sort of American Beauty meets Edward Scissorhands, it was it created a picture or I had a vision for what the show should be. And in fairness to Mark, I mean Mark, I would say, if you look at our roles, he was the architect. He wrote this amazing script. And then, as you guys know, because you read a lot of scripts, somebody has to take that script and turn it into you know, film, and in television, you know, in a feature film, the director does that. In television the producers are much more involved. So it was we got very lucky that my previous show had gone down, because we inherited an amazing crew, and the crew stayed with the show for many, many years, and so those guys hit the ground running. So we had a brilliant art department. We already had a working relationship because I knew them well, and so we scouted a bunch of neighborhoods around LA and what quickly became a parent was we need to own a cult to sack and in success, nobody wants, you know, camera crews and people filming in their neighborhood at four o'clock in the morning. So then it really starts to narrow down. Where could we do this. We talked about building everything at Disney Range, okay, and and that wasn't going to be No, that didn't turn out to be practical. We looked at the Warner Brothers a lot, because they have that little lot of houses you know from sixties television, fifties and sixties television. And then you know, I said, why don't we go look at Universal and that street hadn't been touched. It was dilapidated. So one of the things we had to do was repaint and freshen up and dress an entire street, you know, and that's a multi acre set. I mean that again, TV shows at that time did not have the budgets they have now, right, so, you know, no one had made a Game of Thrones then, and so so the idea that we were going to dress up a whole neighborhood, paint every single house, find you know, and give it a look. And I know you as we're talking about some of the sets, some of those houses are just facades. There's nothing in them. And some of them we had to build sets and try to you know, put breeze I think dining room inside one of them, living room. And so we just kind of faked it until we got stage space.
00:34:15
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:34:16
Speaker 5: Yeah, because when did that happen? When did we get the stages?
00:34:19
Speaker 3: When? When when the show got picked up, we got more stages and we started building and we realized once the show became a hit, you know, the network realized it was in the studio, realized it was going to be around for a while.
00:34:29
Speaker 1: But you know, I mean talk about like sustaining like that with Steria, Lane is still on the Universal Tram tour. Yeah, like I mean, it's a highlight.
00:34:38
Speaker 5: It's a huge draw.
00:34:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a huge draw. Isn't that crazy that you created this. I wouldn't say a neighborhood that didn't exist.
00:34:46
Speaker 3: I think we had an idea that, you know, and Mark and I actually did talk about the fact that we decided together that with Steria Lane, we were never going to give it a location, right, and and the sets were iconic, I mean, the network liked it. But then I would get phone calls where I get these panic phone calls where they'd see the dailies, which is the film that comes out every day. The street's too bright or it's too prettier, there's too many flowers. So I would, you know, So I would go, okay, and I would get in my golf cart and I would drive up from the production office, you know, putt putt putt up and around the hill and get into a stereo lane. I would literally remove one flower and I would and I would call the network back and I would say, listen, guys, you know totally hear you. I went up there myself. I pulled it back and you have to realize, like there's there's so much fear and anxiety that goes into a show before it goes on air, right, And this is true of every show I've ever worked on. There's just a tremendous amount of second guessing by everybody because who have you met who doesn't think they have a good opinion.
00:35:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was just talking to my manager about this. There's so much scared filmmaking because especially you know, you only have so much money.
00:36:08
Speaker 6: Studios have mandates they want to meet.
00:36:10
Speaker 2: And everyone is like, how can we hit every box that we're supposed to hit and not offend anybody? And I mean, I think what's amazing is that you created something so distinct even with all of those factors.
00:36:22
Speaker 3: I think, listen, we had a vision. We had an amazing team of people, and it starts with mark script and that script to the you know, I rewatched the pilot, which I hadn't seen in twenty years. The script is so stellar. It has so many good move moments. Every single scene in that script does something for the show. And to set up four characters plus Edie plus each of the guys, and you knew who every character was, every adult character was in that pilot, and then you I mean Andrea. I mean, my god, your performances were are It's funny because now I've met the grown woman, But to think about that, you were just a kid, and you were so natural and so funny and so good and so charming, and the relationship you had with your mom where you kind of knew all her insecurities and loved her anyway and brought that. And so to Mark's credit, I mean, he wrote a masterpiece. My job then became to keep everybody from touching the script before we started shooting.
00:37:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, were there people at the studio that wanted it change.
00:37:30
Speaker 3: After the read through, which was three days before we filmed, they gave a bunch of notes, and I remember the studio had brought me in and I had to turn to my friends at the studio and say, I'm sorry, you don't get to give notes now. And they said what I said, We're locked. I mean, the director is prepped, You've had the script for nine months. Now is not the time to give notes. And I think they were initially concerned about Breeze dialogue was very heightened to a Los Angeles audience. You know, she's pleased as punch, her little her little expressions in euphemisms. I think to Los Angeles executives felt unnatural, and to Mark's credit, like he was his ear was leaning and picking up something else, which was you know, the genius of the show is that people in Blue states could watch it and think they were watching something that was satirical, and people in red states could watch the exact same show and connected the characters in a totally different way. And I think Mark's neutrality about how he wrote his characters allowed that to happen.
00:38:31
Speaker 1: Wow, that is really a good observation. I really agree. And I but I have to say I've said a lot of Marcia Marsham Marshall because she's so great. Yeah, but I can't think of anybody else that could have taken those, as you say, kind of strange still more stilted words and somehow ground them into a humanity that actually came out of her mouth and made you believe it now.
00:39:01
Speaker 3: Because on one level her character seems really heightened. Yeah, And on another, to your point, you you really connect with her and she breaks your heart. I mean, you know when Rex asked for a divorce and through the whole first season and you know, he she really really I think was approaching everything as this is this is a real person. This is somebody who who has who's done everything in her life that she thought was right and was going to make her happy and she wasn't. And again, that was the genius of the show, that each of the women had gone down a path before before the show started and thought they were going to find happiness, and that each of them we meet them in this moment in time where each of them is confronting what does happy look like? And I think that's why the show resonated not just with women in America, but also with a lot of men. And at one point we had that crazy thing where Edie did the Monday Night Football spot that caused.
00:40:00
Speaker 1: Oh, oh my gosh.
00:40:01
Speaker 5: Oh wait, no, there was a thing in a locker room right, Oh my gosh.
00:40:04
Speaker 3: I totally forgot about this thing and it blew up. But when they came and pitched it to us, ABC, Monday Night Football called me and said, we want to do this thing, and you know, we want to help you know your show, and we have more men watching our show than you have watching Monday Night Football, So let's just reset the conversation.
00:40:21
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:40:22
Speaker 1: Wait, well, I'm sort of loosely remembering this. She did a commercial in a.
00:40:25
Speaker 5: Towel in a locker room.
