Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [13]
I THOUGHT about Sidney’s lesson long and hard that night. I finally knew what I was looking for, and I already knew I wasn’t going to find it sitting behind a desk and writing. Though I wasn’t what anybody would call a “team player,” I wanted to belong to a team—anybody’s team.
As for Sidney’s comment about writers, I realized, even then, that there was considerable wisdom in it. Writers are always outsiders and probably ought to be, since only outsiders see things clearly: the people who publish them, or make movies, or produce plays are always richer and more powerful, however successful the writer is. As I was soon to discover, there’s a tendency among book publishers, especially when making speeches on public occasions, to boast that the writer and the publisher are both part of the same team. This, of course, is pious nonsense. Nobody in the book business really believes it, and no writer is ever taken in by it. A lot of people start out in book publishing believing that it’s true, or at least that it ought to be true, then have to waste time learning otherwise, but I had the good fortune to know better, thanks to Sidney’s insight.
DESPITE SIDNEY’S optimism, CBS eventually pulled the plug on his Hungarian project, which would have left me jobless, except that Sidney felt obliged, out of family feeling for my mother, to get me a job as a freelance reader in the CBS story department.
This was, at the time, about as low as you could get in the hierarchy of television, and indeed only one or two steps above being unemployed. First of all, the networks were already beginning to abandon the whole idea of doing original “quality” drama, even by established playwrights like Sidney or Paddy Chayefsky. Further, though we didn’t know it at the time, they were planning to eliminate their story departments altogether. (Why own a cow when you can buy milk?)
It had never made much sense to have a whole department just to read books and scripts; the only reason CBS still had one was that it was too small and powerless to draw much attention from the cost cutters in the top brass. There was perhaps also some vestigial guilt feeling among the older television producers that the networks ought to consider original material, much as book publishers used to feel an obligation to read “the slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts, rather than mailing them back unopened, as is now usually the case. Then, too, in television as in the book business, senior executives were always promising to look at somebody’s novel or TV script, which then got sent down to the story department for a reading.
The script readers were a mixed bunch, mostly young writers for whom this was the equivalent of waiting on tables for aspiring thespians. They were paid twenty-five dollars apiece for each report, so it wasn’t exactly a good way to get rich—still, neither was waiting on tables, and I’d already tried that.
The good part about the job was that I discovered I had a natural talent for putting the gist of a book or a script into a couple of paragraphs—no report could be longer than one page, which presumably represented the maximum attention span of a television producer. The bad part about it was that nobody who mattered at CBS paid the slightest attention to any of the reports.
The other bad part was that we weren’t really CBS employees at all. It was piecework, like an old-fashioned garment sweatshop. Work was handed out to us in a big, empty room at the CBS studio on West Fifty-seventh Street by means of a kind of daily shape-up. You never knew whether or not you were going to get a book or a script to read, so there was no way to guess how much money you were going to make a week. Some weeks I got lucky and was assigned five or six books; other weeks I got only one or two. Of course, there was no health coverage or employee benefits, and I worked at home.