There’s a certain cachet to writing a masterpiece on a cocktail napkin. It conveys inspiration, as if the author was struck suddenly by an idea so good, it couldn’t wait for a proper notebook. There’s a bit of the American dream in there, too, creating success from nothing more than the power of the human brain and a scrap of paper. And it says that you’re the sort of cool person who hangs out in bars.
Aaron Sorkin wrote A Few Good Men on cocktail napkins while tending bar at a Broadway theater. Discovery Channel producers scribbled the idea for Shark Week on a napkin, and J.K. Rowling invented Quidditch in a pub. For every verifiable tale of a barroom brainstorm, though, there are two fake ones. Herb Kelleher and Rollin King have admitted that their claim of having launched Southwest Airlines from a cocktail napkin was “a hell of a story” but ultimately untrue. And no, Abraham Lincoln didn’t pen the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope.
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So when St. Louis moms Debbie Baldwin and Kim Cella say they wrote the script for their sitcom on cocktail napkins, a bit of skepticism might be understandable. Then they pull out the napkins. Small white squares printed with an image of a skipping pig in one corner are covered in character outlines, to-do lists, bits of dialogue, all written in sloppy, loopy black ink.
Cella grew up in Tennessee, went to Vanderbilt University, and followed her husband to St. Louis. A psychotherapist, she has two daughters in their twenties and is now divorced. She’s tall, blonde, beautiful in ripped jeans and a white shirt, the top couple buttons left undone. She’s enthusiastic, funny. Ask for an idea, and she’ll fire off three. Cella starts sentences, and Baldwin finishes them. Baldwin is the shrewd intellectual. She waits, listens, then offers the definitive word, though she, too, is quite funny. Baldwin grew up here and went to John Burroughs School, then Princeton University and the University of Virginia School of Law. She never took the bar, opting instead for writing and family. She’s the entertainment editor at Ladue News and the mother of three teenagers. She dresses like an upscale soccer mom, in clothes both comfortable and stylish.
The two became best friends because of their mutual love of TV. Insomniacs, they’d text each other lines from Will & Grace at 2 a.m. For years, they’ve had a standing date at Truffles, grabbing drinks every Thursday night, sitting at the same high-top in the back corner of the bar. Waitresses stop to show the ladies pictures of their kids. Just a glance or a nod brings another round from Duke, the bartender: a Bud Light for Cella and a cranberry and club soda for Baldwin. Cella has one drink; Baldwin 10.
One night, after a favorite show’s finale, Baldwin and Cella were lamenting that they couldn’t find anything decent with which to replace it. They were sure the worst show ever made was Sullivan & Son, the barroom sitcom that the Los Angeles Times described as a poor Cheers knockoff “where everybody plays a cliché.” Then they saw Ground Floor, and the bar sank even lower.
“We’re funnier than that,” they told each other. “We should f—king write a TV show.” So they pulled a pen from a purse and grabbed a cocktail napkin. On one napkin they wrote, “Jackson Cooper: depressed, womanizer, smart, hot, shrink, messy personal life.” Their main character would be a psychiatrist who encounters a patient dealing with a certain issue, and then that same issue would pop up in his own life. For instance, he might help a patient with boundary issues, only to come home and find a buddy crashing at his apartment. Another napkin said, “Carter: BFF, rich background, sells weed, no job, supports Coop.” As for plot, Cooper will meet his dream girl (yes, at a bar), only get her first name, and spend the rest of the first season tracking her down.
Cella and Baldwin pulled scenes from their own lives. They had a friend who arrived at his office one day to find a woman on his desk, her skirt hiked up, no panties. Once, Cella had a leaky roof, and the repairman she called had a weird habit of touching all of her things. Cooper would run into the same problems.
At the end of each night, Baldwin gathered the napkins, took them home, and typed up the notes. Then she’d put the file on a zip drive shaped liked a skateboard that they’d bought at Walgreens and drop it off at Cella’s in the middle of the night. “The skateboard’s in your mailbox,” she’d text, which any outsider might interpret as a some secret code. Cella would read the scripts, suggest revisions, and pass the zip drive back.
In January 2013, the women were at Truffles when Cella’s phone rang. It was her doctor. He was standing in her driveway. She needed to come home. Cella left Baldwin at their table. The doctor told her that she had breast cancer. He knew about her medical anxiety, so he wanted to break the news in person, to reassure her, to let her know they’d caught it early. Cella thought she was dying. She thought about her girls. “What are they going to do without a mother?” she worried.