00:40:27
Speaker 3: Yes, it was a promo and I haven't I haven't watched it. I can't. But it caused it caused a scandal. It was sexual, you know. And I don't think she did what was scripted. It wasn't anything she did. It was what everybody decided that she should do.
00:40:40
Speaker 4: And it was because of it being on Family Night football, right, I mean, that's why it was so scandalous.
00:40:46
Speaker 5: I don't think it in and of itself was very offensive.
00:40:48
Speaker 1: Do you have like when you sit this far away and you like look at it and you go like.
00:40:56
Speaker 5: I did that.
00:40:57
Speaker 1: I was a part of that. Do you have things that you that like either scenes or moments or or or or struggles that you conquered over that like you you are proud of them? Or and do you have things that you like just want to be like, I'm so glad that I can just put that to rest and walk away.
00:41:19
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, you know, Desperate was was a wild time in my life because I was very young as a producer and as an executive, and it it allowed me. I'm grateful that that script came into my life and allowed me to showcase what I was capable of do it, just like the script allowed you guys as actors to showcase what you were able to do. Mark and I always had different visions of the show, and tonally, his taste was more comedic than mine. And what ended up happening over the course of the first season was, you know, my I was cutting those first thirteen upsodes because Mark was so far behind in writing that basically the editorial fell to me. And then, you know, and there were times where there'd be a gag or something that he loved that I just thought was silly, and I'd take it out, and so there was a schism forming between the two of us. Case wise, from the beginning.
00:42:21
Speaker 1: I understand that I mean I yeah, and I understand that I mean I as as I said, like I feel like tonally it was could be very good. And then there were definitely episodes, maybe not so much in the first season, but like it you know, would dip into like this doesn't really make sense or this is too can't be well.
00:42:45
Speaker 4: It's hard work to maintain that specific tightrope of that balance between the comedy, the drama, the mystery, the surrealism. You know, it's not an easy thing to maintain, imagine from all different sides, but it is the thing that was so special about the show. And I think that so many people, even me at thirteen, I remember people telling me after they watched the show that the tone was so unique and people just loved that about it.
00:43:18
Speaker 3: And what's interesting is, so I watched the pilot again, and the pilot had a different composer than our series composer, and so one of the things that we had to do was invent a new sound because dramas on TV were scored with drama soundtracks and comedies were scored with comedy soundtracks, and Desperate had to let the audience know that things were ironic at times, or things were not what they seemed, or a character who's doing something straight down the middle, Oh, you've got to think about that. And so, you know, the composer of my previous show is a guy named Steve Jablonski. Steve was introduced to me through Hans Zimmer, who was the greatest of the great and Steve was composing our score and he had done a demo for Desperate Housewives, and I think Mark had felt at the time that I had hired too many of my production people. And by the way, in fairness to him, this was his project. He got saddled with an entire crew, he got saddled with an art department, I mean, and and so he chose a composer for the pilot, and we realized that wasn't the right composer. He chose another composer, realized it wasn't the right composer. And then what ended up happening is really funny. Steve Jablonski's music was in the Avid, which is the editing machine that we could, and some editor found these tracks and knew none of the politics. Oh wow, And so he cut the episode that begins with going into the Furnace. Yeah, you know, re insiderated. Uh, Steve had cut. The editor had cut Steve's music, and Mark and Iron and edited. Mark quen this music. This is the music. Who did this? This is perfect? Oh and and the poor editor turns and goes he looks in Steve Jablonski and Mark just looks it. Uh oh, But Steve got the job. And then Steve and I. So what happened is, you guys would shoot all day. We'd go to set. I would be there at call, which is like six in the morning, six thirty. We would wrap at six to seven to eight. I would then go into editorial to check on the scripts. Then I would drive from the Universal all the way to Steve's house in Santa Monica and we would And he liked to work late at night, so from ten or eleven at night till two or three in the morning, we'd work on the music.
00:45:31
Speaker 6: So did you not sleep for a year? Nine months?
00:45:37
Speaker 1: Wow? Wow?
00:45:38
Speaker 5: It is like having a baby. Then it is.
00:45:41
Speaker 4: It's like you're building growing something for nine months, you know.
00:45:46
Speaker 3: Like I said, it was magical because the work was so good. We all wanted we all wanted success. Everybody showed up. I mean I watched Terry come to work incredibly sick sometimes and like I'm looking in the truck with il I think she's good. I mean, we should send her home, and she would say she's fine. She would literally like hobble to set because she had a huge fever. And then the minute they called action, the magic showed up, the comedy showed up. It was like nothing was wrong, and they'd say cut and you'd collapse into your chair. And I don't know how you did it, but you always managed to when when the work was happening. That's what mattered.
00:46:24
Speaker 1: I seem to recall Felicity saying to me once like, what's wrong with you? You're always sick? And I at the time I remember sort of feeling like, kind of offended because I think of myself as a healthy person. But when I look back on it now, I go, Yeah, every mom I know that has a child between four and ten years old is constantly sick because your kid is bringing home every virus every other day from kindergarten in first grade and second grade. And so yeah, I probably was sick, and Emerson, it was your fault.
00:46:59
Speaker 6: Well, well I am don't.
00:47:01
Speaker 2: I'm so sorry, but I'm so happy that you have such deep mental and physical fortitude that you were able to rise up.
00:47:09
Speaker 4: Well to rise up, Okay, I wanted because we had mentioned obviously, Terry and I hadn't really rewatched the show at all basically until we started this podcast.
00:47:18
Speaker 5: Emerson of course is experiencing it for the first time.
00:47:20
Speaker 6: And what a show it's been.
00:47:22
Speaker 1: Yes, our finale, see.
00:47:23
Speaker 4: There's so far there have been some really standout moments from the first season. We've talked about obviously Terry's amazing naked locked out moment, and the dinner party scene from the same episode episode seven was a really big highlight that we really loved. There's that amazing scene with Felicity, the Lynette scene, the mental breakdown in the kitchen, that felt like a really strong moment from the show. And I know you said you haven't rewatched it really but maybe did in advance of this.
00:47:50
Speaker 3: You know, I didn't watch seven again, but I remember it really well because it was the first time that we actually veered from comedy into serious draw and that that adderall storyline about a mom just wanting to compete and just wanting to do good, which was I think so relatable to so many women. But you know, to the writer's credit, they took it down its natural path and she finally had a breakdown, and again the network was very concerned about this is a comedy, like what are you guys doing? And when that's and that show got a huge response from others and from women. I think people really felt like they could see something that rung true in their own life. And so from that point on, I think we knew we could go where we needed to go with the women as long as it was based in something real.
00:48:35
Speaker 1: Wow, that's that's amazing. And I will tell you what's real and true our love for you, Michael Edlstein. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time and stories. It's been amazing and we will all be coming back. Later this week, we will jump into episode twenty three, the finale of season one. One wonderful day, and I'm sure that it will be a wonderful day as we meet some new neighbors on Westeria Lane and we tie up loose ends. Or will we be able to tie up loose ends. You'll have to wait and see and join us next time because we are desperately devoted to you.
