A New Oral History of HBO – The New York Times

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How did HBO change television forever? James Andrew Miller will be here to talk about his new book, Tinderbox. And in what ways did immigrant women revolutionize American food? Mayukh Sen tells us about his first book, Taste Makers. Plus, my colleagues and I will talk about what were reading. This is the Book Review podcast from The New York Times. Its December 10th. Im Pamela Paul.

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James Andrew Miller joins us now from Los Angeles. He is the author of the new book, Tinderbox: HBOs Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers. Jim, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Very suitably in L.A. This is not your first oral history. Youve done one of SNL, CAA, ESPN. I was going to say they all have three initials, but we have one exception. What draws you to doing oral history as a form?

I think its the fact that I realize that no matter what I can do on the keyboard, you cant replace the intimacy and the individuality of peoples voices. And I think that hearing directly from people creates another layer of understanding for the reader. Theres a real intimacy. You get to hear people talk about their work and about their experiences in ways that you just cant do with prose. I mean, you can characterize it, but this started with the SNL book and just the idea of trying to capture someone like Dan Aykroyds voice when theyre telling stories.

I find it to be pretty captivating and transparent. The level of transparency is much higher than anything that you can do with prose. Although, obviously, prose is a big part of oral history because there is a narrative. Its not just throwing quotes out on pages there. You do have to tell a story, and you do want to make sure that youre adding context and perspective and facts and things along the way for the reader. But I just, I love hearing from people directly.

So from an outsiders perspective, they might say, well, that looks easy. All you have to do is have these really fun conversations and then throw them all on the page. I know that thats not what it takes, but explain a little for listeners whats involved in creating an oral history once you have done all those interviews.

The way Ive been able to figure it out is I think the oral history takes me twice as long. Any of these four books would have been done in half the time if I didnt have to adhere to the oral history structure. I mean, I start with an outline, and I have a basic understanding of who I want to talk to. But then, the great part of an oral history is youre talking to someone and they mention someone else or they mention an event or something. And then youre all of a sudden down another rabbit hole with someone else.

And now you have a series of quotes and an entire interview sometimes with people that you didnt imagine. And so now, the narrative has to get restructured and you have to account for some of these detours. And you also have to make sure that the quotes move together in a way that supports the narrative. You dont want there to be all of a sudden harsh right angles or synapses in the narrative itself. I get a little OCD about placement of quotes and everything else.

But, I mean, for one page, I remember I probably spent two days thinking about this. Theres four quotes from people. How do I line this up for the reader? How does it support the narrative? How does it support the facts that Im trying to download to the reader? And where, if at all, should I come in and do a course correct? Or should I just let this play out? So Im not trying to say that this is jackhammering at four oclock in the morning on a busy highway. But I do try and make sure that everything thats on the page is there for a very, very specific reason.

And of course, the other thing is I have a tendency to go long. And so, sometimes Im at the point where Im cutting 200 or 300 pages. And you all of a sudden realize that the bar has to get higher. That the price of admission has gotten higher because you have so many people talking about things that you feel are worthwhile. And so then you have to say goodbye to some of those stories. And stories that people tell me and then they say, Oh, I cant wait for my parents or somebody to see this or something. Then all of a sudden, you have to say to them, Yeah, Im sorry, that didnt make the cut.

You did 750 interviews. Does that mean 750 different people, or were some of those repeat interviews with the same people?

It was more than 500 individuals, but it was actually more than 550, I believe. But there are certain key people there was one person I interviewed 41 times.

Who was that?

I interviewed Jerry Levin, who was the chairman of Time Warner AOL, who hadnt spoken really publicly about any of these things in 15 years. I think people that are very important to the story, I have a habit of you do a little bit at a time or you go to lunch, and then theres a follow-up. Or sometimes, I will admit, I ask the same question six or seven times at various points.