She had surgery, then months of radiation. At the same time, Baldwin was dealing with her own issues, none of your business. When they reconvened in August, the demons defeated, they felt funnier than ever. Before, there was no urgency, but now, they wanted to finish the project before life happened again.
They contacted everyone they knew in show business, and everyone they knew who knew someone in show business, and asked them to read the script.
Several years ago, a film crew used Cella’s boyfriend’s house to shoot a movie called Meet Bill. Cella sent the filmmakers the script. “This is actually really kind of good,” they said, “but we can’t help you, because we only do movies.” She also had a friend from Vanderbilt who had become an agent in Los Angeles. She sent him the script. “I love it. It’s really clever,” he said. “I can’t help you.” Baldwin’s college boyfriend had gone on to become the showrunner for ER. He gave them some advice but couldn’t go beyond that.
At any given time, every major network has dozens of shows it’s trying to produce and dozens more that it wishes it had the time and money to produce. Why would anyone take a chance on a couple of middle-aged women from flyover country with zero experience? Baldwin sent the script to her high school classmate Kurt Deutsch, a Broadway music producer. He was lukewarm. He told Baldwin he only knew one guy who might be interested, and he’d send it to him, but they probably wouldn’t hear anything.
People send producer Jonathan Burkhart a lot of scripts, but Cella and Baldwin’s caught his attention. Part of it was skill; the script was smarter than most. Part of it was luck; he happened to be between projects. When Burkhart called Baldwin and Cella in September 2013 to tell them he liked their work, they didn’t know who he was, so they looked him up on the Internet Movie Database while he talked on speakerphone. Burkhart had spent years as a cinematographer, manning the camera for movies such as Dazed and Confused and Do the Right Thing. Now, he was a producer. He asked them about their process. They confessed that they didn’t have one. They wrote on bar napkins.
“I really like this,” he told the women. “Can I have permission to show it to my best friend from childhood? He’s a really, really well-known episodic television director. His name is Jace Alexander.”
They thought he said Jason Alexander, the bald guy from Seinfeld. Burkhart explained that this was a different guy but that Jace was a big deal in his own right. His stepfather is Law & Order director Ed Sherin, and his mother is four-time Academy Award nominee Jane Alexander. Following in those footsteps, Jace has directed episodes of Law & Order, Rescue Me, and The Blacklist.
Baldwin and Cella didn’t know how these things were supposed to work, so they said sure.
When Burkhart called Alexander, he’d recently finished a frustrating gig with a major network, where meddling executives had crushed his creativity, and he was taking some time to “regroup and just cleanse myself of that poisonous experience.” He was impressed by Cella and Baldwin’s script. They set up a conference call between the pair of pros and the pair of newbies. Alexander and Burkhart said they wanted to make the show. Great news. Baldwin and Cella felt like they had just hit the lottery. Then the conversation turned. “The chances of us submitting a script to any kind of studio executive who would read this and say, ‘Yeah, let’s put this in development or production,’ are highly, highly unlikely.” Burkhart told them. “It’s just not going to happen.”
That meant their only option was to finance the pilot themselves. That would give them something concrete to show the networks. If it kicked ass, nobody would be able to ignore the show just because the creators lacked credentials. Burkhart told Baldwin and Cella that they needed to raise $120,000 within about a week.
They didn’t know these voices on the other end of the call. They had no idea whether this was the right move. And $120,000 was a lot of money. Most people, told that their dream required that kind of cash, would find a different dream. But the women believed in their script, believed in themselves, believed that they would win the lottery again.
They called friends and family, launching the offline equivalent of a Kickstarter campaign. They formed Couch Trip Productions and gave a small percentage of the company to each investor. Friends brought them checks at Truffles. “You go, girls,” they said. “If anyone can do it, you can.”
A few days later, they wired the money to Burkhart. “This is going to be so f—king cool,” he told them, “but odds are, nothing will ever come of this.”
Jackson Cooper walks into a bar. He’s here for a blind date. He spots an attractive woman standing alone, approaches, says, “Please tell me that your name is Gretchen.”
“You don’t know how much I wish I could,” Natalie answers.
It turns out she’s there on a first date, too, just with some other guy, a total snooze who never stops talking about his job as a plastic-wrap distributor. He’ll be back from the restroom any minute.