Speaker 1: Welcome to desperately devoted Think of us as your favorite neighbors as we chat about life and relationships, all.
00:00:08
Speaker 2: While we revisit the iconic show Desperate Housewives together.
00:00:11
Speaker 1: I'm Terry Hatcher, I'm Andrea Bowen, and I'm Emerson Tenny. You know how when you connect with an old friend that you haven't seen in a long time, and you have that feeling of where you just pick up right where you left off and the best, it's the best feeling. So today I have that feeling because and you super Desperate Housewives fans, you are going to be so excited for this. We have a guest here, a very special guest, somebody who you might not immediately recognize their name, but you will recognize the influence that this person had on the show because it was everywhere from the cast to the music, from the way it looked on screen, I mean, from dealing with the network stuff that went on behind the scenes that nobody's ever heard of. This person was one of two people that helped it get there and keep it there, and he was one of the two executive producers that had everything to do with getting this show made. Of course, everyone's familiar with Mark Cherry, right, So it's about time that you get to meet the man behind so much else that happened on this show. He has been my friend from the beginning, and I've missed him desperately. He went off after the first season to be the president of NBC Universal International Studios, which, by the way, produced a little show called Downton Abbey, among other great shows. So we are so very desperately devoted to him for being here with us today bringing his unique and encompassing perspective. Everyone please go crazy and welcome. Executive producer Michael Etelstein.
00:01:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so great to see all of you. I mean, it's been twenty years. Basically until a couple weeks ago, I hadn't seen Emerson since what you were seven? Yeah, you were thirteen. Andrea, Yeah, and you look amazing. And then Terry it's it's I can't believe it.
00:02:06
Speaker 1: It's it's been so great to reconnect. It just it really and we're going to get into all the stuff that's come up for us. But I'm it's crazy kind of the timing of us reconnecting and us doing this podcast, and it makes so much sense for you to be here because by the way, Andrew and I don't remember anything. And not only that, Like, I think people have these assumptions that we know more than we know, just because we were on the show and we really were such a little part of it and really only in front of the camera, Like I wasn't even ever in a writer's room, do you know what I mean? Like, I think there's assumptions that I know much more than I know. So I'm glad you're here to help reveal stuff that I know our fans are going to want to know about.
00:02:52
Speaker 4: It's like, the first season was centered around a mystery on the story of the story on the street. But this is kind of like our first season one mystery. We can't wait here everything you have to show.
00:03:01
Speaker 1: To surprise us. So let's just can we just start at the beginning, which is, how the hell did you get involved with this thing?
00:03:06
Speaker 3: So at the time, I was producing a show for Touchstone, which is Disney's television armor. It was then and my show, which was called Threat Matrix, was coming to an end. It didn't get picked up for another season, and the studio Josh Berry, who was amazing, sent me the script. I was so busy producing another show. I didn't read it for six weeks. Oh wow, and it sat on my desk and Josh finally is like, dude, are you're going to read the script? And so I read it then and I immediately thought, this is the most amazing pilot script i'd read.
00:03:39
Speaker 1: That's my recollection of I'm a little vague on where I was. I somehow picture that I was poolside. I think it was in Tucson. I was at a hotel. I don't know why that comes to my mind, but I do remember saying to my manager at the time, this is like the best script I've ever read. I'd do anything to be any of these women in this show.
00:03:59
Speaker 3: Well, it's interesting because that script was so popular and as you know, in Hollywood explain to your listeners. So in Hollywood, you know, most times with big actresses like yourself, it was offer only. And what that means is the actor won't come in and read, and the only thing you can do is make them an offer, and you have to hope that you cast the show properly. We had decided Mark myself and the director had decided that everybody had to come in and read, which was highly unusual.
00:04:30
Speaker 1: Can I tell you something. I actually love reading, I love auditioning. I've never been one of the actresses that had even for the smallest parts. And my reasoning is because I don't want to show up this on the set and have the director whose vision I'm trying to execute go, that's not how I see it like that's I didn't see it like that, right. I want to have the exchange of bringing my creativity and my talent to a producer and a director's so that we can be like, oh, yeah, she's going to be able to deliver what it is that you want.
00:05:05
Speaker 3: Well, and you were absolutely fearless because I think we made you auditions seven times.
00:05:09
Speaker 2: Wait yeahs wait why so many times?
00:05:13
Speaker 3: You know? It was interesting some of the some of the decisions were instantaneous some of them. So you know, we saw Eva and I know you guys have talked about this. Eva was cast first. She came in. She was supposed to be a supermodel. She's obviously not tall, and we just decided, okay, aside from that, she's it. And she really, you know, wasn't famous at that point. Marca.
00:05:36
Speaker 1: She gives tall though.
00:05:39
Speaker 3: Great energy, and we shot her. If you look at the runway sequence. We shot her from below to make her look taller, but again, it really doesn't matter. Once once the audience connects with a character, they do they don't really care. So Eva was cast first. Marcia came in for Mary Alice because Marcia was studying psychology if I remember, and really wasn't interested in being a full time actress again. And we convinced her as a group to you know, audition for for Bree and thank god we did it. It's unbelievab. Yes, we'll come back to the finale because there's a great moment for her, and then you know, let's see. We we cast Felicity. Felicity was the network actually said to us they didn't need to audition her. She was so hot coming off of an Aaron An Aaron Sorkin show. ABC was desperate for her, and we basically said, right, we're not going to cast anybody who doesn't read. So Felicity came into our little office in Burbank and she came in covered in like baby food, and literally I don't think she actually dressed for the part. I think she just came in as being a mom or a young mom walked in did the scene was like, oh my god, yes that's Lynette, and I literally ran out of the room, called the network and we started making her deal.
00:06:57
Speaker 5: Wow that quickly, Yes it was and.
00:06:59
Speaker 3: We we didn't have to take her to network. And then you know, there was there was one other person we were considering for you know, the role and for Susan. Yeah.
00:07:10
Speaker 1: My memory of my last audition, which I feel like, is accurate. And I don't know if I went up the elevator at ABC with the other person that was trying to do my role, or if like we we traded off, like she went up as I came down or whatever. But I do remember my my last audition being so good that when I left, I was like, well, at least I didn't screw that up. Like if they don't cast me, then they don't cast me. But it's not because you like I forgot my lines or I didn't do a good job, or I was having a bad day, or like I recall it being a kind of a knocked it out of the park audition and just the kind where you can be like if I don't get it, I don't get it.
