Episode 508: James Burrows, Tom Perrotta, Erotic Thrillers

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• James Burrows has spent 50 years making you LOL

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  James Burrows is a man of many nicknames: the sitcom sorcerer; the Steven Spielberg of sitcoms; and the Concorde of TV pilots, which would make him the James Burrows of Supersonic Airliners.

  Burrows has been making America laugh for half a century with his masterful direction of situation comedies that we’re sure you’re familiar with: “The Mary Tyler Moore Show;” “Taxi,” “Cheers,” “Frasier,” “Friends” and “Will & Grace.”

  His memoir is called “Directed by James Burrows.” He shared the secrets of his success with Wisconsin Public Radio’s “BETA.”

  He also eloquently expressed appreciation for the man who helped launch his incredible career: his father, Abe Burrows, was a well-known humorist, writer and director of radio and stage plays.

  “I didn’t know how big an influence he was on me because he was just my dad, and he would trundle my sister and I off to rehearsals, and we would kind of run around the back of the theater, didn’t know what was going on,” he recalled. “And I like to say he taught me when I didn’t know I was learning. And I ended up at the Yale School of Drama. And once I went there as a student, you have to take courses in directing, acting, writing, stage managing, scene design. I began, as I took these courses, to realize how much I had learned, just kind of watching my dad. And so after I graduated, I started as a stage manager in the theater.”

  Burrows said his father was a kind man who knew what he wanted.

  “And he got it through kindness,” Burrows said. “He would not say, ‘No, you have to do it this way.’ If an actor had a discussion, he would experiment with that suggestion or they’d come up with another suggestion. He always made it feel like it was a group decision of what was funniest at that moment in the play so that the actor felt involved in it.”

  “That’s how I’ve worked, because actors are so valuable to what I do. So what I do is I try to create and empower the actor to contribute,” Burrows said. “If the writer’s work doesn’t work at a certain moment, maybe we can find something that will make it work. So that was all from my dad. My dad was a playwright director. So as he was directing, he would rewrite.”

  Burrows said working on the sitcom, “Taxi,” was the toughest job he ever had.

  “It was my first resident directorship,” he said. “I was hired to do all the shows. It was this incredible group of writers that had come over from MTM (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show”) — James Brooks, Ed. Weinberger, Stan Daniels and Dave Davis — and I had a cast that was interplanetary.”

  Burrows joined forces with writers and producers Glen and Les Charles, producers of “Taxi,” to get a development deal with Paramount Pictures to create “Cheers.”

  Burrows said the biggest challenge he faced during the 11 years he directed “Cheers” was “keeping up the energy in the first year. Because nobody knew us.”

  “The Charles brothers’ writing was extraordinary on that show,” Burrows said. “And I knew it because every show we shot in front of this audience who came in, who had never seen the show before, they roared and they were invested in the characters, especially Sam and Diane. Plus, the key thing is NBC has nothing to replace it with.”

  Burrows said that it was devastating when Shelley Long (who played Diane Chambers) decided she wanted to leave “Cheers” after the fifth season in 1987.

  But as Burrows explained, they went back to their original conception of “Cheers” — which had actor Ted Danson, playing Sam Malone, working for a woman. They created the character of Rebecca Howe.

  “Our casting director Jeff Greenberg came in and said, ‘Kirstie Alley,’ and that was it.”

  Burrows said one of the proudest moments of his career occurred in 2012 when then-vice president Joe Biden said: “I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far. People fear that which is different. Now they’re beginning to understand.”

  Burrows directed all 246 episode of “Will & Grace,” including the recent reboot.

  “It was a situation comedy that happened to have two gay characters. It was not a situation comedy about gay characters,” Burrows said. “I knew we had something special. It was the funniest show I ever did.”

  Burrows points to one episode from the reboot that is especially heartfelt and powerful. It’s when Grace finds a box of letters Will wrote to her — and there’s one letter that has never been opened.

  Burrows on his favorites and his future

  Burrows has a couple of favorite scenes from his brilliant career that really make him laugh. One of them is this hilarious scene from “Taxi”:

  The other is this scene from an episode of “Friends” showcasing the physical comedy skills of David Schwimmer who plays Ross Geller:

  “We had a live cat when I shot the scene with Jen (Jennifer Aniston) and David, but when we were inside, we had a fake cat. So that’s why Schwimmer is so abusive to that animal.”

  Is there anything Burrows has not done over the past 50 years that he would still like to do?

