Rob Burnett Loves Coffee by Charlie Burnett

Rob Burnett Likes Coffee by Charlie Burnett

It’s 9:00 AM and Rob Burnett is driving to his local Dunkin’ Donuts for iced coffee. He uses the Dunkin’ “On The Go” ordering app, and as we approach Exit 34 on the Merritt Parkway, his brow furrows with concentration. With great deliberation, he clicks “Ready to Pick Up.” I ask about the precision of the ritual. “They begin making the coffee the minute you hit ‘Ready to Pick Up.’ The goal is for the server to be putting the coffee on the counter exactly as you enter. Not before. Not after. But exactly,” he says with a desperate need to make sure I understand. I point out that he is ordering iced coffee and that if it sits on the counter for a minute or so, it shouldn’t make much of a difference. He stares at me as if I have two heads. “Well what fun is that?” he asks. When we arrive at the Dunkin Donuts, I feel the tension. His gait is deliberate. We enter and he deflates. The coffee is already on the counter. “Hit it too early. Tomorrow we microadjust. It’s as much art as science.” He arrives home, makes breakfast (egg whites, Ezekiel health bread, ½ of an avocado), reads the newspaper, and by 11 a.m. heads up to his attic office, where he will remain until 5 p.m., writing. His day is different than it used to be. It was March of 1985, and Burnett was at a low point. He had just left a job at a regional newspaper and had badly strained the ligaments of his left ankle while playing basketball. So now he found himself trapped in his childhood bed in North Caldwell, New Jersey with no paycheck and no prospects. His lifelong dream of becoming a writer seemed unlikely. Although Burnett had started writing a screenplay

30 with an old Tufts college friend named Stephen Engel, he felt stagnant. He decided to make a writing submission to Late Night with David Letterman. Burnett describes the submission as being “not particularly inspired. Well, actually, let’s just call it bad.” Nonetheless, the show’s headwriter called Burnett and told him that while there were no writing openings, the show did have internships. Burnett applied the next day. He was given an internship in the show’s talent department, but a problem emerged. Because of labor laws, unpaid interns needed to receive college credit, and since Burnett had already graduated, he was not being compensated. “People say, ‘Oh, I’d pay to work at a place like that.’ Well, I actually was willing to. I went down to William Patterson Community College to look into taking a communications course. It was going to cost me $400, but if it would allow me to keep my Letterman internship, I didn’t care,” he recalls. Before he had to write the check, Burnett says he “got incredibly lucky.” A job opened up and he got hired. “It was mostly inertia. I was sitting at the desk, and after a while I think they figured it was easier to just hire me. I was already doing the job.” Though the work was menial, Burnett finally felt like he was taking steps toward his goal. “I was always the first in the office and the last to leave, which wasn’t always easy since I was writing every early morning with my friend Steve. We were still working on that screenplay, but I was willing to do everything and anything I could to get ahead.” He and Engel finished that screenplay, “The Real World,” (long before MTV’s take on that title), and Burnett gave it to a woman with whom he shared an office. She gave it to a big Hollywood Producer at the time named Joel Silver, whose company hired Burnett and Engel to write a movie.

31 The movie, based on a book entitled “Nice Guys Sleep Alone,” never went into production, but Burnett didn’t care. “We were working screenwriters. It was thrilling.” The two began getting more screenwriting work. Burnett also was writing jokes for standup comedians. “I would send jokes to a comedian named Wil Shriner and he’d pay me $25 if he used one.” The first joke Burnett ever got on national television was actually not on the Late Show with David Letterman, but on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Shriner had been in a movie called Peggy Sue Got Married and used one of Burnett’s lines when he guested on The Tonight Show: “Now that I’m in a movie, my wife thinks I’m going to get a big head, but I told my people to call her and tell her not to worry.” Carson chuckled and said,“That’s funny.” “This was one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life,” says Burnett, sipping his ever-so-slightly-tooearly-ordered Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. “The idea that Johnny Carson was actually hearing words that I had written – and then chuckling at them to boot – well, this was a moment I will never forget.” Eventually an opening became available on the writing team at Letterman. Burnett made a submission of ideas. “Of all the things I’ve ever written, I think those four pages were probably the most important.” The competition was stiff – literally hundreds of submissions came in for the single opening. In the end, the field narrowed to three: a copywriter from Oklahoma named Boyd Hale, Burnett, and Conan O’Brien. Hale got the job. “Conan is still upset about this somehow. I’ve spoken to him about it. He’s hilarious, famous, rich – but there is still a part of him that can’t believe he didn’t get that job,” Burnett chuckles. In February of 1988, another

