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and ridicule of critic and public alike; their careers, contracts, and personal fortunes were not at stake. They were like grandparents who enjoy the child but never have to deal with the dirty diapers. They had it all, except for money; for the fact was (and is) they weren’t very well paid in dollars. Never mind, indy-prod with a multi pic-pac would eventually take care of that.
    It is a myth that talent, like cream, rises to the top. Too often, it is those fragile, talented individuals who are crushed by the system.
    The erosion of the network audience has come about largely due to new technology, but partially, I believe, also because of the incestuous vision of the too few who became the storytellers. Ironically, that very erosion would, ultimately, force the networks to cut costs and reduce the size of their executive staffs, which had caused the problem in the first place. The proliferation of credits, which resulted in the loss of so many truly talented producers in this field, would eventually have to be confronted. It was.
    A new title would be invented, one that has yet to be seen on any television screen: show runner. It is evidence of a desire to return to the way it was done in the beginning. A show runner, not necessarily a writer or a director, someone with an overall vision, someone who can handle the network or studio needs, who can communicate with the cast, hire the writers and the directors, supervise the editorial concept, and turn out, week after week, a consistent, promotable product. It sure sounds like a producer to me, but that credit, if it is ever to mean anything again, will have to be retrieved from an awful lot of production managers, staff writers, and assistants.
    As originated by Barry Diller and his ABC minions—and subsequently by Fred Silverman and his subordinates first at CBS, then ABC, and NBC —this system could be very oppressive and wasteful. In the more than thirty years that have followed—with all their power and virtually unlimited funds—the networks have managed to create less than a half dozen superstar hyphenates. Enormous amounts of capital expended, a lot of talented, passionate, hardworking producers buried, to create—over an entire generation—a handful.
    You cannot cut down rain forests in Brazil and not have it affect the weather in North America. You cannot build concrete canyons in areas that were once flat and not get wind. Swimming pools and golf courses in desert resorts have raised the humidity and caused rainy seasons and droughts, where heretofore they did not exist.
    In the 1970s, Diller, Silverman, and a young group of network executives messed with the ecology of Hollywood. Their imprimatur is still being felt. Of more importance to this piece is that this is where I found myself all those years ago: an overqualified, true, non-writing producer in an awful rising tide, just trying to survive the onrushing tsunami.

Chapter 3
    LIMBO WITH GRANDMA FANNY
    Back at Filmways, Ed Feldman was not having any success in getting financing for a Cagney & Lacey motion picture. Every studio head then in Hollywood was male. Confronted with the Cagney & Lacey screenplay, they demurred. They simply didn’t believe the script. They did not accept that women talked to each other or related to each other in the way we had indicated.
    The men of Hollywood had their own mythology, reinforced by the films of their predecessors (also males):
    “A woman isn’t a woman until she’s had a child.”
    “A woman might have a job but would give it all up in a minute for the ‘right’ man.”
    “Women can’t, and don’t, have friendships the way men do.”
    “Women are in constant competition for Mr. Right.”
    … And, the seemingly inevitable male fantasy of the Madonna/Bitch.
    Is it any wonder Hollywood had never produced a buddy movie for women?
    Sherry Lansing , the recently retired head of Paramount Studios and the producer of Fatal Attraction , among other