  “I’d like to find a show again that makes me laugh like ‘Will & Grace’ did. I couldn’t do all of them, but I would do maybe two and then another two and stuff like that, just to keep the ligaments oiled,” he said.

  Burrows worked with the legendary TV writer/producer Norman Lear on “Live in Front of a Studio Audience.” It was a series of live recreations of such groundbreaking Lear sitcoms as “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times.”

  “Those we had a great time doing,” Burrows said.

  “It scared the crap out of me because I have to be in a booth cutting the show live. On all the shows I ever did, I never cut them live. They were always shot on film and delivered to an editor, and then they were edited down.”

• Author Tom Perrotta revives his 'Election' protagonist, Tracy Flick

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  You may remember Reese Witherspoon’s portrayal of Tracy Flick in Alexander Payne’s black comedy, “Election.” The movie was based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name. In the 1999 film, Tracy is an overachieving high school student who runs for student body president.

  Fast-forward 20 years, and Tracy is in a very different position. She’s an assistant principal at Green Meadow High School in New Jersey. And she feels underappreciated and stuck. That’s the premise of Perrotta’s novel, “Tracy Flick Can’t Win.“

  “When I wrote it (“Election”) in 1993 and showed it to my then-agent and some other people in the publishing business, people were really puzzled by it,” Perrotta told Wisconsin Public Radio’s “BETA.”

  He said they thought it read like a young adult novel, but with a lot of sex and politics.

  “I actually wonder if I wrote it now, (if it) would be considered a young adult novel just because they’re much edgier than they were back then,” Perrotta said.

  But Perrotta remains convinced it is an adult novel. He describes it as “a political novel, but it’s a very unlikely one.”

  The manuscript had spent a few years sitting around in one of his drawers when he got lucky. Some movie producers called him about a different book he’d written.

  “I said, ‘Hey, I got this other book. It’s about a high school election that turns kind of cutthroat.’ And they said, ‘Well, send it along.’ And they really loved it,” Perrotta said.

  They were Albert Berger and Ron Yorks. They got the manuscript over to director Alexander Payne, who ended up directing “Election.”

  “And really within a year, this movie was ready to go and it actually then created an opening for the book finally to be published,” Perotta said. “But the book was always overshadowed by the film.”

  Perrotta said the Tracy in his novel “felt a little more mature and sexually confident” than the character was portrayed in the film by Witherspoon. But he said Payne and Witherspoon’s decision to make Tracy “a little less overtly sexual and a little more vulnerable” was a smart change.

  He said it was more of a discovery rather than a conscious decision to revisit the character of Tracy after almost 25 years.

  He had started writing a book about a pro football player in his 40s. He starts to experience some neurological symptoms he thinks are related to the concussions he suffered while playing. Then he returns to his high school to be inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.

  “And I started to write this story and I wrote it in the same way that I had written ‘Election,’ with these short chapters and multiple narrators,” he said, “and somehow the form of the novel made me think of Tracy again. It just suddenly occurred to me, like, ‘Well, maybe Tracy’s here in this school.’ And when that happened, I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s where she would be.’”

  Perrotta said that #MeToo made him think a lot about the way he’d portrayed her attitude toward the brief relationship she had with the teacher in the film, “and I wondered how she would think about what happened to her some 25 years later when she was an adult and a mother and a high school administrator.”

  Perrotta said he thinks Tracy has changed over the past two decades “in the way that we all change when we go from being young and full of potential to being our middle-aged selves with very specific lives and maybe regrets, but also achievements.”

  “The main thing is Tracy expected big things from herself,” Perrotta explained.

  She attended Georgetown Law School and worked as a congressional intern. It looked like her political career was about to take off when a family emergency derailed her plans. Her mother had become very sick and Tracy had to take time off from school to serve as her mother’s caregiver.

  “She has made a decent life for herself. She’s a professional. She owns her own house. She has a child. But she feels like she sort of betrayed her teenage self,” Perrotta said. “That she never got a shot at being the successful person that she thought she could be. And she had big plans. She thought that she could be the first woman president of the United States.”

  One reviewer has said the main theme of much of Perrotta’s fiction is American masculinity and bro culture. He doesn’t disagree. Perrotta said male friendships are at the core of many of his stories, but with “Election” he began to branch out and center women characters.

  “But I think the reviewer you quoted is correct in saying that all those books also have male counterparts,” he said. “And to an extent, I’d say that the real subject is just the way that gender has been evolving in our culture over the past 40 or 50 years — gender and sexuality both. I think those are actually at the heart of my work.”