00:07:59
Speaker 2: I remember you telling me that story, and I think about that. Sometimes when I pitch a movie, like the two times I've been hired, the two movies that I've really been hired, I guess it's been hired to write. I have had that feeling where I've left the pitch and I've thought of that moment because you've told me about it, and I've been like, well, I kind of already know that this like exists in the world in front of me, and now the pieces are coming into place, and if I don't get it has nothing to do with anything that I did.
00:08:24
Speaker 5: Are we named that way? Are we naming the other actors?
00:08:27
Speaker 3: I will say this in fairness to her. She was brilliant. She was not American, and when she did when she did comedy with an American accent, she lost that twinkle. And she was really good and really surprising because you wouldn't have thought of her for that role. But at the end of the day, so I don't even remember us bringing somebody else to ABC, and I remember you know you you had canceled. We actually had an ABC audition set up for you and you canceled it, which was unheard of, Like actors never canceled network read throughs or auditions and you weren't whatever. I don't know if you weren't feeling well or whatever, but we wanted you enough that we rescheduled, I think for the next day or the day after, and you came in and the rest was history.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: Oh so grateful and.
00:09:19
Speaker 3: Well, listen, I mean we are. I've been rewatching episodes which I haven't looked at in twenty years. And the nuance, the subtlety, the vulnerability, the ability to be just hilariously hilariously funny. And I know you guys have talked about what it's like the naked scene, which was still one of the greatest moments I think in TV to pull that off in the complexity of it and also be completely charming and vulnerable and sweet and.
00:09:45
Speaker 1: So tell us about you were saying like that. There was a lot to the timing of it that I think I've totally forgotten that we You had the script in January, so.
00:09:54
Speaker 3: I got the script. So here's what happened. So, so you know, Mark Cherry had been a sitcom producer and had never produced a scripted drama, which is a very different way of filming. So you know, when you shoot a sitcom, it's multi camera, you shoot everything is sort of on a proscenium and you're done. As you guys know, scripted television, there's a whole other thing. You shoot in one direction, you turn around, you shoot the other way, Because you have to deal with all the lighting, etc. And it's technically just very, very challenging to make a drama. So the studio felt like Mark needed a partner, and the person who was supposed to be his partner got a job executive producing General Hospital because Chuck Pratt was a longtime soap opera guy, and because Chuck wasn't available, it created an opening. Mark met a few producers and I think to this day that I was probably the least offensive or the one And to be candid with you, the studio was very concerned about Mark being a gay man and me being a gay man, and I had to go have a meeting and kind of pitch my take on the show because they were honestly afraid at the time the show would become campy.
00:11:03
Speaker 6: Oh that's so interesting, yeah.
00:11:05
Speaker 3: And so it was like that was the elephant in the room that I addressed in my meeting, And to me, when I read the script, I had two images in my head it was American Beauty meets Edward Scissorhand.
00:11:17
Speaker 6: Love the references.
00:11:18
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:11:18
Speaker 3: And so when you see the show, because American Beauty kind of showed us what was lurking behind our neighbors doors, and it won the Oscar and it was such a presence. I mean, it's hard to remember because it's you know, we're going back, you know, twenty plus years. I remember that, and yeah, it was brilliant. And then the idea of this suburban world that Tim Burton created with Edward Scissorhand, where it was you know, we're going to take you to some very dark places, but if we keep it really bright, we can take the audience there. So that's what I pitched.
00:11:47
Speaker 2: Wo wait, I have a question. Is that why Danny Elfman did the music?
00:11:51
Speaker 3: I mean Danny Elfman we got very lucky because at that point in time, he'd only done The Simpsons for TV. So Danny did only the main title. He didn't do any of the episod Yes, so he did our main title, which was you know, iconic and absolutely amazing.
00:12:06
Speaker 2: I just associate him so much with Timberton, and because he's scored so many of his films that that's so interesting that that's a reference.
00:12:12
Speaker 3: And he got it and it's his first take on the theme song was a little less resolved and a little darker. And we sat with him and talked with him, and he's such a genius. I had to go. I was sent with the network notes to go, you know, give notes.
00:12:25
Speaker 1: To explain to a musician that you want it subtenly changed.
00:12:28
Speaker 3: It's so interesting because the way he built it was it kind of built without a resolve a musical and what he did. So I had to go give Danny Elfman, like one of the greatest composers of all time, musical notes and like you go over and I went to his house and in the basement and to Danny's credit, goes, oh, yeah, yeah, you just want to resolve, and he just looked at me, not up and down. I watched him change one hundred lines of music, Like he literally sat there, changed one hundred lines of music, you know, instrument parts right, and then push play and I'm like, yeah, that's good. Wow. He just did it right in front of my eyes in like the space of a half hour. And then it came back to bite me a little bit because when we went to go score the sound. You know that that opening. We did it on the Warner Brothers a lot on their big orchestral stage, and Danny wanted twenty more musicians or something like. His agent called me because Danny needs more musicians and Disney which week we can get into, you know, before the show had gone on the air, Disney was very very conscious about spending.
00:13:32
Speaker 1: Money, right, Okay, So, which is why.
00:13:34
Speaker 3: You were in Flip.
00:13:35
Speaker 5: Flops history solved? Can we also touch on how Charles McDougall got involved.
00:13:41
Speaker 3: Sure, that's a good story.
00:13:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, great, let's talk about Charles McDougal so much you can see.
00:13:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, So in January I'm hired, Okay, and then you know or maybe it's yeah, I guess beginning of January or late so it had to be late December. I think I was hired because we started filming like the third week in January. Yeah, we delivered in March. No, No, we started prep in January and then we started filming in March.
00:14:05
Speaker 1: Okay, that sounds right.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: So yes, So I was probably hired in January, and the first job I had was to go with Mark to a director's home and talk about the script, and this was a big feature film director who was who had a huge, huge romantic comedy movie that everybody knows. And we go and have a meeting and then my phone rings about five or six hours after he says, right, you seem like a lovely guy, but I can't work with him. Oh okay, and so we quit. Wow, And we were in that frantic And what people don't realize, and what's changed so much about TV now is that you know, pilot season. Every studio was producing pilots, every network was producing pilots. So you are chasing talent like crazy.
00:14:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, your case was always it was always built around this.
00:15:00
Speaker 3: You would January to March.
00:15:02
Speaker 1: In January to March, you would find out if you got picked up in May. Then you would start shooting your year series like August, September earlier. Yeah, and then you would do that through April. You would have a little break and then you would do it again.
00:15:14
Speaker 6: So you're chasing your cast.
00:15:17
Speaker 1: It's all getting shot at the same time.
00:15:19
Speaker 3: The hunger games of hiring people.
00:15:22
Speaker 1: Now, of course it isn't like that because everyone is desperate for a job. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, anyway, started to cut your no.