Over the course of a year, I think I asked Jeff Bewkes, who was the former chairman, the same question maybe six or seven times. Because Im not testing them, Im trying to understand, Im trying to get the layers. Same thing with someone like Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Laura Dern or a lot of actors from HBO history. You try and get to different levels. And a lot of times, it proves to be successful, because youre using what they gave you before as a launching point rather than coming into it cold. And then you can get to a deeper level.

Or I can say to them, Thats interesting, because last time we talked about this, you mentioned x. And now youre focused on y. Why do you think theres a disparity? Or Can you tell me about the connective tissue between these two answers?

You started off with the book on Saturday Night Live with these oral histories. Thats such an obvious and amazing subject for oral history, because you have these incredible personalities and it was such a crazy time. Since then, how have you chosen what companies to make your subject matter?

These four entities Saturday Night Live, ESPN, Creative Artists Agency, and HBO were all born in the 1970s. They were born from the most humble of origins. In fact, 10 minutes before the first show on Saturday Night Live, Chevy Chase looked at one of the producers and said, What do you think I should do after this? Because there were no expectations that it was going to survive.

CAA was a bunch of bridge tables with their wives answering the phone after they had been fired by the William Morris Agency. ESPN was a pile of dirt in a place called Bristol, Connecticut. And when employees would get their paychecks on Wednesday, theyd run to the bank because they thought that there was not going to be any money if they waited. And HBO, of course, was almost canceled, almost basically deleted by Time Inc., its parent company, several times in its formative years. So all four of these are recognizable brands. Theyve all had a considerable impact on the culture, the technology, and the world of media and television. And so I guess thats been my spine.

I mean, you mentioned the impact on the culture. To what extent are these books and this book in particular Tinderbox, on HBO a business story, and to what extent is it about the culture and the art involved?

Well, because I try and write, quote, books of record, they wind up being somewhat schizophrenic, right? Because there are several arteries that need to be served. You need to tell the story of the business story. In all these cases, how is it decided that this was going to even begin? What were some of the chutes and ladders along the way? In the case of HBO, HBO was never on its own. I mean, theres never been a stock called HBO, right? Always been owned by Time Inc., then Time Warner, then Time Warner AOL, then AT&T, and now Discovery.

So I have to trace the pedigree of those parent organizations or the business story of it. What were the financial exigencies involved? And then, of course, you have what I consider to be the cultural component. What was it like to work at these places? And its one of my favorite parts of the book, because you get to talk to employees. And what was it like when it was a very small organization? What were the inflection points when it became bigger? How did things change? What was it like to be at those meetings?

And then you start to go into deeper things, like the growth of female executives over this time, or how certain people came and stayed there or got fired, and all the things like that. And then, of course, then theres also the impact on the culture. And when, in the case of HBO, when youre talking about shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City and The Wire and it goes on and on and on, not to mention the documentary work and the work that they did in sports and late night shows, it just becomes a diverse and very chaotic roadmap. And thats another reason why the narrative has to be so clean, because you need to make sure that the reader is able to follow along as you chart the course of this history.

All right, lets talk a little bit about the early days of HBO, Home Box Office. Was it the first premium cable channel? Did it start out that way? What were its competitors at that time?

Dating back to the late 1940s actually, there were various experiments with pay television. And they all failed miserably. By the time HBO went on the air in 1972, even though it was only 345 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, it wound up being the first formidable attempt to do pay television. In the 1950s, there had been some attempts. But actually, movie theater owners and the networks, as you can imagine, always tried to clamp them down. So it was a bad combination of enemies and poor technology that made it almost impossible for anything to survive.

What made HBO different? How did it survive those early days?

I think it survived because its parent, Time Inc., which at that point was one of the venerable journalistic institutions and the home for all these incredible brands like People Magazine and Time Magazine, of course, Sports Illustrated and others there were people there who were very interested in diversification. They had dipped their toes into cable television by that time. And they were determined to see if this thing could go.

