Everyone knows Ross, Monica, and Joey. Now it's time to meet their makers: David, Marta, and Kevin.
By Daniel Howard Cerone.
Shortly after wrapping the second season of Friends in May, the exhausted creative trio behind the NBC hit comedy gathered at a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles to celebrate...Christmas.
Two Christmases, actually. At around 11 P.M., over their fifth pitcher of sake, the executive producers -- Kevin Bright, Marta Kauffman, and David Crane (above) -- and their significant others began unwrapping two holidays' worth of presents on a warm spring evening. Says Crane, "We were giving each other gifts, saying, 'I don't remember what this is.'"
Such is the consequence of creating a cultural phenomenon on network television. The three friends behind Friends love to spend time together -- "When there is time," says Kauffman, who met Crane, her writing partner, two decades ago at Brandeis University.
"The downside of all this is that it's extraordinarily time consuming," says Bright, a producer who teamed up with the two writers in the late '80s for the HBO series Dream On (now shown in reruns on Comedy Central). "The three of us will work from 9:30 in the morning to anywhere between midnight and seven the following morning, five days a week."
The last two months of the season, they say, were especially brutal because of the special one-hour Super Bowl episode, which caused the scribes to fall behind.
"It killed us," says a sighing Kauffman, the mother of two young children. "I would get home in the morning, say hello to my kids, change my clothes, and drive back to work."
The three never quite got the rest they were looking for this summer when they got caught in the hailstorm of critical press that descended after the cast members demanded a salary boost from an estimated $40,000 to $100,000 per episode. When asked if the producers feel let down that the actors put the show at risk over money, Kauffman says, "Negotiations are what they are. There is enough respect between us all that no one feels betrayed. You have to realize that negotiations are between the actors' representatives and Warner Bros. [which coproduces Friends]. There's been no tension on the set, no attitudes. There really hasn't."
At no point did Kauffman and her colleagues feel they would have to resort to anything drastic. "There's been no feeling of, 'Oh God, we're going to have to replace somebody.' It's really not like that," says Kauffman. "We have a very good relationship with these actors. We all talk. We all air out our feelings. Not in a touchy-feely way, but in a very open forum."
In fact, Kauffman falls just short of supporting the cast's actions. "I have to believe that as much as we provided a vehicle for them with this show, they lifted the material to a new level by doing what they do. I have to believe in my heart there is mutual appreciation here."