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films, was, in 1975, a youthful assistant to Dan Melnick , the MGM studio chief of the moment. She liked the Avedon & Corday screenplay and kept hounding her mentor to consider it for production. Her persistence outlasted his obstinacy. He finally condescended to make an “offer.” He would fund the movie for $1.8 million contingent on getting Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch as the two women leads.
    It was all pretty silly. In the mid-1970s it was barely possible to hire these two women for that price, let alone have enough left over to make a film. Furthermore, it should be remembered just who Ms. Margret and Ms. Welch were all those years ago. Neither had yet achieved the hard-won recognition they have today as talented actresses; in those days they were simply symbols of Hollywood’s male fantasy of the super-endowed sex goddess. They were then the polar opposite of what we were trying to accomplish with Cagney & Lacey and, so as to keep the record straight, our prototypes for casting in those early days were Sally Kellerman and Paula Prentiss.
    Things were also not going so well on my other project with a female lead. The written presentation for NBC by Avedon & Corday on This Girl for Hire is to this day one I use as a reference and an example for would-be pilot makers to follow. It is well-written, entertaining, and informative. The reader of those less than two dozen pages knows exactly what the show is about, what the film will look like, what the characters sound like, how they dress, and how they relate to each other. It made it very easy to visualize not only the eventual screenplay but the film itself. It was such a strong guide that it all but guaranteed a solid screenplay. All one had to do was follow the map of that presentation to pay dirt.
    We had been operating under the guidance of network development executives Lou Hunter and Deanne Barkley. Now the project had stalled before going to the final stage of ordering a pilot script. Irwin Segelstein , then of NBC ’s upper echelon, had pulled the plug.
    “A woman’s place is in the kitchen and the bedroom,” he said to his staff. What Deanne Barkley rejoined I do not know. What I do know is we were out of business at NBC and that Ms. Barkley didn’t stay around at the network too much longer after that.
    That spring, across town, the team of Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg had struck some pay dirt of their own with a show featuring women. It was called Charlie’s Angels , and it had made the ABC lineup for the fall of 1976. The good news was I was on the Spelling/Goldberg shortlist of producer-for-hire candidates. The bad news? Another Spelling/Goldberg series, The Rookies , had finally been canceled. Its writer/producer had been Rick Husky, who ten years before had been my protégé on Daniel Boone (my first producing job) and before that (in the early 1960s) at the MGM publicity department. It was on Daniel Boone that Rick had received his first writing assignment, launching his career. Now he was being asked to set up the company’s new series with Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson, and Jaclyn Smith, who he was then dating.
    Rick called me within a few days. “I hear I beat you out of a job. I’m sick about it,” he said.
    “Don’t be silly,” I countered. “They know you a lot better than me. You’ve been with them a long time and done a hell of a job. It’s only natural they would want you.”
    “Listen Barney,” Rick said, his tone almost conspiratorial. “I’m exhausted. I really wanted a major break after my series, but I couldn’t turn these guys down. All I agreed to do was get ’em started. I’m only doing the first six episodes, so stay on top of this. Push your agent to get you in here. There’ll be a job by fall.”
    Rick had heard me talk about how cold it had been on the outside. How, as a non-writing producer, trying to make a living on supervisory fees of $2,500 here and $1,750 there was a bad joke. I appreciated the tip.