30 Minutes Alone with Michael Baser

The "30 Minutes Alone" interviews give inspiring insights into the real-life journeys of successful filmmakers, writers, actors, and other industry professionals from around the world.   

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Michael Baser has worked as writer/producer/showrunner on hit primetime television shows including One Day At A Time, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Three's Company, and Full House. He is currently Head of Writing for Film & Television at Vancouver Film School. 

At what age did you know you were going to be a writer?
It wasn’t writing that got me started, it was comedy. I remember in the third grade, I couldn’t have been any more than nine or ten years old, I was allowed before the morning prayer to get up and do five minutes of jokes. And that became my thing. I had seen a lot of stand-up comedians as a kid on Ed Sullivan – Jack E. Leonard, Shecky Greene, the Borscht Belt comics of that generation – and I just aspired to be a funny person. I think class clown fits the description for most of the guys who do what I do, because you don’t get beat up by the class bullies so much if you can make people laugh. So I think it starts out as more of a survival instinct. But I was always sort of driven towards comedy.  

Where did things go from there?

I had a partner early on, a kid named Charlie that I met in the first grade. We had this comedy idea that we developed later on when we were 14 and 15 and 16. It was this musical-comedy act that did small clubs in New York, then bigger clubs in New York. Steve Martin meets the Marx Brothers, post-Vaudevillian jug-band kind of thing. We opened up for some bigger acts and did the college coffee house circuit in those days, back in the sixties. So we were part of that world, which was kind of fun and exciting and heady. But I was never thinking of being a writer, I was just thinking of making people laugh somehow. And then my partner died when he was 19 and that put me in a whole new, what-the-fuck-do I-do-now place in my life.

How old were you when you lost your partner, Charlie?

19, same age as him. I was in college and living with a girl at the time up in Westport, Connecticut, and her parents were show business people, Broadway people, great people. They had a friend, Bob Weiskopf, who was a very well-known comedy writer from radio and I Love Lucy. He had a son named Kim, who was a few years older than me and an aspiring writer who was working on the periphery of the business, including The Zero Hour for Rod Serling and game shows for Monty Hall, but who hadn’t sold any TV shows yet. My girlfriend’s father said maybe you should team up with Kim and we did and became really good friends. So after I graduated college, I drove to L.A. where Kim lived at the time. Prior to that, I had written a spec script for a TV pilot and sent it to Kim who got it in the hands of an actor who made the mistake of saying, “If you ever come to L.A., look me up.” So I was in my car the next day driving to the West Coast. By the time I arrived, I discovered the actor couldn’t do much for us, but it got me out there. Kim and I formalized our partnership and we started writing a bunch of spec scripts. And eventually someone invited us in to talk.

So heading west was a leap of faith, to say the least.

Sure, but back in those days, writing wasn’t a destination job. People weren’t clamoring to become TV writers like they are now, it wasn’t as competitive. Most industry writers were misfits, they couldn’t do anything else, they were a little twisted.  So it didn’t really feel like a leap. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be successful, it was just never an option. I just had this kind of blind, idiot faith. I think everyone who goes into this business and succeeds has to have that. “I know it doesn’t happen, but it’s going to happen,” that kind of thing. You just kind of believe that and that’s what sustains you. I don’t know what else I would have done, you know? My friends in the business and I talk about this all time and we all say the same thing, that there’s nothing else we could be doing. We just had to write. Running the writing department at Vancouver Film School is really the only job I’ve ever held in my life.

Why did you go to college?

Oh, who knows why I went to college. You mean what did I study? I think I had a loose journalism major. But I never used it. I suspect I didn’t go to class very much. After my friend Charlie died, I was in a bit of a fog for a few years. I must have gone to class, I must have taken tests, but I have no memory of going to school. It was an odd time.

So now you’re in L.A. and you’re writing with Kim.

Kim had his foot in the door a little bit, and of course his father was a very well-known comedy writer. His father didn’t do anything to help us, but his friends did. Bob didn’t want his son in the business. He was a wonderfully funny curmudgeon, I liked Bob a lot. But I don’t think he felt anything we wrote was any good, you know? He was that guy, and frankly, I think he was embarrassed by the fact that we were in the business! But Bob’s friends, old Jack Benny Show writers who were now writing All In The Family and Good Times, had known Kim since he was a child. And so when Kim and I wrote something that wasn’t half-bad, it wasn’t just “Come in a we’ll give you a job”, but they were happy to bring us in to talk.

How did your parents feel about your chosen profession? Were they supportive?

