B004YENES8 EBOK by Barney Rosenzweig Read Free Book Online

Los Angeles is the capital of the entertainment industry.
    In those days, the show could be more economically produced there than in any other city in the country. Besides, it is where I lived and where my family lived. Why be on location for six months of the year when you could come home to your own bed every night?
    Axelrod just might have been wavering. It was at this juncture that Mace decided to speak up. “Philadelphia’s a nice town,” he said.
    If looks could kill, Mace’s grave would now have more than a quarter century of overgrowth.
    Axelrod gained strength from this division. The result was a compromise. American Dream would be set in Chicago. Unlike Philadelphia, Chicago at least had a semblance of a film production community. It was also (unlike Philadelphia) outside of the expensive New York unions’ jurisdiction. Finally, it was the hometown of then-writer-elect Ronald M. Cohen.
    Mace had attended just one other meeting, in the early days of our association, and it had involved Cagney & Lacey . Here, it helps to know that Mace is what I would term a twitcher. He is not unattractive, in sort of an older, Garry Shandling way, but he is, well, I think, sort of a nervous type. I remember him constantly pulling on his cheek, his cuticles, and his ears. He appeared to me to be uncomfortable in a chair. So it was not too great a surprise when, at a CBS pitch, in the first of the three meetings he attended during our association, Mace sat down on the couch and promptly spilled coffee all over himself.
    It was all really OK, all except the line about Philadelphia, that is. What I must say, however, is that he did finance my passion. He did capitalize my dream.
    Furthermore, in the days of 1978 and 1979, when the Captain would tell Tennille that he no longer wanted to pay six figures in annual commissions and the rock group known as Kansas threatened to join the already-defected Carpenters , Mace held firm against his partners’ wishes to further cut costs by adding television to their already abandoned or disbanded record and publishing companies.
    Mace believed in his vision and ultimately broke off his partnership and the business that he knew to form BNB Productions. We would no longer be a part of the original BNB, nor would we be in the talent management business.
    Cagney & Lacey , meanwhile, had been languishing on the shelves at Filmways for a couple of years. The last action had occurred with Leonard Goldberg some months before—before our relationship irreparably deteriorated. I had given the script by Avedon & Corday to Goldberg as an illustration of my position regarding the depiction of female relationships. He not only liked it but indicated he would be interested in acquiring an equity position to produce it as a motion picture. I had agent Broder pull the project as my relationship with Goldberg fell apart.
    Now, with the forthcoming release of films such as Julia and The Turning Point , I feared my concept of making a female buddy movie might again be one of my too-little-too-late moments. Corday urged me to make the project for television before the women’s movement totally passed us by.
    My friend Ed Feldman had left Filmways. I inquired of the company about having the rights to Cagney & Lacey revert to me. They had no interest in that. Would they sell me the rights? They countered with the proposal that I develop the project and that, if I were successful in selling it, we could form a joint venture with my new alliance at BNB. That’s what we did.
    I now had control of the Avedon & Corday screenplay but had to face the TV industry conundrum that you can’t submit a completed work to television development executives. To do so would give them little to “develop” and imply they were not very necessary. My solution was to turn what already existed as a theatrical screenplay into a television presentation. First, I excised the plot from the manuscript. Much of it was then too risqué for