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When the Star Gets Fired
There’s an influential Hollywood website called The Ankler. It gets its name from “ankling”, a word coined by Variety, the ancient Bible of the business side of show business. Someone who “ankles” a studio is laid off, but leaves under their own power; a normal, unemotional job separation. The opposite, in Variety-ese, is getting “axed”—flat out fired, and escorted off the studio lot by security, with dueling lawyers sure to follow. It doesn’t often happen to the stars, but when it does, it’s a big, public, messy deal. This is particularly true when an entire show is shaped around them: Charlie Sheen, Jeremy Clarkson, and Roseanne Barr are recent examples. We’ll get to them.
Some actors are fired because of problems they caused on the set. Others, simply because they were miscast to begin with, or couldn’t seem to give the performance that the film or TV show needed. And with many others it simply came down to money.
On-set misbehavior got Clayne Crawford fired from the Lethal Weapon TV series, where he played Riggs, the character that Mel Gibson played in the film. Most of the show’s crew quietly applauded the move, but there is a contingent of Team Crawford that attributes the firing to reverse discrimination and political correctness. After all, they point out, his black co-star, Damon Wayans, was no shrinking violet either.
Wayans, not considered one of the warmest or friendliest of actors, was chilly and remote with co-workers, but professional. He knew his lines, hit his marks and went back to his trailer. By contrast, Crawford had screaming fits, one of them in full view of the public while the show was filming local locations. Christian Bale got away with it on the Terminator: Salvation set, but power-wise, Clayne Crawford is no Christian Bale.
A famous early case of on-set problems was Steven Hill, the first leader of the Mission: Impossible team. Show creator Bruce Geller fought to cast him; Desilu’s empress, Lucille Ball, had her doubts. Hill brought an impressively dark and brooding presence to the role. But he began to cause production to fall behind schedule because of his increasing observance of strict Jewish laws. He had to leave early on Fridays before sunset, a problem for filming as daylight hours dwindled in the winter. He wanted special linings sewn into his on-camera wardrobe. The demands started to raise hackles, which Hill interpreted as hostility to his religious faith.
The irony, of course, is he was surrounded by other Jews—Geller, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, all of the writers, not to mention most of Desilu—who got fed up with him. There are common-sense exceptions to Sabbath rules for people whose roles in society require it—policemen, soldiers, doctors. By the Sixties, Hollywood’s large Jewish community had managed the issue for a half century, at least for Conservative and Reform Jews. But that wasn’t good enough for hyper-observant Steven Hill, so he was replaced by Peter Graves.
Sometimes it’s not the actor’s fault: they were miscast. Though it’s forgotten now, in 1975 Robert De Niro was fired from a movie that had already started shooting, Bogart Slept Here. According to Neil Simon, De Niro was a fine actor who simply wasn’t funny. Simon was able to rewrite the script, which two years later became The Goodbye Girl.
A similar case that’s much more familiar is Eric Stoltz’s firing from Back to the Future. This was a very difficult decision because it was six weeks into filming, requiring much of it to be totally redone. Sets had to be rebuilt, supporting actors brought back. It’s hard to find another example of a reshoot that major that doesn’t involve the sudden death of an actor, or an actor’s involvement in serious offscreen criminal scandal, like All the Money in the World and Kevin Spacey, or Frogman with O.J. Simpson.
It was also painful because there were no outside causes to blame, no diplomatic way to avoid the fact that Stoltz’s performance was the problem. And by all accounts it was a good performance; Christopher Lloyd (Doc) and Tom Wilson (Biff) attest to it. But it wasn’t funny, not even a little bit. Stoltz saw it as a straightforward science fiction story with a wistful, dreamlike Fifties setting. Bob Zemeckis, Bob Gale, and Steven Spielberg made one of the gutsiest decisions of their careers, and the results back them up.
Some actors are replaced over money disputes, and in those cases, making after-the-fact judgments about whether they were quit, fired, jumped or pushed is often harder. Crispin Glover (“George McFly”) didn’t come back to BTTF II, Richard Castellano (“fat Clemenza”) didn’t come back to The Godfather Part II, and Robert Duvall didn’t come back to The Godfather Part III, because the studio wouldn’t meet their salary demands.