“It seems the gods of blind dating are not with me tonight,” Cooper says.
“Well, clearly we haven’t offered the proper sacrifice,” Natalie says. “Burn our fake phone numbers with incense…”
“Spill a Cosmopolitan on a virgin, maybe,” Cooper suggests.
“No, I did that,” Natalie says.
Standing behind Cooper at the bar are the ladies who wrote those lines. There wasn’t room in the budget for extras.
Once Baldwin and Cella sent the money, Alexander assembled the cast. Steven Pasquale, recognized for his roles on Broadway and in Rescue Me, signed on to play Cooper. Christopher Fitzgerald, a multitalented Broadway veteran who can sing, juggle, and mime, would play Carter, Cooper’s drug-dealing best friend. Alexander cast his wife, versatile actress Maddie Corman, as Cooper’s receptionist, who takes crap from no one. Burkhart hired a crew and put together a schedule for a two-day shoot in New York in November 2013. They would create a 14-minute mini-episode.
The scene in the bar, as well as a couple of scenes in Cooper’s office, were shot on day one. That left the scenes in Cooper’s apartment for day two. Baldwin and Cella had secured the location, borrowing an apartment from a friend’s daughter. She’d told Baldwin and Cella that the building managers had given their blessing. She didn’t mention that she’d told them that they were just shooting a home video for Thanksgiving. As dolly after dolly of cameras and lights came rolling into the lobby, the doorman sounded the alarm, and before they could shoot even one scene, they were thrown out of the building on a 10-degree day.
Baldwin and Cella regrouped in a diner on First Avenue. This was the nightmare scenario. They’d already spent half of their $120,000 on the first day of the shoot. The actors and the crew were ready for day two, but they had nowhere to go. If they couldn’t find a new apartment, they’d be out of time and money with nothing to show for it but a couple of disjointed scenes.
Feeling guilty, the girl whose apartment they’d just been evicted from offered a potential solution. Her boyfriend lived in a bachelor pad with a bunch of guys in The Village. Burkhart wouldn’t commit without first seeing the space. “Are you kidding me?” Baldwin remembers thinking. “Beggars cannot be choosers.”
For the ladies, this was tense. For Burkhart, it was fun. “The film business is held together by duct tape: You lose locations. Somebody gets sick. The camera breaks. Somebody forgets a line,” he says. “So when shit hits the fan, you’re always ready. The crew fixes it. That’s the kind of stuff that makes me happy.”
Burkhart ran over to the new apartment. It was filthy, full of pizza boxes and empty beer cans and drug paraphernalia. But it was gorgeous, with high ceilings, exposed brick, huge windows. He brought the crew in, started cleaning. Soon, cameras were rolling.
Cooper comes around the corner to discover that Carter has commandeered his couch and raided his fridge. They discuss when it is appropriate to drink during the daytime, and Cooper rattles off a list of 10 occasions that includes “Thanksgiving if you’re with your family, New Year’s Day if you’re not with your family, and Groundhog Day.”
Groundhog Day?
“It’s February. Any excuse, man.”
Cooper asks Carter to instruct his “customers to not light up in the elevator. It’s starting to smell like a Lil Wayne concert in there.”
“Clients; I call them clients,” Carter corrects. “On my tax return, I list them as chemical dependents.”
“Get out.”
Alexander thought both days went well, but he wouldn’t know what they really had until he began editing. He cut it all together and said, “This really works.” In St. Louis, Baldwin and Cella crossed their fingers and held their breath, while Alexander and Burkhart shopped the show to various networks. Everyone loved it. “Kim and Debbie’s writing is that good,” Burkhart says. “They wrote a smart, engaging story.”
Having a somewhat finished product was good and bad. It made pitching easier. All they had to do was push “play”; the networks didn’t need to use their imaginations. On the other hand, it was too late for the executives to make major changes. “It was pretty simple at this point,” Alexander says. “’Do you like the show, or do you not like the show?’ We have some really great characters, and we have some ideas of where they are going to go in this first season and a couple of seasons beyond.”
They received an offer from FOX but ultimately decided to go with DirecTV. In recent years, TV providers have begun to compete with one another—and with networks, in a way—by producing their own original programming. Think of House of Cards on Netflix or Transparent on Amazon. It was “an extremely low, low, low budget offer,” Burkhart says. “However, it came with a particular amount of creative freedom.” Whereas a half-hour scripted show would usually cost more than $1 million per episode, DirecTV was offering only about $300,000, but there would be very little oversight. For Alexander, this was ideal.