00:15:29
Speaker 3: You're not, and so it's it's so what happened was there was a vacuum and the network wanted a big film person and I'm like, you know, we make TV. We need someone who understands TV. And then we had to go a little bit deeper because going back to two thousand and four, no one had mixed drama and comedy on American television. And I know we won, you know, awards and comedy categories, but you know, the show was really not a comedy and it wasn't a drama. It was entirely its own thing. And so I started to think about who knows how to mix comedy and drama, and the Brits and watching British television had been doing it for years absolutely, and Charles had directed a British program called Queer as Folk, which was a really complicated mix. It was a realistic look on sort of gay life, but it was funny, it was real. He'd also done Sex in the City, and so the fact that he'd done sex in the City made me and I checked with my friends who were producers there, and they said they were very happy with the film. They had everything they needed. The challenge with Charles was at Disney. He'd done some directing for them and had gone wildly over budget, and the studio didn't want to hire it, okay, and so and everybody wanted to feature film person and somehow, some way, I kind of just kept twisting arms until they agreed to hire Trump.
00:16:50
Speaker 1: You know when Desperate Housewives was at its best is when it was writing this tone of I love your examples of American beauty meets Edward Scissorhands is sort of surreal, comedic but also grounded and emotional. And when I think it wasn't great is when it dipped off into sort of more slapsticky, less consistent, you know, with the characters.
00:17:18
Speaker 4: Like too much of one or the other, because that balance that that's where it's magic, really lie.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: And Charles was just all over that. I think he's so tremendously talented.
00:17:27
Speaker 3: It was so brilliant. He came to set every day with a shot list. He handed it out to us, he handed out to the camera team, and he was wildly prepared. I mean, at one point I saw him skulking through the bushes looking at angles and things like in his suits. Because you guys talked about he always wore suit. English directors wore suits. I mean the thing I love about English directors. And I went over to London and you know, and built NBC's business there. English directors are trained both in camera and in acting. And a lot of times in the US TV directors either come out of the the the talent acting part and then become a director, or they come out of the camera world and become a director. But the English directors really have both raft and in fact, when we did the thing with Oprah where she came on our show, yeah, you know, Charles, I brought Charles back because we had to cut Oprah into all these scenes from the first season and it was so technically challenging that we needed a director who could actually understand the technical challenge and do all that. And so remember we we had we worked Oprah an eighteen hour day.
00:18:33
Speaker 6: Oh my, I'm so excited to see this.
00:18:36
Speaker 3: So it's on. You could google it to Oprah Winfrey with Stereia Lane, folks. So we made it. We made an eight minute movie where Oprah came on. It was for the Oprah Winfrey Show. And I took the guys and that's where the guys went on Oprah with that movie.
00:18:49
Speaker 5: Oh Okay, and then we didn't get to have Charles back.
00:18:52
Speaker 3: Charles, I think was a brilliant pilot director, and I don't think Charles had any desire to to kind of be an episodic director.
00:19:01
Speaker 1: It's a different beast like the directors of pilots, and this is not unusual. They'll put their stamp all over it, and because they have that bit of extra time to almost treat it like a mini movie. But then the pace of episodic television, it just doesn't offer them the room to create I think the way that they want to, right, That's why it's a different It's almost like a I don't want to say cookie cutter, because I love some of the really great episodic directors we had on our show, but like it definitely is you get less time and less ownership of your vision.
00:19:38
Speaker 3: Well, the pilot, I think we shot for fourteen or fifteen days, Yeah, which was a long for a drama pilot. Then now it's nothing because the whole world has changed. But you know, a typical episode of Desperate was supposed to fit into eight days, and it never really did, so we ended up having second units.
00:19:54
Speaker 1: And we you know, okay, so since we're there, and since we're not going to spend five hours on this episode of the podcast, you don't know about it, even though I think there's stuff to fill it. But since we're there, I know, you and I when we were having dinner, you mentioned and I had kind of forgotten about this too when the thing kicked off. So when we got picked up and we re started shooting the season, that was in June or right June or yeah, I.
00:20:25
Speaker 3: Think it was probably June.
00:20:26
Speaker 1: And so it was, you know, it was shooting episodes of the show from June until September before we knew that it was a hit.
00:20:35
Speaker 3: It went on the air in October the beginning. It went on the air late, so the beginning of October.
00:20:39
Speaker 1: Okay, And so all that time, and you can talk to this better because you reminded me, and I think this is insane. In the beginning. You know, people think that actors are like so spoiled and so like they get all the glamour things. They had the housewives sharing a double trailer, like honeywagon kind of trailer, so like we just had these half room trailers that were connected. But because we were so far behind because it was such a huge show to shoot. They added a second unit, and the trailer would go with whoever was on the first unit, and the second unit wouldn't have a trailer, And so there were or a hairdresser or there.
00:21:26
Speaker 3: You'd have a hair dresser. You wouldn't have somebody who knew how to do your hair.
00:21:32
Speaker 1: This is unheard of for the leads of a show to not have the hairdresser and the makeup artist and their trailer with them when they're working on a regular basis. It wasn't like a one off one day, can we get through this? It became a like and you remind I totally forgotten about this, and you reminded me of all this, and it just it brings back how from the beginning there was drama that that created that we had nothing to do with.
00:22:05
Speaker 3: There's no question. And I think part of what's interesting is is in retrospect, you know, the show was a massive hit once it hit the air, but if you go back and look at Disney and ABC in particular, they hadn't launched a successful show in five years. The company was losing probably hundreds of millions of dollars a year on pilots and TV shows that weren't getting picked up to future seasons. So from their point of view, you know, they they they were really struggling financially. And I went on to run a studio, so I understand the pressures of making your budget work and hitting your numbers. The thing that was interesting was we never had enough money in those first thirteen episodes to actually make the show.
00:22:48
Speaker 1: We finally have answered why I had my own wardrobe and.
00:22:51
Speaker 3: Why so there was never enough money? It was there was we were. We were George Perkins, who I know you guys have talked about who is our amazing line and who you know built the crew with Charlie Scurris. I mean there are two of like the nicest, most honest, hardworking people and super talented because they would try to figure out ways to make things work. But we were making that show with like scotch tape and holding it together any way we could.
00:23:18
Speaker 1: I put some on my boobs for that.
00:23:22
Speaker 3: Small house after we went into the say yes, it was.
00:23:27
Speaker 1: A very small amount of tape I was allowed to use.
00:23:29
Speaker 3: I mean, as I understand that you were the fearless one who kind of decided how you wanted to do it.
00:23:35
Speaker 1: I did because I mean my motivation though, and this is kind of how I look at everything was kind of in being considerate of the director of that. I wanted them to be able to shoot it from any angle that they I didn't want the steady cam guy to have to be like, oh I caught her underwear, that's not that SHOT's not going to work. You know. I just wanted to be like, let me just make this easy on everybody.
00:23:56
Speaker 3: I'm amazed the camera crew could even pull focus that day. I mean everybody, everybody was, you know, in awe, and and the film speaks for itself. I mean, it's got to be one of the great comedy performance, isn't you.
