In 2017, Bruce Eric Kaplan—New Yorker cartoonist, screenwriter, producer (Girls, Six Feet Under), and showrunner for season two of Nobody Wants This—wrote a pilot for Sony about a woman who falls in love with an incarcerated man half her age. When he’s unexpectedly released, they grapple with how to actually be together. It was Harold and Maude meets Moonstruck, as Kaplan describes it. Sony did not move forward with the project, but some years later, Glenn Close read the script and signed on. This seemed promising—but by January 2022, Kaplan was no closer to getting the pilot made. And so, “to keep from going mad,” as he writes, he began obsessively chronicling the next six months of false starts and backslides, the promised Zooms, the canceled Zooms, the meetings and pre-meetings. (A representative for Close didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
In February, Pete Davidson entered the chat—Close’s “friend,” whom she had “great chemistry with,” as she apparently described in an email to Kaplan. (When VF reached out to a representative, Davidson was not available to comment for this story.) Unfortunately, this only prompted further scheduling chaos. “At one point,” Kaplan writes, “Glenn pitched out doing an entirely different show that was about her and Pete working together at a Target in Staten Island, then traveling around the middle of the country having ‘kooky’ adventures with people.” With some despair, Kaplan writes, “It was like being in a writers’ room on the first day of a season, but sadly, the two people making all the pitches were not writers.”
In other hands, the book might have read like an extended exercise in sour grapes. Instead, it’s an idiosyncratic meditation on creativity, success and failure, self discovery via frustration—and, because Kaplan includes dispatches on his home life, it’s about the ecosystem of a family, too. A fellow writer can also recognize it as a writer’s revenge. After hours of unpaid labor, Kaplan wielded his weapon (his keyboard) and reaped his reward (a book deal). Kaplan sums up the project as “a portrait of the fever dream that is my brain.”
On a call with VF before a day in the Nobody Wants This writers room, Kaplan talks shop.
Vanity Fair: It’s very meta to be in a Zoom with you after reading about all these Zooms with you. I’m surprised that we didn’t have to reschedule this, although I think throughout the whole book you weren’t ever the cause of a rescheduling.
Bruce Eric Kaplan: Literally, not once. When someone says “here are the five days [I’m available],” I take the first one. If someone gives me five times in one day, I take the first time.
You’ve been in TV for over 25 years. Was this experience particularly Sisyphean, or was it just the first time you wrote it all down?
When I started out, there were three networks. You would have an idea; you didn’t even need a producer. Your agent would say, I have meetings set up for you on Thursday and Friday with ABC, NBC, CBS. You would have them on Friday at five o’clock. Your agent would say, like, All right, no one’s interested; all three are interested; one is interested. And then it was over. It was a 72-hour experience, basically.
And then things evolved. There became more networks. I had a deal with HBO, and they were always a dream to develop with. You may not get something made, but they were always very old school. They were interested in a world and people, but never once did I ever hear: What is the second season? But around the time of Netflix I heard like, oh, Netflix wants to hear the whole season. And then somewhere along the way it became, they want to know what season two and season three are. Combined with that, it all became more layers, more producers involved. You weren’t just pitching to the network; you would pitch first to producers, then to the studio. Then to the network.
I’ve been on Zooms with, say, a dozen people, and 11 of the people on the Zoom are getting a salary. I’m the only person on the Zoom who’s just coming up with all this stuff and not getting paid a cent for it.
You write in the memoir that the book was partially inspired by John Gregory Dunne’s Monster. Why do you love the book so much?
It’s such a pure document of the experience. It’s very unusual, I love all things like that. There’s two books that I love so much and reread a lot. One [called The Seesaw Log] is about Two for the Seesaw, a play in the fifties that Henry Fonda and Ann Bancroft were in. And the writer does a diary from writing it, to first reading, to rehearsal, to opening. Similarly, there’s a book called Son of Any Wednesday[: The Making of a Broadway Hit], which was this movie, it was on TV when I was a kid, a Jane Fonda sex comedy based on a play. And Muriel Resnik, the playwright, did the same thing—from writing it, reading, rehearsal. It’s very sort of like, this is how something gets made.
Sadly, in my case, this is how something doesn’t get made.
