I'll Be There For You. Kelsey Miller
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have a barn.”
Neither had ever written a play, let alone a musical. So they did what one is supposed to do in college: experimented. They booked a theater space and commissioned classmates Seth Friedman and Billy Dreskin1 to help out.
This play would become the first Kauffman-Crane production, titled Waiting for the Feeling. (It was exactly what it sounds like, according to Kauffman: “An angst-driven, collegiate, ‘comedy’” about how hard it is to be a college student.) Still, the experience confirmed what they’d first come to realize while directing Godspell. They clicked. They were good (if still juvenile) writers. They understood each other, but also complemented one another. Crane was analytical, his focus homed in on the words on the page. Kauffman was better with emotion, and enjoyed the creative work of taking a story from script to stage and, later, to screen. Down the line, during the production of Friends, Crane preferred to stay in the writers’ room, tweaking jokes and refining stories, while Kauffman did much of the creative producing on set, checking wardrobe, watching camera blocking, and hashing scenes out with the actors.
What made Kauffman and Crane such a strong team was the fact that they could put their heads together and create something, and then step apart to execute their vision in slightly separate roles. They had talent and dynamism and extraordinary work ethic, but they also had trust. On this foundation, the pair would go on to forge a lifelong friendship, and a twenty-seven-year creative partnership, which would forever alter the trajectory of both network and cable television programming. It was a natural, comfortable interdependence. Together, they just worked.
When people wonder about that ineffable magic that made Friends such a hit, much credit (if not all credit) is given to the cast. But Kauffman and Crane were the primary ingredient, no question. It was not only the fortitude of their professional relationship, but the intimacy and trust within their personal one. They were the original friends.
Kauffman and Crane moved to New York after college, pursuing the musical-theater career they’d begun at Brandeis. They wrote their next show, Personals, along with former classmate Seth Friedman. It was a musical revue about the people behind newspaper personal ads, featuring music and lyrics by none other than Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz—already musical-theater stars, and on the verge of becoming musical-theater legends, as well as the musicians behind virtually every Disney animated feature of the 1990s. Personals made the rounds on college festival circuits, and even a USO tour, before landing off-Broadway in 1985, where it starred a twenty-six-year-old Jason Alexander. The production was bursting at the seams with talent, and yet reviews were almost comically mixed. “Entertaining and ingenious,” declared the New York Post. “Unfailingly mirthless,” countered the Times.
Still, Kauffman and Crane had laid solid groundwork for what they planned as a lifelong career in the theater. Only in their late twenties, they’d already written and mounted a handful of off-Broadway plays and musicals—some with Kauffman’s new husband, composer Michael Skolff—many of which were well received. If they weren’t yet an established hit, they were on their way, with no plans to change course.
Then television agent Nancy Josephson came to see Personals. She, too, was a relative newbie, on the cusp of titanic success—much of which would arise from her decision to contact Kauffman and Crane, and eventually sign them as clients. That night, after seeing the show, she reached out to the playwrights. Had they ever considered writing for TV? Not really. Did they want to give it a shot? Why not.
Josephson tasked Kauffman and Crane to come up with ten television concepts to shop around. Crane is the first to acknowledge that some of the show ideas were, in a word, “crazy.” Others were just bad. But Kauffman and Crane were undaunted, perhaps because, being so far removed from Hollywood, they had no real sense of the competition they were up against. At that point, television would be at best a side gig, with both of them still committed to the theater. They flew out to Los Angeles for meetings occasionally, but remained firmly rooted in New York. And then, out of the blue, someone bought one of their scripts.
“Talk about your first work not being your best work,” Crane said, shaking his head. “It was called Just a Guy. And it was really just about a guy… I don’t know, it was really lame.” But it was a milestone—a massive turning point in their career. “We sat in the rental car, screaming,” Kauffman recalled. Just a Guy was never produced, but now they could say that they’d sold something. “And then we were able to sell a few more scripts that didn’t get produced,” said Crane. On the one hand, they’d spent years doing unpaid work on unproduced scripts, flying back and forth across the country, and this was the big payoff: five minutes of screaming in a rental car, and a fee that, after commission, probably wouldn’t cover rent on either of their apartments, let alone both. On the other hand, they were TV writers now, officially. In selling one lousy script, they’d shot past the thousands of other writers out there trying to do just that.
It was the third of three key events in their early professional partnership—the one that made them pack up and leave their lives in New York, to try this TV thing, for real. The first was simply meeting Josephson, and agreeing to her suggestion that they give TV a shot. (When later asked about her role in their career, Josephson took no more or less credit than she was due: “I saw the play and thought they should work in TV. I guess I was right about that.”)
The second moment happened after Josephson told them it was time to formalize their writing team. By then, Kauffman and Crane were doing some work as a pair, and some as a trio, with their friend Seth Friedman, who had cowritten Personals. Then Josephson brought them a potential gig working on a screenplay. It would turn out to be just another script that never got produced, but the nameless project became a turning point, nonetheless. As Josephson was finalizing the deal, she told Kauffman and Crane they had to decide whether or not they would do this job with Friedman, or work together as a pair. If this was a partnership, it was time to make it official, once and for all. They had twenty-four hours to make the call.
That evening, Kauffman found herself in a taxicab, inching her way home through the driving rain. A sign, she thought. “And I sit up, and I look at the license of the cabdriver. And his name was David Yu.” That was it, as far as she was concerned. From then on, it was David and Marta. They were partners. And soon they were off to LA together, for good.
“The meeting that you think is not going to yield anything is the one that’s going to change your life.” When asked for his advice to aspiring TV writers, this was David Crane’s reply. “If success should happen, you have no idea how it’s going to happen.” He and Kauffman were brought into the television world because of their exceptional creative and story-crafting abilities. They then spent years ideating, pitching, maybe selling but never producing, and heading back to the drawing board, hoping the next one would be a hit. In other words, they were following the traditional path toward (fingers crossed) success. But in the end, success turned up in an unexpected detour from that path. It wasn’t one of those myriad pitch meetings that got Kauffman and Crane their big break. It was simply the fact Universal Studios had a bunch of old black-and-white TV shows lying around, and was looking for a way to make money off them.
The way the story goes, in the late 1980s, director/producer John Landis had a bungalow on the Universal lot. He hadn’t had a hit in a couple years, and so studio chief Sid Scheinberg charged him with the task of coming up with a show using Universal’s enormous anthology of midcentury television footage. As Kauffman recalled, they’d brought in “thousands” of writers to invent series ideas around this archival material. Game shows, Mystery Science Theater–style shows, and none of it had worked. By the time they reached out to Kauffman and Crane, she said, “they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, talking to two musical-theater writers.” They were in Los Angeles, about to fly home to New York after wrapping up yet another fruitless pitch meeting, when Josephson called and asked if they could squeeze in one more before going to the airport. As Crane recalled, “We went in, and they showed us six minutes of black-and-white clips and said, ‘What would you do?’ And we said, ‘We have absolutely no idea.’” Another flop, but, oh, well. Every other writer in town had flopped, too, and anyway, this meeting was little more than a pit stop