32 writer left and Burnett was asked to join the writing staff. “Of everything I have been lucky enough to achieve, I think the defining moment for me was when Steve O’Donnell [the show’s head writer] called me into his office and offered me a spot on that staff. I felt like I was in a dream.” Though he was now officially writing for the Letterman show, Burnett’s screenwriting aspirations did not wane. Once on staff, he got a proper agent, who began submitting his and Engel’s original screenplay around town. Soon after, Burnett got a call he’ll never forget. “Steven Spielberg read The Real World and he wants to meet you guys,” his agent said. Burnett cracked up. “I honestly thought he was kidding.” He was not. Spielberg flew Burnett and Engel out to California to meet. “Because of WGA requirements, they had to fly us out first class, which was a first for me,” Burnett recalls fondly. “My buddy and I were playing with the seats like idiots. ‘Look how far these recline!’” The two met with Spielberg and Burnett recalls the moment. “We’re sitting on a couch, the door opens, and in walks Steven Spielberg. Once again, I am waiting for someone to wake me up. And on top of it Spielberg says, ‘I read a lot of coming-of-age movies, but yours really was great.” Burnett smiled and said, “I like your movies, too.” Spielberg laughed and the two were hired to write a movie about sleepwalking. “This was I think the fourth or fifth movie we were paid to write,” Burnett says. “Unfortunately, like the others, this one, too, never got made. Spielberg got busy directing a movie called Hook’and the project kind of went away.” Around this time, Burnett’s personal life took a big step when he married fellow Tufts graduate Eunice Johnson. The two had met through a mutual friend and had an unusual courtship. “We wrote letters to each other long before we ever met. We became really close friends.

33 It felt inevitable that we would get married. It wasn’t even a decision.” Burnett lights up when he talks about his wife, as she does when talking about him. “We used to call each other ‘soul bros’, Eunice fondly remembers. “I never thought I would get married, but when I met Rob it all made sense.” In September the couple celebrated their 30th anniversary. The next big moment in Burnett’s career came when he was asked to be the Late Show’s head writer. He was 29. “I said ‘yes’ without even understanding the full implications of it all,” says Burnett. “The truth is, I had no idea what the head writer even did.” He points out that there was no training period for him. “It was sink or swim.” According to Burnett, he started out sinking. “The beginning was not pretty. I was absolutely in over my head. I’m running a writing room with 45-year-olds, many of whom had been there longer than I was.” Dave was very hard on me. It was downright ugly.” And then came a moment that turned things around. “The show taped at 5:30, and Dave’s rehearsal would end each day at 4 p.m. on the dot. One day we were working with two ideas for the show and Dave hadn’t really approved either. At 4p.m. he left and all eyes turned to me. It was terrifying.” Burnett went to Letterman’s office to try to get clarification. “What should we be doing?” Burnett asked his boss. Letterman coolly replied, “This is supposed to work the other way around.” And shut the door. “He was right,” Burnett said. “And that was the moment I decided if I was going to fail, I’d go down swinging.” Burnett finds an analogy in watching football. “Whenever I see the rookie quarterback yelling out signals, I think of my early headwriting days. There’s the kid in his first game or two – what is he, 23? – screaming at guys who might be already in the league 10 years. But what’s he gotta do? He’s gotta scream at them. They want him to scream at them.” Burnett says that

34 when you need to lead you can be right, you can be wrong, but you can’t be tentative. “I just took charge and luckily I found my footing.” Indeed, he did. Burnett was headwriter from 1988 – 1992, during which Late Night with David Letterman became Late Show with David Letterman when it moved from 12:30 a.m. on NBC to 11:30p.m. on CBS. “It was a high-pressure time. We were going up against The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. No one knew if Dave would play with audiences an hour earlier. The stakes could not have been higher.” The CBS show exploded, exceeding all expectations. Burnett was a major part of the success. “We had a great team,” he says modestly. In 1996, Letterman asked Burnett to become the show’s Executive Producer and to run. Worldwide Pants, Letterman’s production company. Burnett accepted, and the company thrived. Burnett developed the hit Everybody Loves Raymond, and oversaw production of The Late Late Show, a nightly talk show that aired at 12:30 after the Letterman show. He then co-created the critically acclaimed one-hour dramedy “Ed” with Late Show colleague Jon Beckerman. The show would run on NBC from 2000 – 2004. “It was a heady time to be sure. For a small production company, we were having success right up there with the big boys.” In 2001, of the top five shows ranked by a survey of critics nationwide in the electronic media poll, Worldwide Pants produced three of them. Ed was #2, Everybody Loves Raymond was #3, and The Late Show was #5. Burnett recalls his days on Ed with bitter sweetness. “It was as hard a job as I have ever had. Jon [Beckerman, Burnett’s co-creator and writing partner] and I never clicked with our writing staffs, so we ended up writing most of the scripts ourselves. It was punishing. Every eight days another