00:24:09
Speaker 1: Oh thank you? So. Circling back to there wasn't a lot of money there was, you feel like, how did that.
00:24:22
Speaker 6: Affect your experience, you know, in the studio and on set.
00:24:26
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I was young, and I was in my mid thirties. I mean I'd produced you know, two pilots previously, and I had a show that had made sixteen episodes. But we really wanted this to work. And you do what you have to do, and you have to figure out what battles to fight, what battles not to fight, And it's like anything else in life. But we George and I were really holding the show together with the money we had. Every week was a fight. Every there was stuff with a studio breathe, you know, coming and like you know, standing there by the t rock, you know, to buy the to pull the plug you know on the generators. Wow, because we were shooting you know things next days. Yeah, And in fairness, we didn't do anything wrong. The show had a massive appetite. It was a big show, huge cast. I mean really unusual that you know, you'd be lucky to have two or three leads on a TV show. We had a bunch of leads. Then we had a bunch of co leads, and we had I think fourteen series in some capacity series regulars, whether they were a series regular in their deal or not, but we had to track them. Plus we had a bunch of young kids, which presents its own challenges because you can't shoot that. You can't work an eight hour day with a bunch of young kids, let alone a fourteen hour day. Yeah, And so at the time we were just doing everything we could to get to air because we thought that we had something unique and special and then fortunately, you know, the ratings came out and I think they were the biggest ratings in er It was enormous.
00:25:57
Speaker 4: Wow. So with that amount of oversight when it came to budgeting and things like that. I know we've we've talked about it from how it felt as actors on the show, and we've talked about like the little bits that we sort of surmised, Like we mentioned Terry and maybe Nicolette's nipples being a problem at one point that maybe you've got notes on Uh huh, do you have more to say on that?
00:26:17
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I think they were concerned about advertisers and they and so so and I at the time pushed back and I said, we're doing a show about women, but we don't like women's bodies. And you know, I didn't win that argument. And what we ended up doing was in post production blurring them out a little bit, or painting them out.
00:26:36
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh, wow, you had your nipples blurret out.
00:26:39
Speaker 6: I wonder who had that job.
00:26:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:26:41
Speaker 3: By the way, so the audience understands the women were wearing clothes, it's just you know, they wanted, you know, in scenes I guess where you didn't want to wear a bra. You didn't feel it was appropriate to.
00:26:51
Speaker 1: It was always wearing a bra. But I think when it's cold, your nipples get hard and then you know they poke out through the shirt. I mean what is interesting is as we were watching it, and maybe you listened to this, I did bring up like, wow, I kind of loosely remember being told can we put your nipples away somehow because they're causing a problem and it costs extra money to have to air brush them out, like and me thinking, you know, from my point of view, I'm not doing that, Like that's not a big deal. But it's because I'm in my body, like I'm wearing a bra, I'm wearing a shirt like that feels normal to me. It did like asking me to put like, you know, gauze over my nipples or something like that, it starts to feel.
00:27:37
Speaker 3: Like what, I just have an issue with it. And in fairness, listen, I I can't say it enough. We're doing a show about women. There's nothing wrong with the woman's body. These are dressed women. This is not a nudity issue, right, So for me, it was something that you know, I lost that fight. You don't win fights with standards and practices. I've only won one in my entire career when I was at CBS, and it came back to bite me in the bus.
00:28:03
Speaker 2: Well, I'm curious. So you're for the first you know, thirteen episodes. You're doing this on a shoe string scotch tape budget. You don't know if it's going to be successful. Then the ratings start coming in, then the show blows up. How did that change your working experience?
00:28:20
Speaker 3: It helped, and it made everything harder because suddenly the cast, in particular, there was not a free moment of time. ABC had not had a hit in so long, and that year, as you guys remember, it's been written about, Bill Carter wrote a book called Desperate Networks, and it talked about how ABC went from fourth place to first place, and on the back of Desperate and loss, and then Gray's Anatomy came mid season, and so you know, suddenly we were so in demand. So we did two Oprah show, we did every weekend. You know, the girls were being in Forgive me for calling you the girls. I hope that's OK. They were back in twenty twenty two thousand and four, so I guess, you know, you gardeners can have you know, we could have pedophilia and not talk about it because it's two thousand and four, and God did that make me uncomfortable.
00:29:12
Speaker 5: Watching those Yeah.
00:29:14
Speaker 3: So we can come back to that. But but suddenly everybody is in demand. And you have to understand, ABC went from like not having any water running to being like gushing in success. And suddenly it didn't just translate to you know, for Desperate Housewives or Lost or Grays. It was also Good Morning America. So you know, Diane Sawyer did a special. They would they wanted everything they could get of the women, and and you know, I felt terrible at the time because you know, we forget that we were in a paparazzi era in two thousand and four. You guys had no privacy. You were followed off the studio lot, followed to your homes. I mean, you'd had success before, so you were aware of how to manage it.
00:30:01
Speaker 1: And we were followed home from the hospital when Emerson was born, like they've literally followed us in.
00:30:07
Speaker 3: And so you at least had like, you know, gates around you, you had a private area, you could go home to Marsha had a little picket fence, I mean, and they would just stare and shoot pictures of her through the windows. And so, you know, I don't think anybody was prepared to take care of you guys properly, to give you the rest you needed to make sure you had security. I mean, I think it would be done so differently. But we live in a world where we don't have mega hits like that anymore. There's no show that everybody watches at nine o'clock on Sunday night.
00:30:39
Speaker 4: Were there was conversations being had or not even I try to.
00:30:44
Speaker 3: I mean, I think it was a different time. And again, I you know, it's it's hard because everybody felt like, well, they're lucky, like they're lucky because they're on a hit and this is great for them, and everybody feels lucky to be on a hit. But you could be lucky on a hit, and you can also be exhausted or be you know. You know, Marcia couldn't go to the supermarket, you know, she was being followed. She had to go in full hair and makeup because Papa Razzi were dying to get a shot of the women not looking like they were perfect and it was a lot of pressure forever.
00:31:22
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can imagine.
00:31:24
Speaker 1: So you I know, you were talking about Danny Elfman and he only did the the trailer, I mean, the main title music. But I felt like, first of all Wassteria Lane itself was a character in the show as strong as any cast member, and I would love to know how Universal got chosen and how that street in particular became Wasteria Lane. But also, like I know, you were really involved with the music throughout the show, and I feel like that has such a central part in its success of it the way it looked. Can you tell us about that?