Well, yes and no. My father was in the clothing business back east. He came from immigrant parents and my mom came from immigrant parents, and so I don’t think they understood the idea. Their generation’s aspiration was that their children become doctors and lawyers. But I was always that kid who wanted to do comedy. I don’t think they got it, but they supported me enough by at least not trying to stop me. They might have said things like, “Are you insane? Why do you think you’re going to make it? What makes you think you can do it?” I’d been laying down tracks over the years with my act, but I think they saw that mostly as a weird thing. They didn’t really discourage or support me in the beginning, but as I got success, it was like, “Jesus!”, right?  Then I started getting more acceptance. And I was a bit estranged from my family as a kid anyway. I was the oddball, out of the house most of the time doing the music thing.

And what about your stint in third-grade stand-up? Did that put a little wind in your sails?

I think I got encouragement from my teacher, who saw me maybe as this kid who just needed attention.  As far as the kids went, I think some of them found it amusing while others probably thought, “Shut the fuck up, Baser!” It was a long time ago, but it was fun.

How did you eat back in those early L.A. days?

I had a few bucks saved up. I ended up selling my guitar and rented a room in some crazy lawyer’s mansion. He was nuts but he had five rooms and so I took one. And the house was, it was crazy. It would make a series in and of itself, trust me. I flipped burgers for a while at night, worked at a pastrami house across from the Roxy on Sunset Strip. We did some TV work under the table, making a few bucks writing questions for game shows. By hook or by crook, anyway to make some money. But we kept on writing specs. It took about a year and a half and then a guy a named Allan Manings, who was working on a show called One Day At A Time for Norman Lear’s company, bought an idea of ours. This would have been around 1974. Then I went on staff and never stopped working.

Did you ever think about attending a film school?

There were no writing programs to speak of. I mean, there were film schools, yes, but no one was teaching writing. I think the neat thing about film schools today, be it Vancouver Film School or someplace else, is that they provide the kind of apprenticeship we got from those old pros in an industry that, today, isn’t as kind and generous as it was for me.

Film school or not, though, you believe good writing is good writing.

Hey, it doesn’t matter if a person goes to any school. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t make it past kindergarten. It doesn’t matter if you can’t keep food in your mouth. The producers, the executives, the people who hire you as a writer only care about one thing: what’s on the page. If you can kick out a great script, then so long as you’re where the industry is - L.A., Toronto, wherever – and you put yourself in the way of success, no one cares if you have a degree.  Having said that, film schools are great because they provide a concentrated period of time to focus on building your skills and portfolio, a body of work that hopefully is going to open a door. If we, for example, can enable our students to leave VFS with a piece of material that makes someone sit up and say, “come in, let’s talk”, that’s fucking gold.

You said earlier that managing the writing department at VFS is the first real job you’ve ever had. But you were a TV showrunner for years. That sounds like a job to me.

Sure, but the difference between those jobs and this one. . . Look, let me put it this way, being a show runner is like being on a baseball team. It’s never a job where you feel like you’re going to be here for a while. You get traded. Nothing is permanent. There’s always ratings and other variables. It’s not for the faint of heart being in this business. I have friends who are civilians who don’t understand how you could do this and make a living. You need to have a strong stomach to live your life from show to show, as opposed to having a career. I mean, I had a career but it was always very tenuous. But it was a wonderful thing. Look, I’m the luckiest man in the world. And people who work in the industry, who have had jobs like I’ve had, are the luckiest people in the world. Because we get to do what we love, work with creative people, have a few laughs, and make a good piece of change.   

Tell me about some of the challenges you faced along the way that tempted you to turn back.

I was never tempted to turn back, honestly. It was that idiot blind faith. It was tough going sometimes, like, “oh man, I’m not going to be able to pay my rent”, but you figure out a way to make it work, right? We were young. I mean, it’s a young person’s game. When you’re young, you don’t need so much. You don’t have those relationships, you don’t have children. All you’ve got to do is put gas in your car and figure out a way to get places. You work at restaurants because you know at least you’re going to eat. You form relationships and friendships with like-minded people who are struggling like you and trying to get their foot in the door, and you support one other. That’s the way it works. Making a bunch of money is way on the back burner, that’s not the driving force. The driving force is the desire to write. A hugely successful director friend of mine said to me once, “The dirty little secret producers and executives don’t know is that we writers would do this for free.” And I’m not just talking about the love of writing. It’s more of a belief, really, a drive. It’s weird but we just have to do it. We’re like bumblebees, you know? On paper, a bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but somehow they manage to do it. It’s that idiot faith, saying “I’m going to make it”, even though the odds are against it.  

How important to your success was having a writing partner? 

