Story Frame 46 – Superman & The Zen Water Fountains

“That’s gross!” Zoë said to me over dinner at home one night when I couldn’t chew my food without a loud and annoying clicking in my jaw. “Can you eat somewhere else?”

I had recently been diagnosed with TMJ. Apparently, the sliding hinge of the temporomandibular joint on one side of my jaw was out of whack, likely the direct result of grinding my teeth and clenching my jaw too much. And I knew just what to blame: the latest television project I was working on for WNET in New York City.

A year after Who Cares, Anne Stonehill and Lisa Simon – the program marketing team at WNET – invited me to help them with another project. Having no idea what I was getting myself into and looking forward to the opportunity to work with them, I said yes – unaware that it was almost impossibly Machiavellian in the number of obstacles it presented.

To begin with, it wasn’t what we call a “one-off” or single program, it was a series. I’d never worked on a series before, and this one was a daunting prospect – sixteen half hours based on young adult history books written by author Joy Hakim.

Intended for PBS, Freedom: A History of US explored the birth and growth of freedom in America over the centuries and the tensions, conflicts and triumphs sparked in an effort to lay out how liberty and justice for all is both our legacy and our destination, Hakim used the stories of both famous and ordinary Americans in order in to tell what was described as a ‘compelling, thematic narrative,’ rather than just a dull recitation of facts.

The cast of celebrities lending their voices to this production included an astonishing twenty Oscar winners and eight Oscar nominees:

• Tom Hanks as the voices of Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere and Daniel Boone • Paul Newman (Justice Earl Warren and Woodrow Wilson) • Kevin Kline (Thomas Jefferson) • Jeremy Irons (King James, Lord Grey and Thomas Paine) • Sean Connery (John Muir) • Anthony Hopkins (George Washington) • Kevin Spacey (Herbert Hoover and Herman Melville) • Ralph Fiennes (John D Rockefeller) • Michael Caine (Lord Cornwallis and William Pitt) • Samuel L Jackson (Highland Garnet, Isaiah Wears and Tecumseh) • Dennis Quaid (Andrew Jackson and General Robert E Lee) • Whoopi Goldberg (Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth) • Robin Williams (General Ulysses S Grant and Josiah Quincy) • Chevy Chase (Meriwether Lewis and Theodore Roosevelt) • Tim Robbins (General Winfield Scott Hancock) • John Goodman (Benjamin Harrison) • Michael Douglas (Benjamin Franklin) • Meryl Streep (Abigail Adams and Mother Jones • Martin Sheen (Charles Lindberg and John Adams) • Stanley Tucci (Sitting Bull) • Susan Sarandon (Susan B Anthony) • Matthew McConaughey (Andrew Jackson and Mark Twain) • Morgan Freeman (Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall) • Brad Pitt (James K. Polk and William Lloyd Garrison) • Matthew Broderick (General William Tecumseh Sherman) • Harry Connick Jr (Joseph Pulitzer)

…with added characters voiced by John Lithgow, Julia Roberts, Richard Gere, Stacy Keach, Jane Alexander, Aidan Quinn, Angela Bassett, Glenn Close, Dana Reeve, Blythe Danner, Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Billy Crystal, Joanne Woodward, Kristi Yamaguchi, Graham Greene, and Bobby Kennedy rounding out the extraordinary cast.

The list of who wasn’t a part of this production was likely shorter.

Katie Couric, the popular co-host of Today, did the overall series narration. And, as if this wasn’t enough star power, one of the producers was none other than Superman – Christopher Reeve.

So, no pressures there. At all. I can feel my jaw beginning to clench up again and my body begin to shake slightly just recalling how stressful this project was.

For these and so many other reasons, this series should have been a no-brainer, a home run. Something PBS (the mothership) would pick up and air nationally on all stations, right?

That’s what the producers at WNET assumed. They had assured the GE, the funder, the series would broadcast as ‘common carriage” – airing at the same time and on the same dates on PBS stations throughout 98% of the US – the total broadcast footprint covered by PBS.

But for some reason, that didn’t happen. Much to everyone’s surprise, PBS took a pass on the series.

And now, instead of having common carriage, someone would have to work their way through the entire list of 349 PBS stations behind the scenes to try and make this happen – à la carte.

The project was punted over to WNET’s program marketing group: Anne, Lisa and me (onboard as a freelancer). We were the back-up team, brought in to get these sixteen, star-studded half hours – an impossible amount of real estate – on PBS stations across the country, one by excruciating one.

It’s one thing to ask PBS station programmers for an hour in their schedules; asking them for sixteen half hours in a row is nearly impossible. It meant regular trips to NYC for meetings and hundreds, maybe even a thousand phone calls and emails from my home office. The celebrity names attached only added to the pressures. Most of all, I felt I couldn’t let down Superman, even though he was not even aware of my existence.

By this time, taking on work nobody else wanted to deal with was, whether or not I liked it, becoming one of my superpowers. Somehow, between the three of us, with dozens of favors pulled and promises made, we managed to get the series on the air throughout more than 90% of the US.

Once we were finished, Anne had the lovely idea to send out gifts of desktop zen water fountains to key PBS colleagues whose arms we may have twisted to an uncomfortable degree. When she heard about the TMJ and my clicking jaw, Anne also had one delivered to me.

It took another six months for my jaw to relax and the weird sounds to go away. I gave Zoë the zen water fountain to make up for the dinnertime distractions I’d caused her.

Coming up next: Story Frame 47 – Bill Moyers & the Mystical Leprechaun

[photo taken by me at Austin’s Zilker Park, 2010]