00:32:03
Speaker 3: Sure? So, I mean, I think going back to my initial statement about sort of American Beauty meets Edward Scissorhands, it was it created a picture or I had a vision for what the show should be. And in fairness to Mark, I mean Mark, I would say, if you look at our roles, he was the architect. He wrote this amazing script. And then, as you guys know, because you read a lot of scripts, somebody has to take that script and turn it into you know, film, and in television, you know, in a feature film, the director does that. In television the producers are much more involved. So it was we got very lucky that my previous show had gone down, because we inherited an amazing crew, and the crew stayed with the show for many, many years, and so those guys hit the ground running. So we had a brilliant art department. We already had a working relationship because I knew them well, and so we scouted a bunch of neighborhoods around LA and what quickly became a parent was we need to own a cult to sack and in success, nobody wants, you know, camera crews and people filming in their neighborhood at four o'clock in the morning. So then it really starts to narrow down. Where could we do this. We talked about building everything at Disney Range, okay, and and that wasn't going to be No, that didn't turn out to be practical. We looked at the Warner Brothers a lot, because they have that little lot of houses you know from sixties television, fifties and sixties television. And then you know, I said, why don't we go look at Universal and that street hadn't been touched. It was dilapidated. So one of the things we had to do was repaint and freshen up and dress an entire street, you know, and that's a multi acre set. I mean that again, TV shows at that time did not have the budgets they have now, right, so, you know, no one had made a Game of Thrones then, and so so the idea that we were going to dress up a whole neighborhood, paint every single house, find you know, and give it a look. And I know you as we're talking about some of the sets, some of those houses are just facades. There's nothing in them. And some of them we had to build sets and try to you know, put breeze I think dining room inside one of them, living room. And so we just kind of faked it until we got stage space.
00:34:15
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:34:16
Speaker 5: Yeah, because when did that happen? When did we get the stages?
00:34:19
Speaker 3: When? When when the show got picked up, we got more stages and we started building and we realized once the show became a hit, you know, the network realized it was in the studio, realized it was going to be around for a while.
00:34:29
Speaker 1: But you know, I mean talk about like sustaining like that with Steria, Lane is still on the Universal Tram tour. Yeah, like I mean, it's a highlight.
00:34:38
Speaker 5: It's a huge draw.
00:34:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a huge draw. Isn't that crazy that you created this. I wouldn't say a neighborhood that didn't exist.
00:34:46
Speaker 3: I think we had an idea that, you know, and Mark and I actually did talk about the fact that we decided together that with Steria Lane, we were never going to give it a location, right, and and the sets were iconic, I mean, the network liked it. But then I would get phone calls where I get these panic phone calls where they'd see the dailies, which is the film that comes out every day. The street's too bright or it's too prettier, there's too many flowers. So I would, you know, So I would go, okay, and I would get in my golf cart and I would drive up from the production office, you know, putt putt putt up and around the hill and get into a stereo lane. I would literally remove one flower and I would and I would call the network back and I would say, listen, guys, you know totally hear you. I went up there myself. I pulled it back and you have to realize, like there's there's so much fear and anxiety that goes into a show before it goes on air, right, And this is true of every show I've ever worked on. There's just a tremendous amount of second guessing by everybody because who have you met who doesn't think they have a good opinion.
00:35:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was just talking to my manager about this. There's so much scared filmmaking because especially you know, you only have so much money.
00:36:08
Speaker 6: Studios have mandates they want to meet.
00:36:10
Speaker 2: And everyone is like, how can we hit every box that we're supposed to hit and not offend anybody? And I mean, I think what's amazing is that you created something so distinct even with all of those factors.
00:36:22
Speaker 3: I think, listen, we had a vision. We had an amazing team of people, and it starts with mark script and that script to the you know, I rewatched the pilot, which I hadn't seen in twenty years. The script is so stellar. It has so many good move moments. Every single scene in that script does something for the show. And to set up four characters plus Edie plus each of the guys, and you knew who every character was, every adult character was in that pilot, and then you I mean Andrea. I mean, my god, your performances were are It's funny because now I've met the grown woman, But to think about that, you were just a kid, and you were so natural and so funny and so good and so charming, and the relationship you had with your mom where you kind of knew all her insecurities and loved her anyway and brought that. And so to Mark's credit, I mean, he wrote a masterpiece. My job then became to keep everybody from touching the script before we started shooting.
00:37:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, were there people at the studio that wanted it change.
00:37:30
Speaker 3: After the read through, which was three days before we filmed, they gave a bunch of notes, and I remember the studio had brought me in and I had to turn to my friends at the studio and say, I'm sorry, you don't get to give notes now. And they said what I said, We're locked. I mean, the director is prepped, You've had the script for nine months. Now is not the time to give notes. And I think they were initially concerned about Breeze dialogue was very heightened to a Los Angeles audience. You know, she's pleased as punch, her little her little expressions in euphemisms. I think to Los Angeles executives felt unnatural, and to Mark's credit, like he was his ear was leaning and picking up something else, which was you know, the genius of the show is that people in Blue states could watch it and think they were watching something that was satirical, and people in red states could watch the exact same show and connected the characters in a totally different way. And I think Mark's neutrality about how he wrote his characters allowed that to happen.
00:38:31
Speaker 1: Wow, that is really a good observation. I really agree. And I but I have to say I've said a lot of Marcia Marsham Marshall because she's so great. Yeah, but I can't think of anybody else that could have taken those, as you say, kind of strange still more stilted words and somehow ground them into a humanity that actually came out of her mouth and made you believe it now.
00:39:01
Speaker 3: Because on one level her character seems really heightened. Yeah, And on another, to your point, you you really connect with her and she breaks your heart. I mean, you know when Rex asked for a divorce and through the whole first season and you know, he she really really I think was approaching everything as this is this is a real person. This is somebody who who has who's done everything in her life that she thought was right and was going to make her happy and she wasn't. And again, that was the genius of the show, that each of the women had gone down a path before before the show started and thought they were going to find happiness, and that each of them we meet them in this moment in time where each of them is confronting what does happy look like? And I think that's why the show resonated not just with women in America, but also with a lot of men. And at one point we had that crazy thing where Edie did the Monday Night Football spot that caused.
00:40:00
Speaker 1: Oh, oh my gosh.
00:40:01
Speaker 5: Oh wait, no, there was a thing in a locker room right, Oh my gosh.
00:40:04
Speaker 3: I totally forgot about this thing and it blew up. But when they came and pitched it to us, ABC, Monday Night Football called me and said, we want to do this thing, and you know, we want to help you know your show, and we have more men watching our show than you have watching Monday Night Football, So let's just reset the conversation.
00:40:21
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:40:22
Speaker 1: Wait, well, I'm sort of loosely remembering this. She did a commercial in a.
00:40:25
Speaker 5: Towel in a locker room.
00:40:27
Speaker 3: Yes, it was a promo and I haven't I haven't watched it. I can't. But it caused it caused a scandal. It was sexual, you know. And I don't think she did what was scripted. It wasn't anything she did. It was what everybody decided that she should do.