35 55-page script was due, while we were editing the last episode, casting the current episode, prepping the upcoming episode. It was everything I ever wanted to do, but just way too much of it.” Burnett once again speaks through analogy: “Imagine you are starving and you walk into a room where the best chefs in the world have made all of your favorite foods. And then they make you eat nonstop for four years. And also, you don’t know if you’ll ever have a chance to get back into that room again.” Ed garnered Burnett and Beckerman an Emmy nomination for writing and People’s Choice award for the series.“People always thought the main character ‘Ed’ was Tom Cavanagh (the show’s star), but it was also, very much Rob,” says Eunice. “The show had a romantic quality that was definitely trademark Rob.” Cavanagh agrees, “Yes I’m biased. The man gave me a career. He wrote scripts that made me ten times smarter and funnier than I am.” Burnett demurs, “Tom is being modest. It was all him – trust me. He is not only a great actor but also one of those guys who is likeable in repose.” Meanwhile at home, Burnett and his wife now had two young girls, Sydney and Lucy, and in the second year of Ed added a boy, Charlie. Eunice had left her job as an equity analyst on Wall Street to raise the family. “I could never have done any of it if Eunice didn’t take care of the family,” says Burnett. “She was the glue, the engine, the backbone – pick any phrase you like. Without her, nothing would have been possible.” The couple moved from New York City to Greenwich, CT in 2002 “in search of a backyard.” By the early 2000s Burnett had also wrote the Late Show, leading it to five Emmy awards, three of which, Burnett himself accepted. “That’s a weird moment. We had lost so many times in a row I really got used to not thinking we had a chance. So much so that I thought of a good acceptance

36 speech joke during a commercial break and tried to find Ray [Romano] to give it to him since I thought Everybody Loves Raymond actually had a chance of winning. But then suddenly we won and now I’m walking up there thinking, ‘Do I do the new joke I just thought of 10 seconds ago, or the one I had prepared for the last 10 years of losing?’ “Burnett went with the new one. “I’m not sure, but I think I might have just kissed a seat filler.” The response? “Dead silence. I had just bombed in front of a giant room of everyone in show business and 30 million people watching on TV.” His mind worked frantically. “I had a follow up, so now I’m calculating – do I just move on or do I double down?” And then something wonderful happened. “Suddenly I hear this rolling thunder of laughter. That room is so big it just takes time for the joke to go out and the response to come back. I didn’t bomb. I killed. I actually, had to pause to wait for the laughter to die down. It was crazy.” He doubled down and went for the follow up, which was: “Sorry, sir.” More laughter. Another highlight. In 2007 Burnett and his writing partner Beckerman developed another show called The Knights of Prosperity, which was about a bunch of blue-collar guys deciding to rob rock legend Mick Jagger. Burnett compares this experience with Ed: “When Jon and I developed Ed, we were barely on the radar. Knights of Prosperity was the exact opposite.” Burnett and Beckerman flew to California and pitched the show, originally entitled Let’s Rob Jeff Goldblum, to the four network presidents of ABC, NBC, FOX and CBS. They had offers from all four before they landed back in New York. “It was insane. I literally had the presidents of the networks calling me at home, telling me why I needed to do the show at their place.” The show did not succeed. “Every failed show has

37 a story. Jeff Goldblum wasn’t available, and we ended up with Mick Jagger. That seems incredible, but Jagger didn’t agree to be on the show more than the pilot. He also had a lot of provisions – one big one was that we couldn’t use his name in the show title or in promotional materials. The next thing we know the network people and Jaggers’ people all start fighting. We’re caught in the middle. We changed the name, couldn’t promote it well, got a bad time slot and we were off the air after one season,” Burnett reflects on the fickle nature of show business. “By all accounts, Knights should have been a success. It had everything going for it – we were the show the network really wanted. It was a good lesson on how you never know what is going to happen in show business.” Burnett sips his iced coffee as he remembers the absurdity of it all. Eventually Burnett turned back to movies. He and Beckerman made a small independent movie called We Made This Movie, about high school kids trying to make a movie. Burnett, having cut his directing chops on Ed, directed. “I loved everything about that experience, Burnett said. As the Late Show began its final season, Burnett acquired the rights to a book called The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and adapted it into a screenplay. He met with Paul Rudd, who agreed to play the lead role of Ben. Burnett directed the movie in February of 2015 in Atlanta, just a few months before the Late Show would air its finale in May of the same year. “What a time!” Burnett says. “Shooting the movie was exhilarating, and then I went right into the [Late] show’s final few months after all those years. It was an emotional time.” But when the last Late Show aired, Burnett, who had been there for 29 years, didn’t have much time for emotion. “I was in the edit room on the movie the next day.” He says he felt lucky to have something to focus on when the

38 Late Show ended. “I think it would have been too emotional for me without something else pressing on me.” The film, entitled The Fundamentals of Caring, was a success. It was named the closing night film of the Sundance Film Festival in February of 2016, and was ultimately purchased by Netflix, where it still airs. Burnett describes the Sundance experience wistfully. “Being a director at Sundance is like nothing else in the world. You’re the star of the show.” Now Burnett is back at it, working each day on new projects. He has a movie called Frindle (based on the children’s book of the same name) he is supposed to direct in the spring. Susan Sarandon is attached to star. “Directing Susan Sarandon would be something, wouldn’t it?” There seems to be a theme with Burnett. Moment after moment of highlights of things he’ll never forget. So, I ask him, “Of all the things – Spielberg, Headwriter, Emmies, Sundance and on and on -- what is the moment you treasure the most?” His answer is typical: “I’ve been very lucky to get to do a lot of memorable things in my life. But let’s face it, nothing will be bigger than if tomorrow that guy is putting that coffee down exactly when I walk through the door.”