A Tribute to Anne Beatts and her creation, Square Pegs

Back in the days when I was editing the “Icons” (classic TV) section of CBS’ Watch! magazine, I was like a kid in a candy store.  So many of the shows I had grown up adoring had been on CBS – and now, I had license to get in touch with any of those shows’ creators and/or stars, to write tributes of all my favorites, one by one.

In February of 2008, I was thrilled to get to interview Anne Beatts, to pay tribute to her 1982-83 sitcom Square Pegs, short-lived but influential on my generation of actors and writers – and everyone else adolescent at the time.  [I must admit, my writing partner Bonnie Datt and I were so molded by Square Pegs that we even wrote its characters into a spec script we wrote for Sex and the City – melding the two worlds and winning a few screenwriting awards in the process.]  The piece ran in the magazine’s May/June 2008 issue; you can check it out here: 

But Anne, who died this past Wednesday, April 7 at age 74, was way too interesting to be confined to a mere page’s worth of memories.  And so below, here is the full scope of her memories not only of creating the beloved sitcom which brought Sarah Jessica Parker to national attention, but also as a pioneering “girl writer” on Saturday Night Live.

 

 

The Square Pegs Origin Story

Square Pegs was autobiographical.  What happened was that I had been on Saturday Night Live for the first five years of that as a writer.  And then the upheaval happened.  Lorne Michaels was no longer doing the show.  Everybody left at one time.  And I had an agent, an older gentleman named Frank Cooper. He had been Frank Sinatra’s first agent – he was of that generation.  He was trying to get me some other work.  And he said, “I guess you were probably very popular when you were in high school.”  And I said, “Oh, Frank, are you kidding?  I wasn’t very popular at all!  I was a square peg when I was in high school!”  And he said, “Why don’t you write about that?”

Frank had the idea he could sell a high school show to CBS.  There wasn’t a show like that at the time.  I guess there had been Welcome Back, Kotter and Happy Days, but at the time there wasn’t a show of that nature.  And he knew that CBS was wanting to skew younger -- which was a little bit of an uphill battle.  So we went in, and I had never pitched a sitcom.  I had never written a sitcom, or spec script, or had anything to do with the word “sitcom” -- and it kind of stuck in my throat a little bit.

I went in to CBS and had thought out what my life had been like in high school, me and my best friend.  So Square Pegs was based on us; I was the Sarah Jessica Parker character, the skinny one with glasses, and she was the short one with braces.  I harkened back to us, when we were in Somers High School in the ‘60s, in Somers, New York.

I wasn’t a big sitcom watcher.  So in my concept, I harkened back to [the 1959-63 CBS sitcom The Many Loves of] Dobie Gillis.  That was a model of a high school show that I really liked.  And then when I went in to pitch, guess who was in the room?  Dobie Gillis!  Because Dwayne Hickman was an executive at CBS at this point.  So here I go in to have a meeting with Kim LeMasters who was the CBS development exec at the time, and in the room – the way there’s always 3 or 4 people in the room – was Dobie himself!  I thought at the time that this was either good or bad omen.  I guess it proved good.  Because there I was, talking how much I loved Dobie Gillis and how my show could be like that.  That was the pitch.

My agent had set up for us to meet at NBC the next day.  I was at the Chateau Marmont [hotel], getting dressed for the meeting, and the phone rang.  It was my agent and the executives from CBS.  They had some concerns and questions about the show.  And basically it was, what about sex, drugs and rock and roll?  This was 1981, I guess, because I was on SNL from ’75 to ’80. So this was the fall of ‘81. Were these girls having sex?  This was pre-Dawson’s Creek; you did not want the answer to be yes.  You wanted the answer to be no, because they wanted to do something that was basically an 8 o’clock show.  And I said no, that they weren’t– which was perfectly true.  I wasn’t telling them just what they wanted to hear, but what my vision of the show was.

[My main characters] aspired to those things, but were nowhere near reaching them.  And I quoted another archetype, another movie that was important for me, which was The World of Henry Orient.  About a little girl chasing Peter Sellers around New York -- which I later learned was actually based on the real experience of the author, with Oscar Levant, of all people.  The original book was written by Nunnally Johnson’s daughter [Nora], and she had had for some bizarre reason an insane crush on Oscar Levant, so that was why there was this concert pianist character, played by Sellers, who they were crazy in love with.

I said that’s sort of the level of sexuality these [Square Pegs] girls are operating on.  So the CBS executives got it, and they bought the show on the phone.  Sad to say, I never had the meeting with NBC, because that actually would have been a better network, probably.  Hindsight being 20/20, maybe that would have kept the show on the air longer, because they were still struggling.  It turned out it was actually one of Brandon Tartikoff’s favorite shows.  He tried to buy it as a summer replacement show, but they had already unfortunately syndicated it to USA, so that deal didn’t happen.