00:40:40
Speaker 4: And it was because of it being on Family Night football, right, I mean, that's why it was so scandalous.
00:40:46
Speaker 5: I don't think it in and of itself was very offensive.
00:40:48
Speaker 1: Do you have like when you sit this far away and you like look at it and you go like.
00:40:56
Speaker 5: I did that.
00:40:57
Speaker 1: I was a part of that. Do you have things that you that like either scenes or moments or or or or struggles that you conquered over that like you you are proud of them? Or and do you have things that you like just want to be like, I'm so glad that I can just put that to rest and walk away.
00:41:19
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, you know, Desperate was was a wild time in my life because I was very young as a producer and as an executive, and it it allowed me. I'm grateful that that script came into my life and allowed me to showcase what I was capable of do it, just like the script allowed you guys as actors to showcase what you were able to do. Mark and I always had different visions of the show, and tonally, his taste was more comedic than mine. And what ended up happening over the course of the first season was, you know, my I was cutting those first thirteen upsodes because Mark was so far behind in writing that basically the editorial fell to me. And then, you know, and there were times where there'd be a gag or something that he loved that I just thought was silly, and I'd take it out, and so there was a schism forming between the two of us. Case wise, from the beginning.
00:42:21
Speaker 1: I understand that I mean I yeah, and I understand that I mean I as as I said, like I feel like tonally it was could be very good. And then there were definitely episodes, maybe not so much in the first season, but like it you know, would dip into like this doesn't really make sense or this is too can't be well.
00:42:45
Speaker 4: It's hard work to maintain that specific tightrope of that balance between the comedy, the drama, the mystery, the surrealism. You know, it's not an easy thing to maintain, imagine from all different sides, but it is the thing that was so special about the show. And I think that so many people, even me at thirteen, I remember people telling me after they watched the show that the tone was so unique and people just loved that about it.
00:43:18
Speaker 3: And what's interesting is, so I watched the pilot again, and the pilot had a different composer than our series composer, and so one of the things that we had to do was invent a new sound because dramas on TV were scored with drama soundtracks and comedies were scored with comedy soundtracks, and Desperate had to let the audience know that things were ironic at times, or things were not what they seemed, or a character who's doing something straight down the middle, Oh, you've got to think about that. And so, you know, the composer of my previous show is a guy named Steve Jablonski. Steve was introduced to me through Hans Zimmer, who was the greatest of the great and Steve was composing our score and he had done a demo for Desperate Housewives, and I think Mark had felt at the time that I had hired too many of my production people. And by the way, in fairness to him, this was his project. He got saddled with an entire crew, he got saddled with an art department, I mean, and and so he chose a composer for the pilot, and we realized that wasn't the right composer. He chose another composer, realized it wasn't the right composer. And then what ended up happening is really funny. Steve Jablonski's music was in the Avid, which is the editing machine that we could, and some editor found these tracks and knew none of the politics. Oh wow, And so he cut the episode that begins with going into the Furnace. Yeah, you know, re insiderated. Uh, Steve had cut. The editor had cut Steve's music, and Mark and Iron and edited. Mark quen this music. This is the music. Who did this? This is perfect? Oh and and the poor editor turns and goes he looks in Steve Jablonski and Mark just looks it. Uh oh, But Steve got the job. And then Steve and I. So what happened is, you guys would shoot all day. We'd go to set. I would be there at call, which is like six in the morning, six thirty. We would wrap at six to seven to eight. I would then go into editorial to check on the scripts. Then I would drive from the Universal all the way to Steve's house in Santa Monica and we would And he liked to work late at night, so from ten or eleven at night till two or three in the morning, we'd work on the music.
00:45:31
Speaker 6: So did you not sleep for a year? Nine months?
00:45:37
Speaker 1: Wow? Wow?
00:45:38
Speaker 5: It is like having a baby. Then it is.
00:45:41
Speaker 4: It's like you're building growing something for nine months, you know.
00:45:46
Speaker 3: Like I said, it was magical because the work was so good. We all wanted we all wanted success. Everybody showed up. I mean I watched Terry come to work incredibly sick sometimes and like I'm looking in the truck with il I think she's good. I mean, we should send her home, and she would say she's fine. She would literally like hobble to set because she had a huge fever. And then the minute they called action, the magic showed up, the comedy showed up. It was like nothing was wrong, and they'd say cut and you'd collapse into your chair. And I don't know how you did it, but you always managed to when when the work was happening. That's what mattered.
00:46:24
Speaker 1: I seem to recall Felicity saying to me once like, what's wrong with you? You're always sick? And I at the time I remember sort of feeling like, kind of offended because I think of myself as a healthy person. But when I look back on it now, I go, Yeah, every mom I know that has a child between four and ten years old is constantly sick because your kid is bringing home every virus every other day from kindergarten in first grade and second grade. And so yeah, I probably was sick, and Emerson, it was your fault.
00:46:59
Speaker 6: Well, well I am don't.
00:47:01
Speaker 2: I'm so sorry, but I'm so happy that you have such deep mental and physical fortitude that you were able to rise up.
00:47:09
Speaker 4: Well to rise up, Okay, I wanted because we had mentioned obviously, Terry and I hadn't really rewatched the show at all basically until we started this podcast.
00:47:18
Speaker 5: Emerson of course is experiencing it for the first time.
00:47:20
Speaker 6: And what a show it's been.
00:47:22
Speaker 1: Yes, our finale, see.
00:47:23
Speaker 4: There's so far there have been some really standout moments from the first season. We've talked about obviously Terry's amazing naked locked out moment, and the dinner party scene from the same episode episode seven was a really big highlight that we really loved. There's that amazing scene with Felicity, the Lynette scene, the mental breakdown in the kitchen, that felt like a really strong moment from the show. And I know you said you haven't rewatched it really but maybe did in advance of this.
00:47:50
Speaker 3: You know, I didn't watch seven again, but I remember it really well because it was the first time that we actually veered from comedy into serious draw and that that adderall storyline about a mom just wanting to compete and just wanting to do good, which was I think so relatable to so many women. But you know, to the writer's credit, they took it down its natural path and she finally had a breakdown, and again the network was very concerned about this is a comedy, like what are you guys doing? And when that's and that show got a huge response from others and from women. I think people really felt like they could see something that rung true in their own life. And so from that point on, I think we knew we could go where we needed to go with the women as long as it was based in something real.
00:48:35
Speaker 1: Wow, that's that's amazing. And I will tell you what's real and true our love for you, Michael Edlstein. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time and stories. It's been amazing and we will all be coming back. Later this week, we will jump into episode twenty three, the finale of season one. One wonderful day, and I'm sure that it will be a wonderful day as we meet some new neighbors on Westeria Lane and we tie up loose ends. Or will we be able to tie up loose ends. You'll have to wait and see and join us next time because we are desperately devoted to you.