Oh, huge. I was a horrible student. I didn’t have any use for grammar or punctuation. Luckily I had a partner who knew how to do those things. He sat at the typewriter. I was less of a writer than a talker. Comedy in my generation was, for the most part, written in teams. I was partner with Kim for 16 years before we had a fight and broke up. It was like a marriage. And then I had another partner, Frank Dungan, for another 16 years. These relationship aren’t just like marriages, they are marriages! You spend time nurturing those relationships, arguing and fighting. I’ve been married to my wife now for 39 years, and she’s seen me through those marriages, and believe me, it is the other woman!  But she’s in the business, so she understands it. I tell my students it’s good to marry someone with a sense of humour because when it gets tough, it’s good to be with somebody who can laugh.

Is she one of the reasons you’re the luckiest man on earth?

Without a doubt. But that’s a whole different discussion. The fact that she even talks to me is a miracle.

In your opinion, how has the world of television writing changed over the years?

Well, writing hasn’t changed. Stories still need a beginning, middle, and end. The great thing is there’s more opportunity for writers now than ever before. Cable, streaming, Netflix - all these new outlets and buyers looking for original material. And once they figure out how to effectively monetize web series, that’ll explode, too. Seven years ago, AMC was just this funky little channel showing bad movies. Now it’s a huge player buying and showing stuff like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. There are more niches and more varied audiences than ever. Less broadcasting and more "narrow-casting" catered to specific audiences. And the shows are really fantastic, cutting-edge stuff, constantly pushing the envelope.

Do you think families no longer gathering around the TV has changed the landscape?

I don’t know if that’s true or not. I know that people’s habits have changed. PVRs and on-demand viewing and all that. I know in my family, when we’re all home for the holidays, we still sit around and watch particular shows. The television is still the campfire in most people's homes and it is still the most powerful and influential medium. People say TV is dead, but it’s not dead, it’s just changing. Your iPhone is your TV now. But for writers, this is the best time. And maybe it was the best time in the 6os. And maybe it was the best time in the 70s when I got started. But now, it’s the best time. It’s just different. And there’s more opportunity than ever. But anyone who aspires to be in this business needs a strong constitution. And you’ve got to want it. And it can’t be a secondary job. I remember Barry Kemp giving a eulogy years ago for a young writer who’d passed away. Barry described him as someone who never had a safety net and suggested that this was why he’d been successful. That’s the way it’s worked for most of the successful writers I know. No safety nets.

Burn the bridges behind you in pursuit of your dreams, that sort of thing?

That’s right. If you have a safety net, you’re going to fall back on it when things get scary. It’s human nature. My father told me to be safe, to get a job in the post office, to have something to fall back on. I looked at my father like he was a fucking madman. Dad, I don’t want to be a fucking delivery guy, I want to be a writer! I aspired a little higher. You have to or you’ll never make it.

What drew you to the writing department at Vancouver Film School?

It was 2008 and I was in my mid-fifties. I had broken up with my second writing partner and there’d just been a writers strike. I thought to myself, oh shit, do I really want to reinvent myself again? My agents were shifting me away from things I wanted to do to things they thought I should be doing at my age.  It’s a strange thing, they kind of move you out of the business. It’s true. My friends weren’t working anymore, it was getting harder and harder to get a gig, network executives wanted to work with young people. It’s a young person’s business, like I said. I’m not bitter about it, it’s just a fact. Then I got this job offer and I thought maybe this would be an interesting to do for a year or two. My kids had moved out or were in college and I didn’t like the idea of sitting around in L.A. with the other bitter writers of my generation being pissed. And I liked Vancouver. I knew it would give me a chance to be around young people and I knew that would be refreshing. I thought I had something to teach and say, and said to myself, “Why the fuck not?” I really only thought it would last a year or two. But it grew on me, you know?

You once said to me that you don’t have the “worry” gene, that you don’t let anything get you down too badly. How does that relate to your responsibilities at VFS? I mean, you must face constant challenges with departmental budgets, committees, red tape. . .

Oh, compared to Hollywood, this is a walk in the park. In L.A. you deal with a lot of difficult, dare I say aberrant personalities, and you learn how to navigate that world. This is a much kinder and gentler place. Any difficulties here are much more easily managed, trust me.

What advice would you give to an aspiring writer?
If you want to write, write! Don’t talk about it, do it! The only thing that differentiates a would-be writer from a writer is writing. The beauty of being a writer is that you can go into a room and come out two to six weeks later with a script in your hand and you have a commodity, something someone may want to make. If you’re an actor, you can do Othello in your bedroom, but at the end of the day, someone’s got to hire you to do that. But for a writer, it’s different. It starts out in the shower with an idea, playing the “what-if” game. Then jotting down a notion and fleshing it out. I always say, I have an idea in the shower and if I’m lucky, six months later, 200 people are working. There’s nothing more entrepreneurial than being a writer. Once you’ve got a script in someone’s hands, you’re the same as me or anyone else in the business. But first, you’ve got to sit down and write something.