In the movie business, the director rules, but in TV, the writer is king…at least until everyone has to answer to the network. “That’s been frustrating for me as a filmmaker,” Alexander says. Now, he’d be working with a network willing to let him take the lead and a couple of rookie writers who didn’t know any better. “We turned the paradigm on its head,” Alexander says.
Of course, despite being mostly hands-off, DirecTV did have a couple of requests. The provider had another show in which the main character was a shrink, so its execs asked that Cooper’s profession be changed. Cella and Baldwin made him a college professor and invented a wild back story: He’d been a practicing psychiatrist until he wrote a bestseller that outed one of his patients; he lost his license, and the patient ran off with Cooper’s fiancée. DirecTV didn’t like the working titles for the show, first And We’re Out of Time and then simply Coop. Eventually they settled on Almost There, which is exactly where Baldwin and Cella found themselves.
Having won the lottery again, they moved to New York for several weeks this winter to shoot the first 10-episode season. After hearing all of the talk about the low budget, Baldwin and Cella arrived at a Brooklyn soundstage to find what seemed like an enormous production. The bachelor pad from the pilot had been rebuilt as a set, complete with a working kitchen and bathroom. The women had their own office and a production assistant they had hired from St. Louis. Breakfast each morning was a massive spread that included an omelet bar. The crew included some 80 people. And the wardrobe department had so many racks of clothes, you would have thought they were shooting a period drama, not a sitcom.
It quickly became apparent why so many of the cast members had agreed to work at a discount for the chance to collaborate with Alexander. He gave everyone the leeway to do their jobs but always kept things on schedule. Days were short and efficient. Actors were allowed to improvise, play with their lines. Often, with so many Broadway stars in the cast, singing would break out. Once, Pasquale and Fitzgerald did a beautiful duet of “Old Man River.” Another time, the cast wouldn’t stop singing “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers, pining for some funky Dixieland. Alexander slammed his fists on a table to stop the music. By then, the rest of the crew was crying laughing.
Cella and Baldwin pitched in where they could on set. They shoveled snow during one of New York’s coldest winters. One day, Baldwin helped unload cases of Coke from a truck. For location shoots, they moved racks of clothes. That attitude seemed to rub off on others. One time, the hairstylist used instructions found via Google search to fix a broken-down car. “Everybody had a feeling that the show was theirs, that it wasn’t just that you were hired to just do your job,” says Corman, Alexander’s wife and Cooper’s secretary. The shoot became a real family affair, with Jace’s daughter and legendary mother both playing guest roles. “There was some sense of ‘We are doing this on a shoestring. We are doing it because we think it’s really great.’”
During shoots, Baldwin and Cella sat at monitors and wore professional headphones, watching the action. Because it was important to keep quiet, Cella would hiss at Baldwin whenever her phone started vibrating. Once, Baldwin’s husband, Richard, called. It was his turn to bring cookies to a work meeting. What should he do? “What do you mean, what do you do?” Baldwin asked, incredulous. Another time, she answered the phone, and it was her son, in a panic. “Mom, where is my backpack?” Baldwin wasn’t in a great position to answer this question: She was in a different time zone, and besides, hello, she was trying to make a TV show. Cella’s daughters, both students at Vanderbilt, came to visit, and Baldwin’s family managed to get themselves there, too. Everybody was very proud of Mom. Everybody also wanted jobs.
As Alexander pushed the show in his own direction, the women sometimes felt frustrated, Baldwin in particular. “You’re cutting a great joke,” she’d grumble. It was then that Brian Riedel, the show’s script coordinator, who had worked on 30 Rock, issued a wakeup call: Take a step back, ladies. People don’t write scripts in their spare time and end up in Hollywood. Alexander and Burkhart had been working in this industry since they were kids, and they’d never seen anything like it. “You do not understand how lucky you are,” Riedel told them.
Occasionally Burkhart would worry whether Baldwin and Cella were happy with how certain scenes were turning out. He’d wonder, “Are they satisfied with this?” On the other hand, he’d think, “I don’t care if they’re happy, because you know what? Anything they were thinking about, this has gone miles beyond that. We’re all going for the ride. Am I happy?”