• The rise and fall (and possible rise again) of the erotic thriller

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  There’s an apocryphal legend that the most rewound scene in cinema history is from the 1992 erotic thriller “Basic Instinct” starring Sharon Stone.

  It’s from the interrogation scene where Stone’s character, Catherine Trammel, stymies a room full of male investigators with a salacious leg cross.

  Writer Abbey Bender, who’s written quite a bit about the genre of erotic thrillers, told Wisconsin Public Radio’s “BETA” that not only is that an iconic cinematic moment, but it’s also a hallmark of the erotic thriller.

  “It’s the kind of scene where it’s so absurd, and you’re watching this, and you’re like, ‘Who would do this? This is crazy,” Bender said. “At the same time, it fits because these movies are built on these crazy actions, and that’s what makes them escapism.”

  Bender suggests the erotic thriller genre was born out of noir films and peaked in the 1980s and 1990s.

  “Obviously, (film noirs) were very much the template for the erotic thriller. And the erotic thriller owes a lot to it. I think what makes it different is how erotic thrillers are a bit more explicit,” Bender said. “You could bring in these more modern themes of yuppie culture and women in the workplace and things that were becoming more common then. So, it’s basically like the film noir template meets the trashiness and more explicit sexuality and the social and cultural concerns of the 80s and 90s.”

  A prime example of this is the 1987 film “Fatal Attraction” starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close. Bender said this film perfectly displays the Reagan era contradiction of political conservatism clashing against cultural boundary pushing.

  “Glenn Close is obviously like this iconic femme fatale, and she clearly disrupts Michael Douglas’ very yuppyish existence. But then at the same time, at the end, it’s like all the family unit getting back together,” Bender said. “It’s a happy ending for this family even though they’ve been through a lot, and I think that very much embodies that Reagan era. There’s like this trashiness, but at the same time, the family can still be together and it’s fine and put this woman in her place.”

  The erotic thriller expands the femme fatale archetype by giving these women the ability to harness their sexuality for power and doesn’t always doom them to tragic fates.

  “The femme fatale is obviously quite rooted in male fantasy and is depicted as the homewrecker or the person who throws the man’s life off track,” Bender said. “But what I love about the femme fatale character is that there’s always this sort of level of con artistry to her that I find really interesting. She’s able to sort of gain people’s confidence and keep them eating out of the palm of her hand just from being sexy and being smart.”

  Take for instance Neve Campbell’s role of Suzie Toller in 1998’s “Wild Things” starring opposite Denise Richards. The movie updates the classic noir blonde v. brunette rivalry by pitting Campbell’s Goth identity against Richards’ rich and popular girl. By the end of the film, Toller subverts all expectations to gain the upper hand.

  “She doesn’t have as much money. She’s not from a stable background. And it turns out she is the smartest person of all. And that really appealed to me, the idea of the outsider who can infiltrate these spaces and be able to get away with things because they’re being underestimated for whatever reason,” Bender said.

  “I think that there is always this idea of the woman in these movies being a force that comes in from the outside and messes things up in interesting and exciting ways,” she continued.

  There was a stark decline in the creation of erotic thrillers post 9/11. Bender chalks this up to a more somber national mood and, to a certain degree, the increase in political correctness, even though she dislikes that phrase.

  She also cites a more pragmatic reason with the increase in popularity and ease of access in online pornography.

  “A large part of the decline of the erotic thriller has to do with the change in the way people would consume film and also the way, honestly, people would consume pornography. Because it is kind of funny to think that the decline of the erotic thriller really does kind of pair with when online porn was becoming increasingly popular and accessible,” Bender said.

  The erotic thriller thrived in home viewing markets like VHS and DVDs and premium cable subscriptions. A lot of these films, like “Poison Ivy” and “Wild Things,” would launch multiple sequels that would use the branding of the first film even though the central stars weren’t connected to them at all.

  Ironically, it might be in the home viewing market of streaming services where the erotic thriller could make a comeback. Bender points to “Fatal Attraction” director Adrian Lyne’s 2022 release of “Deep Water” for Hulu as an example of resurfacing the genre.

  “I would say that’s like the biggest recent one and one that’s brought a lot of these conversations about the genre back into the forefront,” Bender said. “It’s interesting to see that streaming is our home video now and once again, erotic thrillers are something that can find a home there.”