Ditto Suzanne Somers (Three’s Company), Farrah Fawcett-Majors (Charlie’s Angels), Melina Kanakaredes (CSI:NY). In a rare case of the actors winning, the original Duke boys on The Dukes of Hazzard quit/were fired and replaced, but the ratings suffered so badly that they got rehired. But usually, the actors lose. George Eads and Jorja Fox tried it on CSI and came back without a raise. Hawaii Five-O’s Grace Park and Daniel Dae Kim provocatively added a race card to their salary fight, but still lost.
Then there are star replacements that, deservedly or not, became public relations trainwrecks. Usually it’s a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back type of thing. Charlie Sheen was known to be trouble long before he was signed to star in Two and a Half Men. His character in that show, Charlie Harper, is a caricature of an amiable Malibu celebrity known chiefly for drinking, gambling, and bedding lots of women. In other words, he was playing himself.
Show creator Chuck Lorre knew that it was a calculated risk working with someone with Charlie’s erratic behavior, but for the first couple of years Sheen kept his real-life drug use and whoring off the front pages. Finally, he couldn’t resist testing the limits and exceeding them. Yet he was the star, and the role was him. What could Chuck do?
He fired him. Lorre knew that it would be tough to keep the show going with someone else. But at a certain point, he had to take the chance. He rolled the dice with Ashton Kutcher playing a different character, and won four more years of life for his show.
Jeremy Clarkson is a slightly different case; he isn’t an actor. Well, not really, although like fellow Brit reality show king Simon Cowell, Clarkson’s forceful personality made him a TV star. He had every reason to think he was the indispensable centerpiece of his show, Top Gear. But he was so obnoxious to his bosses, not to mention the show’s staff, that after a few too many wearying fights, they canned him. Yes, they knew it would be hard to retain a good part of the show’s audience without Clarkson. But after a certain point, the producers emphatically decided “life is too short”, far too short to keep putting up with him, so they came to a parting of the ways.
Both Sheen and Clarkson recovered, going right on to other, similarly-themed shows, Anger Management and The Grand Tour (and now Clarkson’s Farm) respectively. By all accounts, this time they showed up on time and did their jobs professionally. This can be taken as a rebuke to the people who fired them: See, you idiots, if you’d treated me right to begin with, I would have behaved. But it can also be read as the performer ruefully facing reality: If I hadn’t been a jerk, I’d still have that show. Probably there’s some of both.
In May 2018, there was the bizarre, out of nowhere drama of the ABC television network versus Roseanne Barr.
Barr sent an arguably racist Tweet about Valerie Jarrett, by then the all-but-obscure chief advisor to Barack Obama. Actually, it wasn’t just arguable: it was offensive, but cryptic enough to possibly skate by with excuses about sleeping pills or supposedly hacked phones. By 2018 Jarrett did seem a peculiar subject for a drug-hazed, multi-multi-millionairess TV star to be obsessing about at two in the morning. Unfortunately, for a crucial couple of days Roseanne wouldn’t back down. “I’m a comedian!” But she wasn’t making a discernable joke.
Yes, the wokesters had it in for her. No surprise. But the key thing is the normies didn’t see a reason why they should jump to her defense. Roseanne made a big splash with her newly revived show, but it was season one; she hadn’t rebuilt a mass audience yet.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake, for Roseanne and for ABC, but the network was too stiff-necked to quickly work out a backstage agreement, and Barr was too stiff-necked to make a real apology. She finally did after it was too late. For example, she could have made a well-publicized 3-week retreat to a rehab clinic, re-emerge in public life at the end of the month with an Oprah interview, and make a $50,000 contribution to a women’s group fighting Ambien addiction. There were plenty of ways she could have handled it and kept her show. But Roseanne was too much of an egomaniac to do any of that. She misjudged her strength and lost.
Some stray facts had a strong role in how this played out. It was the end of May, almost at the very end of the TV season, and before much had been done to prepare the next one. In short, strategically it was the weakest time of the year for any star to press her luck against a network, because season one’s production was about to shut down anyway and the show wasn’t due back on the air for three months.