Cheers was on NBC, and they had lower ratings than we did that year.  But [Tartikoff] believed in that show, and kept it on the air.  Unfortunately we were on the “Tiffany Network,” and were messing with CBS’ ratings.  This in the day when there were only three networks.  We had a 23 share.  Now if you had a 23 share, you would be the queen of Hollywood.  More people saw Square Pegs than ever watched an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, and Square Pegs was a flop.  That’s the ironic part about it!

We did special material for the Square Pegs DVD, which comes out on May 13 [2008], and I think it will do well, although that depends upon if they promote it or not.  But it might do quite well, because people who were fans might buy it now for their kids.  Because it’s been 25 years.  So I think maybe the people who were 13-year-old girls are moms now, and might say it’s great for their kids.  That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.  There could be potentially a new generation of fans.  There’s still a tremendous amount of web presence for the show, all these web sites and things like that, and places where you can download episode guides and songs.  There’s a tremendous amount of fan stuff that’s out there.

 

The Launch of SJP, and Her New Friend, Amy Linker

We tried to tie the DVD to coincide with the Sex and the City movie.  We were able to get Sarah Jessica Parker on all the extras – actually all the cast members, except Merritt Butrick, who died [in 1989] and Jon Caliri, who was unavailable.  [SJP] had done Annie, but as she herself has said, she was not the first Annie [on Broadway]; she was like Annie #3 in the production, and she wasn’t Andrea McArdle.  And so really, that had not launched her career; so yeah, we did kind of discover her.  The person who was really responsible for that was Eve Brandstein -- she was the casting director for Norman Lear -- who also could be credited for discovering George Clooney and so many others.  She put a lot of people on shows.

When I finally wrote the pilot script – it was kind of amazing because it was the first sitcom ever I had anything to do with – I wrote the script, rewrote the script, it went to pilot, and then series.  I was like “Oh, I think I’ll do this [for a living.]”  Little did I know, it was like getting struck by lightning to get that to happen.

When the show was going to go to pilot, every production company in Hollywood was sniffing around, because I had this deal and a show for which I’d just written the script completely on my own.  So I was the most popular person in Hollywood at that point.  People were sending me flowers and champagne – it was amazing.  On the strength of Mary Kay Place’s recommendation, I went with Norman’s company.  She said “If you want to have your creative vision serviced…”  That’s how Eve and I first met.  Eve and Kim Friedman, who directed the pilot, and I went on a cross-country mission to find kids for this show.  And one of the big things about Tandem, as Norman’s company was called then, was that they were willing to cast age appropriately.  Because everybody else wanted [actors] over 18.  Like in 90210; they didn’t want the trouble of working with actual, real kids.  And so that was another reason that really sold me on [Tandem] as a production company, because they did work with kids.  With The Facts of Life and so on, they were accustomed to it, and would cast age appropriately.

Sarah Jessica Parker was the first person that I ever saw for the role of Patty.  Eve brought her in.  We were in New York, and she read, and Eve was like, “Isn’t she great!”  And I was like “Yes… but she’s too pretty.” Eve had a pair of sunglasses, knocked out the lenses, and put them on her, and said, “Now have her read.”  I still wasn’t convinced.  We made her come back like 8 times to audition.  You know how it is – do you take the first apartment you see?

Obviously she was the best person -- and with the Lauren character, we had similar issues because we were meeting these chubby girls.  And we knew we could put on fake braces.  But we were still reading girls who were chunky, and couldn’t find anybody.  Then I had the idea that we could put her in a fat suit.  Because I remembered when we were doing the bees on SNL, and we had these little padded body suits for the bee characters.  In 1982, the whole thing of prosthetics wasn’t nearly as advanced as now.  But still I thought, “Why can’t we do that?”  So poor Amy Linker had to wear fake braces and body padding and still deliver a performance.  Sarah had, of course, fake glasses, and as she said, she had to dress as an Appalachian child.  She got her revenge for that later!

 

Casting the Cool Kids

Literally, we went everywhere.  San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago.  Jami Gertz was in Chicago, and she had kind of done local commercials.  Nothing really.  And Tracy Nelson was a funny thing, because she said to me when she auditioned, “You worked with my father.”  I was like “What?” and it turned out her dad was Ricky Nelson, who had been a host on SNL.  Which made me feel a lot older suddenly.  I got a few gray hairs there, I think.

