It's All In the Playing Read Online Free PDF Page A

our reluctance in creating a reality that might just prevent our script from being accepted. There was no discussion about what we would have written differently. We knew we were programming the turndown.
    That understood, we discussed the nature of communicating what we found to be true and real in our lives even if it sounded spaced out. We knew better, and if we were to contribute to the consciousness of the society in even the entertainment industry, what better way than to do a show that would be something besides rape, car chases, cops, street people, and low morals in high places?
    After not too extensive a discussion, there was clearly no point in putting up unconscious personal resistance for very much longer. I knew my task was to extend emotionally to television what I had already done in my books, and Colin’s was to begin his initial foray into a public declaration. That resolved, it was, unsurprisingly, only a few days before ABC called and said they’d like us to go ahead with writing the script for the second night. Lesson? Release and resolve fear, and what you want flows freely.
    We wrote the second night in the same way—fast and full of food. Five days, to be exact. Any more than that and we’d have to shoot from the Fat Farm.
    We turned in the final two hours and waited for Brandon Stoddard to read them, which would most likely occur on an airplane between New York and L.A. That’s where most creative thinking is done in TV land—the solitary office in the sky.
    Brandon called Stan Margulies about a week later.
    “Be in my office at ten o’clock,” he said.
    Stan gulped, notified Colin and me, and we prepared for what we had by that time come to expect—the best, not the worst.
    We were all there at ten except for Colin. He was not a fashionably late individual, so I wondered what was up. Well into the social breakfast amenities, he arrived. He made no remarks about his tardiness. Brandon probably expected that from a hot “feature hyphenate” (writer-director).
    Brandon cleared his throat, put one leg over the other, and began. “I felt wonderful when I finished reading your script. I want to do it.”
    We smiled confidently and waited for more instructions.
    “All I ask,” Brandon went on, “is that you make sure the audience understands cosmic justice and that we each are responsible for our own reality. That’s what the viewers will want to respond to.”
    An important issue in the show was the exploration of karma. The concept that states: “What we cause, good or bad, will have an effect—on us” is karma. Karmic justice is the extension of cause and effect, so that the seeds we sow in one lifetime may not be reaped until a much later lifetime. Hence, Karmic Cosmic Justice. Brandon, ever vigilant regarding the American consciousness, wanted to contribute somehow to making the world make more sense.
    “And,” he commanded, “I want you on the floor [to begin shooting] November fifteenth, because I want the option of having it on the air May ’86 for sweeps week.”
    Stan choked on a piece of Danish.
    “Brandon,” he said in his best Talmudic experiential tone, “we’re late already for that date. This means twenty-two-hour days.”
    Brandon smiled and tapped his feet. “Right. I still want it. Now make up a budget. Twelve, fifteen million, whatever it is. Hopefully, we’ve got an Event here. I like what these guys have written. Besides, my sister would kill me if she heard I turned it down. There are morepeople into this stuff than you think. And I want ABC to be first.”
    Stan and Colin and I looked at one another. It was best to quit while we were ahead. Brandon continued.
    “I know you have work to do on the script, casting, production, location hunting, and all that—so leave now. Whatever you need—you’ve got. I’m going on vacation.”
    Brandon stood up, shook hands with us, smiled, winked, and left.
    Stan hitched up his belt, threw up his hands, looked into