Also, ABC wasn’t just any old network. It was a relatively small, if highly visible, part of The Walt Disney Company. Embarrassing problems can affect the image and income of the entire company, from theme parks to cruise ships, as it has learned to its chagrin. ABC likes to present itself as the family network, just as the CW features teenagers, and NBC favors urban singles. ABC has also made an effort to be perceived as the most black-friendly of broadcast networks. The head of programming was black. None of this was unknown to Roseanne. Once the Tweet became public—that is, instantly—ABC didn’t have the option of ignoring it.
Every time an actor is fired, there’s a whole branch of alternate reality: how different casting would have sometimes led to a different cultural reality. Suppose there had been no Archie Bunker. The real world of America’s 1970s was changed by the success of All in the Family and its offshoots. The real world of America’s 2020s could have been changed by the success of Roseanne, which was beginning to emerge as something unique, something different; a show set between the coasts with three-dimensional characters who earned laughs by acting out seldom acknowledged truths.
There was already an example of how to handle the situation. When Valerie Harper quit Valerie, she didn’t expect the studio and the network to be able to continue as Valerie’s Family, and then The Hogan Family. But they did. So it wasn’t unprecedented for ABC to take Roseanne and simply turn it into The Connor Family.
I wish there was a happy ending to the story. At the time, it looked like it might have turned into a case of “go woke, go broke”, but it didn’t: The Connor Family just got renewed for a fifth season.
Published in General
When I read this, I got the impression you were writing for Rob Long’s new podcast. And he could still do a lot worse than just read everything you wrote.
They all wanted to be sure he was dead.
Tom Rothman is a tremendous mensch. His town hall Q&As are great because he is witty and doesn’t pull his punches. When asked about what kind of a film major one should get to best succeed in Hollywood, he said to get an English degree. Movies are all about stories and story telling and that is what you learn with an English degree.
There is also a great interview with him in Deadline. His comments on the Academy are great:
Yes, and all three continued their car show while adding interesting individual projects.
Sure, a backlash can still happen. It’s tough to enforce general amnesia on the public.
Any Vietnam-era vets reading this? When you saw Barbarella in 1968, what did you think of Jane Fonda? Compare it to the way you felt reading her name five years later.
OJ Simpson is, at the moment, a free man; technically, there’s nothing preventing the Zucker brothers and Paramount from hiring him for a Naked Gun 30 Years Later reunion. But it’s not going to happen.
That’s more likely due to the absence of Leslie Nielsen. And George Kennedy… and Ed Williams is 95…
Many thanks, K. Actually, Rob could tell an interesting story, though I don’t like to put friends on the spot. Kevin Can Wait replaced the character of his wife with a different woman, a new romantic interest, and cast Leah Remini because audiences still associated her with Kevin due to The King of Queens. It was a daring move that might have worked, but didn’t save the show.
BTW, one of the things I admired about Kevin Can Wait was Kevin James insisted on taping the show on Long Island, far from NYC, in a tidy but blue collar neighborhood.
It didn’t help that she didn’t age well since “KoQ.” But there were some very powerful moments.
I’m with you on the British TV. The Brits have ruined American TV series for me. By comparison, I find the American actors are wooden — as if they are reading their lines from cue cards. Also, the Australian/New Zealand shows seem very plodding, with very little pace to them. So, my watching is mostly streaming British series and movies.
Jane Fonda will never be mentioned in my house. When my wife picked up one of her workout tapes at a garage sale (for 50 cents) I politely asked her to trash it. Today, that photo of her sitting on that North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery (wearing an NVA helmet) still infuriates me.
I still have mixed emotions when I watch Cat Ballou. Lee Marvin’s performance was fantastic, but then, there’s Fonda.
Gary, what a fantastic piece of Hollywood history!
I had always been a fan of Charley Sheen, until he self-destructed. Making nearly 2 million an episode on Two and a Half Men and then shooting off his mouth at management was incredibly stupid. Especially when you consider that he didn’t really have to act; he was just playing himself.
His performance on Wall Street was excellent and, from what I understand, his performance in Platoon was even better (I didn’t see the movie). I thought his move into comedy (both Hot Shots movies) was successful. Major League is still one of my favorite movies.