So we did really do the Gone With the Wind talent search to get these people, the embodiment of the characters as I saw them.  One reason the show worked so well, I have to credit the casting.  John Huston used to say casting was everything, and I really have to say that it is.

 

A Slice of Real Life

I think [all the characters] were high school archetypes.  That may have changed, but I suspect not all that much.  There’s the student leader like Muffy, the king and queen like Vinnie and Jennifer.  And then Jennifer had to have a friend and confidante, and I really wanted to have the show be multiracial, so it was logical to me to have an African American girl [played by Claudette Wells].  Which also was groundbreaking; not since I, Spy had there been black and white friends.  And this was 1982!  So that was important to me that there be a person of color in the show.  As there had been back where I was; Somers was a predominantly white bedroom suburb, but there were Black kids in the school.

My friend does know that Lauren was based on her – and I think she’s flattered.  I had saved all the notes we wrote to each other when I was in high school.  The one issue was whether the show needed to be period or not, like The Wonder Years, which came later.  I really wanted it to be contemporary, because I wanted to be able to do jokes about Reagan and things like that, and be “of today.”  So I borrowed the daughter of a friend of mine and her friend, who were 14-year-old girls who went to private school in Manhattan, and lived in Soho.  So I thought of them as reasonably sophisticated.  I wanted to check that I wasn’t totally off.  I remember, I took them to lunch and said, “Is there anyone in your school who is doing this?”  And they said “Oh no, only the sluts!”  And I thought, “God, things have not changed.”

And then I asked them, “Who are your heroes?” and they said Che Guevara – they didn’t really know who he was but had a poster – and James Dean.  And then I was like “Okay, I can still write this.”  But then I tried to keep my ears open to current slang, and that’s how the Jennifer Valley Girl character came about.  And that was before the song “Valley Girl;” even though the show was on the air after the Moon Zappa song came out, we had shot the pilot before that.  That was something Tracy came up with.  I remember Tracy said – she was not conventionally the pretty girl -- that she was auditioning with all these girls more conventionally gorgeous.  And they were like, “You’re not here for the Jennifer character!”  They were mean to her.  And so she figured “I’m going to get this” – this fierce resolve.  Here were the girls who had been mean to her in high school!  She ended up doing a devastating take on people she had observed.

 

 The Music of Square Pegs

The music was another thing that was groundbreaking – this was pre-Miami Vice.  There really hadn’t been rock and roll on TV since Ricky Nelson.  It was very important to me that the music be part of their world.  Johnny Slash, the anomalous character, was the way the music came into the show.  If you want to talk archetypes, there’s always the strange kid.  And he said he was “left back and laid back.”  It’s like that line in Animal House:  “Six years of college down the drain.”

I was listening to the radio, and I was going to clubs in New York, and was hearing these [New Wave] groups.  What was interesting about The Waitresses -- my friend Lynn Goldsmith is a rock and roll photographer who just put a book out.  She had taken shots of all these iconic people, like Springsteen.  She was someone I turned to for music world connections.  She told me about The Waitresses, “the perfect group for your show.”  I was like “Okay, the Waitresses.”  And then [coincidentally] I was listening to a song on the radio, “I Know What Boys Like” – [and thought] “this is the perfect group for my show!”  I said, “I don’t know about the Waitresses, but I want the group who did this song!”  So we got them, brought them out [to L.A.] to be in the pilot, and also to write the theme song. 

When they had Square Pegs on Nick at Nite at one point, they had a sequence which thrilled me, where they had people in the street, singing theme songs -- and they had people singing the Square Pegs theme song.  So I was pretty pleased.  I worked with them [in writing] it – glasses, and cliques, and so on.  I was telling them what it should deal with.

Once we did the pilot, and then it was picked up by CBS, which was also quite an amazing thing, the market research for it was not good.  It said things like “These kids should be in an insane asylum, not a high school.  They’re disrespectful of adults.”  Cleverly, Kim LeMasters kept it under his hat, because luckily for me, he had been promoted up the ranks as the show had moved along, and had more power, and was a big proponent of the show.  And ultimately [CBS senior programs executive] Harvey Shephard also became very fond of it.  His daughter, Greer Shephard, went on to produce such shows as Popular, and was a big fan of the show.

At one point, for Muffy’s bat mitzvah, it had originally been booked to be The Clash, and they fell through.  And funny, to think that The Clash was going to be on Square Pegs.  When they fell through, we had the Boomtown Rats begging to be on the show.  They sent us a side of smoked salmon.  Meanwhile, Devo was also another possibility, and they were local.  So I had to call up CBS and ask them which.  Harvey called his daughter Greer and asked her – she was in high school at the time – and she picked Devo.  So Devo was on the show.  And then they tried to cancel, and I couldn’t find out why they were cancelling; and it turned out the head Devo guy had scheduled root canal for the same week.  I remember being on the phone with him saying, “Change your appointment – you have a contract!”