Unable to convince himself that he didn’t care, Burkhart would walk over to where Baldwin and Cella were watching. He’d catch them giggling to one another at the jokes, and he’d go back to work satisfied. (Later, once they’ve seen the finished episodes, Baldwin and Cella will say that Alexander “completely got it.”)
On Cella’s 50th birthday, the cast brought a cake and sang to her. When they first sat down at Truffles to write a few lines of dialogue on cocktail napkins, she and Baldwin never could have predicted they would one day be serenaded by a cast of celebrities that included a four-time Academy Award nominee.
Almost There is set to premiere this fall on DirecTV’s Audience network. Those without a satellite dish will be able to stream it on Amazon Prime. Asked why people should watch, Alexander* says, “It is just a refreshingly honest relationship comedy. The comedy is not forced. The characters are people that you just want to spend time with. They are complex. They are funny. And they are brilliantly realized by a really unheralded young cast.”
I screen the pilot for a focus group of young women in the SLM office, and even before the opening credits have run they are disrupting nearby employees by laughing out loud. The word “smart” is used often to describe the dialogue. Another amateur critic says it’s “very watchable,” which she means as a high compliment, the perfect rom-com show to binge-watch while snuggling up on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Some parts are silly and plenty of it is absurd, but the show doesn’t take itself too seriously. And the relationship between Coop and Carter is gold, like a Seinfeld and Kramer for the 21st century.
Asked why he’s excited about the show, Burkhart launches into a diatribe about why he doesn’t watch TV, the bottom line of which is “I don’t have the f—king time. If I weren’t getting paid, I wouldn’t f—king watch it.” Let me rephrase the question. What makes the show worth watching, you know, for other people? “There is a lot of television that is built on a culture of mean. Nasty, backstabbing, catty competition and angst is the way that American television works,” he says. “Quite honestly, I think the one thing that I like the most about this series is that it’s not mean.”
You could say the same thing about the city from which the series came.
Baldwin and Cella glow. The radiance of the red carpet transforms mere mortals into stars, their faces shining like the sun. They’re here at the Siasconset Casino on June 26 for Late Night Storytelling, one of the signature events at the Nantucket Film Festival.
They submitted their story on a whim. This year’s theme is Fact vs. Fiction, and the prompt seemed perfect: “Do you have a tale so far-fetched that no one believes it’s true? What about that moment in your life so perfect that it seemed scripted?” The pair was chosen from among dozens of applicants to speak in front of a crowd of 300, many of them industry insiders. It was another long shot. (Burkhart founded the festival but had nothing to do with their selection.)
Even after everything that’s happened, Baldwin and Cella still feel starstruck by the big names in the crowd. On the way in, they strike up a conversation with Chris Matthews.
“Are you doing a story tonight?” Cella asks the host of Hardball.
“No, I don’t have the guts to do that,” Matthews says, oblivious that these women will be among tonight’s presenters. “This is not amateur hour.”
Once he walks away, Cella turns to Baldwin and says, “Oh my God, I am going to be sick.”
They find their seats in the front row, next to the evening’s other storytellers. Ophira Eisenberg, of the NPR trivia show Ask Me Another, serves as host. After cracking a few jokes about her Jewish heritage, she turns over the mic. First up is Eddie Brill, the longtime warm-up comedian for David Letterman. Next is former Big Bang Theory writer Rob Cohen, whose mockumentary Being Canadian is showing at the festival. Most intimidating of all is actor Tom Cavanagh of Ed fame, another Canadian, who tells a story about being pulled over in his ancient Toyota Tercel and trying to play the fame card to talk his way out of the ticket, with the cop refusing to believe that anybody driving such a piece of junk could be on Scrubs.
At this point, Baldwin and Cella would be forgiven for realizing that they’re out of their depth and running away. Instead, they stand up. “If you’re wondering what two Midwest middle-aged housewives are doing on the stage, you’re not alone,” Cella says. “We’re freaking out.”
Big laughs.
“Yeah, I’m not really sure what we’re doing here, because we are neither Jewish nor Canadian,” Baldwin deadpans.
Bigger laughs. Ice broken.
They tell their story. It begins with scribbles on cocktail napkins.
*Just before this story went to press, Jace Alexander was arrested and charged for allegedly possessing and distributing child pornography. The show’s premiere this fall will not be affected, Cella says.