Still, he has been bent on self-destruction. Too bad, but it’s his own fault.
I should point out that there’s usually two sides to each of these stories. What’s in the post is my own best guess as to which side to believe. I’m sure there are Suzanne Somers fans out there somewhere who’ll tell you to this day that it was all Joyce De Witt’s fault.
It’s tougher to make a judgment about someone I like. I’m a car nut who enjoys watching Clarkson, but I’ve never kidded myself that he’s a cuddly teddy bear to work with.
Cases like Roseanne’s are tough because I keep getting distracted by the needless waste of an opportunity to do something different and actually daring in the ideologically straitjacketed world of TV. From the conservative point of view I’d like to give her the benefit of some doubt. ABC botched it, no question. The problem is, so did Roseanne.
Try as I may, I could never understand the popularity of Three’s Company. I couldn’t even see it as a comedy; it was just a silly T&A show in which idiots dialed in, hoping for a glance of Suzanne Somers jumping up and down.
From what little I heard, it was Somers’ husband who was urging her to hold out for more money. Dumb move.
Anyone make discreet use of a hat pin?
This post and the comments have been quite enlightening, thanks Gary and everyone else. I rarely watch TV these days-if our TV died I wouldn’t miss anything. I can watch Fox News and movies if I want, on my computer. I prefer to read books. Speaking of that, I picked up Lark Rise to Candleford at Half Price Books, where they had a big stack of them. I finished it, but found it incredibly boring. I assume the TV adaptation was better.
In 1967-8, when I was a freshman in college, everyone dropped everything we were doing to watch that week’s episode of Star Trek on a dorm-mate’s TV (her room was packed, and peoples’ dates cooled their heels in the lobby, waiting for the show to finish). Today, I can’t imagine that level of dedication to anything on TV.
I think Roseanne Barr was a special case. First, she insulted an insider of the Obama administration. The ‘monkey’ reference is the worst comparison because it implies sub-human. However in Planet of the Apes, the apes were the sophisticated educated intelligencia and the humans were primitive and ignorant.
But what’s always most important is who is doing the insulting or making the gaffe.
I think it’s useful to make the distinction of ‘saying something racist’ versus being a racist. One could accidentally say something ‘racist’ and not be a racist at all.
This is the case with Roseanne Barr. She didn’t know Valerie Jarret was a POC. She thought she was white.
But if you look into Roseanne’s history, you will find her record of being very close with some fairly rebellious black guys and gals, in other words, not Ben Carson and Tim Scott types. Roseanne is very close to being a Progressive and anti-Republican in general, more a Ron Paul type, and ultimately, someone who has good things to say about Trump.
This was her biggest transgression. She and her show were normalizing Trump voters. This was something they hated. And the show was making light of political differences we have become so familiar with. This could not continue. They want division. It’s obvious to me, anyway.
That the show was #1 on all networks made them all the more zealous in cancellation.
As far as how Roseanne bar handled this incident, I no longer judge PR responses to overwhelming condemnation and mass social shaming. There is no way to overcome that kind of onslaught.
She’s also Jewish ( I think) and concerned for Israel regarding Iran. (My God, this was a perfect storm!)
She’s always been a somewhat crazy gal. I trashed her on Ricochet for her National Anthem travesty years ago..
Can’t we just celebrate who she is rather than trying to read her mind?
So if we can determine she’s not a racist, then the tweet should not be interpreted as an attack. Her explanation should suffice.
It is them deliberately misunderstanding.
Same.
The saddest story I know of in Hollywood is that of Ingrid Bergman:
It was different then of course, because there was no streaming, no on-demand viewing, no VCRs… and very few repeats.
Me too.
@MarciN What a great story and very sad. Thanks for sharing it.
I shared a dressing area with her, Isabella. And Martin Short. It was an NBC production and live feed from Rockefeller Center. So maybe I’m a “C” level …LOL
So much judgement from people who have no clue!
https://rushbabe49.com/2022/07/18/my-sentiments-exactly-isabella-rossellini-on-when-youre-older/
That’s the gal!
My experience with NBC was very negative. They made us come at 4:30AM Today Show, and we had to wait a half hour to get in and waited. Much more weird dazzle-dazzle with these sick producers pulling strings.