 

Square Pegs on the Air

When the pilot got picked up, I had to hire a writing staff.  That was another struggle, because I remember they made me hire Andy Borowitz.  They didn’t want to have a staff composed entirely of women.  I wanted women because I was writing about girls in high school, so it seemed the writers should be women.  So the staff was women, and Andy.  He was our token male.  We used to call him Tootsie Borowitz. 

M*A*S*H was the only other single-camera show on the air at the time.  Our [Director of Photography] was a guy who had worked on M*A*S*H.  He was about 70 or something.  Emil Oster.  People were not shooting single-cam because it is more expensive; but now, everything is single camera.  Obviously there will always be multi cam shows, because comedians like to perform in front of a live audience.  I teach sitcom at USC – I work for the writing division of the School of Cinema and Television, now called the School of Cinematic Arts because George Lucas gave them a bunch of money.  I’m an adjunct professor.  And almost all the shows I’m teaching are single-camera.  Entourage, Weeds, even Scrubs or 30 Rock.  So that was another issue.  And that was another reason why – when I was in this bidding war where people were wining and dining me and wanting me to pick their production company – one of the stipulations I had had was that I wanted the show to be single cam.

I had worked on commercial parodies on SNL and actual commercials in England, which is where I had first worked in TV: 30 millimeter film, sixty-second black-and-white TV commercials in the ‘60s in London.  So it was very important to me to do [Square Pegs] in single camera, because for me it was a reality element.  I felt it should be [shot] in a real high school.  And it was shot in a real, abandoned high school, in Norwalk, California.  It had been condemned for heating problems.  It was the school where they had shot Grease 2. 

The show was supposed to be set in upstate New York, outside of New York City – a la Somers.  But it was odd, because there ended up being a Valley Girl on the east coast – because she was a transfer student.  The reason we shot it in Norwalk was to find a school that looked like one of those WGA school buildings they built during the Depression on the East Coast.  There wasn’t that kind of school in Beverly Hills.  And so the exterior shot was actually a middle school that’s over on McCadden place in Hollywood, and the interiors were all at the school in Norwalk, which was great; we would never have been able to build those sets.  We had the full cafeteria, and an auditorium and theater – it was an amazing physical plant.

What was very lucky was there was a football strike.  Football was on another network, ABC, but it was lucky for us in terms of our competition.  We were on opposite Little House on the Prairie on NBC, so that was the real ratings competition, because obviously it was a similar audience.  I never wrote the show to be a kids’ show.  I didn’t realize that, that they would say “Is it an 8 o’clock show or a 10 o’clock show?”  To me it was a show.  It was meant to be for everybody.  It was sort of ghettoized by CBS in a way I never intended to happen.

[Mondays at 8PM] wasn’t a great night or a great time slot.  But because of the football strike, we were protected for a while.  Then they moved us to Wednesdays at 8:30, and that was the death of the show.  They said “We have great new show to give you as a lead in:  Zorro and Son.”  There wasn’t a lot of competition, but in a counter-programming move, NBC moved The A-Team up to 8 o’clock, and that was the end.  Suddenly we got a 12 share – still not so shabby in today’s terms, but then it was death.  I was in New York and called up to get the overnights, and the girl told me 12, and I knew pretty much that it was over.  And then she asked me for a job, and I wanted to go, “With timing like that, stay out of comedy.”

We got cancelled after 20 episodes.  It would have been nice to get 22 or 24, but we had 20.  We had a lot of support from the network.  We had a lot of support from CBS, but not from the production company.  That show was expensive for them, and the guy who was running it, who later went back to England, just never got the show and didn’t support it.  He actually left the company after that year, because he also had allowed them to cancel Archie Bunker’s Place on his watch, and it wasn’t taken very well.  

We were on at 8, so we were trying to start the night.  We didn’t have a hammock, a lead-in.  The only lead-in we ever got was Zorro and Son, and of course that was famous [as a disaster, lasting just five episodes].  The thing about it is that if right now, you had a show that every 13- to 16-year-old girl was watching, you’d have Gossip Girl.  And you’d be a big hit. 

But here's the big difference between our show and other teen shows, like Our So-Called Life.  Our show was a comedy.  And I think that is a big difference.  If the show had been kept on the air, it had the potential to be more successful than drippy shows about teenage angst.  Our show was based on the premise that someday you'll look back on all this and laugh.