And they were cheap.
Poor Isabelle Rossellini, daughter of international icons, is in a New York basement with jugglers and clowns. With Martin Short. I think they felt humiliated. I understand completely.
We were professional enough not to talk to them. And they didn’t talk to us.
This is wildly off topic, but almost worth it’s own post.
Ricochet found one method of keeping the temperature down on comments by charging for access and having a Code Of Conduct that allows them to boot troublemakers. But there is another method that’s been proven (in my mind anyway) to work.
In the late 1990s National Review Online had a “discussion forum” named Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO) that worked a little differently. It only published once per day. Readers emailed in to the moderator, he’d collate all the messages and publish, then everyone could react via email back to the moderator, who’d publish again the next day.
It could still get heated – I remember more than a few occasions where I’d email in a response to something someone said, then after a little while email again asking for something to be retracted prior to publication. That “Cooling Off” period is what doesn’t exist on modern social media.
There was a core group of people who participated – we even had a “meetup” in DC is September 1999. I want to say there were about a dozen or so people there.
The feature was retired shortly before The Corner started. I think the guy who was in charge of the daily collation of the emails left for another job.
In college in 1984 I had a part-time job at K-mart. I made sure to schedule a late class on Thursday afternoons so that they couldn’t schedule me to work Thursday nights, or I would have missed Cheers and the rest of the NBC Thursday night lineup.
About once or twice a semester we’d pool our money and rent a VCR and a couple movies for the weekend.
That’s key to understanding Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch, which damaged his career at the time (2005, IIRC). I read an account of the incident by one of the stagehands. He made a point of saying it didn’t feel weird or crazy at the time, and he was mystified how or why it became such a big deal. Performers often did zany things to stir up the studio audience.
The answer is YouTube and other online video clips. Sure, home VCRs had been around for a quarter-century or more, but most people didn’t have them recording everything they were watching. Even if you time-shifted Oprah’s show, there was no way to share the tape with more than a handful of friends. If something that happened on TV was truly notorious, it might have made the news. But this certainly didn’t qualify.
What Tom Cruise didn’t realize, what few people at the time realized back then, is YouTube made it possible to make someone’s over-the-top moments instantly available to everyone and permanent. It changed the way people behave on camera, because even a slight misjudgment, or a one time misreading the room, became your most prominent moment ever.
“YEEEE-AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!”
Can’t even remember his name anymore. Dumped his presidential run with one scream.
There have been a few with slight variations, but I think you mean Howard Dean.
Cheers? Sure. But also Night Court!
That’s a careful and intelligent defense, Franco, better than any that Roseanne herself came up with at the time, but…nah, I’m not buying it. During the Gulf War, when an Arab paper depicted Condoleeza Rice as an ape, I don’t recall that we went out of our way to call it a disguised compliment. Because it wasn’t. And it wasn’t here either. I agree that she’s not a conservative, never has been.
There’s a certain point where you can’t deduce that Mel Gibson’s drunken rant shows that he really loves the Jews, or Stephen Colbert’s offensive anti-American jokes show that he’s really the biggest patriot on TV. Sometimes you have to take people at face value.
I’ve never met Roseanne Barr. I don’t know what’s in her heart of hearts. I have to go by her actions, because that’s all I can know about her. I’m not calling her a racist. I’m saying she made a racist Tweet. That’s my common sense reading of what she wrote. That was most people’s reading of it. That’s why there wasn’t a backlash; the normies didn’t rush to her defense because that’s the way they read it.
Being Jewish and/or supporting Israel is the most ordinary thing in the world in Hollywood, and the city of Los Angeles generally. Roseanne gets no bonus points for that.
If we’re going to say that The Powers that Be wanted her off the air By Any Means Necessary, then we also have to conclude that Roseanne herself must be in on the conspiracy, because she set this in motion and could have stopped it within days.
She messed up. It doesn’t make her an untouchable human being. But it doesn’t make her a victim either.
Anyway, thanks for a thoughtful comment. I weighed some of these ideas before I wrote the post, but I decided that she couldn’t just get a Get Out of Jail Free card.