One of the things that I was able to track down, though, was how many times they almost hit the delete key on HBO. And in fact, one of the things that Jerry Levin shares, which was a lot of fun, was that they had a mandate to get 20,000 homes by July 1st of 1973. And if they hadnt done it, Time Inc. was going to cancel. And they started giving away free turkeys and stopped reporting a lot of the cancellations just so they could meet that threshold. If they had done it by the books, they wouldnt have made 20,000, and the thing would have been canceled.

Today, HBO is known, of course, primarily as a venue for original programming, whether its The Sopranos, or Euphoria, or Game of Thrones, or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Was it from its origins about original programming, or was it primarily about re-airing movies? And when did that transition occur?

HBO goes on the air in 1972. And I would say that for the first 10 years, at least, its value proposition, what it was being sold on, was the fact that you could get uncut movies uninterrupted at home. And there was also a great combination of some live sports, particularly boxing, that people could get as well. And so there was no real original programming. In fact, if you go back and look at some of the titles, they didnt have the money to actually produce something. So they were just buying some things. Like the Polka Festival in Pennsylvania was their first big event. Nothing that anybody was going to write home about.

And then what happened was, because of the advent of the VCR and the fact that people then could go to their corner Blockbuster and get these tapes and watch these movies at home, they realized that they had to do more. And thats when they did that paradigm shift to creating shows on their own and also doing movies.

So it had to be more about just not having commercials. There had to be something else.

Exactly. And they also started to do I mean, look, the mandate was, lets just do what the networks cant. And that manifested itself with basically three headlines. One, lets show the violence that they cant. Lets show the curse words that they cant. So George Carlin did his famous routine on HBO of the seven words you cant say on television. And lets be sexual in nature in a way that networks cant. So Sheila Nevins, who was there in the early 80s, she did this late night show called Eros, which then was changed to Real Sex, which became a huge hit for the company.

And again, youre coming back to things where you cant see it on the network, and these were incredibly unique to HBO.

By the time you have Blockbuster Video and you have VCRs and people are able to watch these kinds of things on their own time and not wait for it to come on HBO, you also have competing premium cable channels, right, like Showtime and Starz. You didnt write this book about Showtime, you didnt write it about Starz. What made HBO different from those other premium primarily movie-based channels? Was it the original programming?

Showtime, Starz, The Movie Channel they never got the traction, particularly early on, that HBO did, because HBO was first to market. They had a lot of support from Time Inc. I mean, Michael Fuchs, who was basically the George Washington of HBO, was incredibly aggressive. And so he made sure that the company had incredible talent relations. So I think that I mentioned in the introduction that when HBO went on the air, there were probably less than a dozen comedy clubs and big comedy clubs in the United States.

And 10 years later, there were hundreds. They went out and made all these deals with George Carlin and Billy Crystal and, I mean, Whoopi Goldberg and everybody. And it became one of these things that created a moat around HBO. So they had a built-in talent pool that helped them even before they were doing original series. And the same thing with music. Huge concerts with Bette Midler and tons of other artists Whitney Houston and others that made sure that they had people coming back to them all the time and spending money that their competition couldnt do.

Id forgotten about all this. Youre catapulting me back to the living room sofa of the 1980s. And Im remembering, oh right, Comic Relief and Bette Midler and all of these things that were relentlessly promoted on HBO. If you had to say what it is and perhaps because this is an oral history, different people said different things about what made it successful what were the primary factors that led to HBOs creative and business success?

I think that in its first decade, it made a very smart and this was Fuchs again a very smart, calculated decision to not try and be a fourth network. It did the opposite. And so, as a result, every programming decision went through a maze. Could you do this on a network? And, is this a network show? Well, then, forget it. We dont want it. It was funny because when they started Oz, which was their first big drama there had been a couple others before, but Oz was their big drama.

The programming executive Chris Albrecht said to Tom Fontana, who created the show, he said, Let me ask you a question. Youve worked in network your whole career. Has there ever been anything that you always wanted to do that the networks wouldnt let you do? And he said, Yes, I wanted to kill the lead character in their first episode. And Albrecht looks at him and says, Go do it. I mean, they were obsessed with breaking rules. They were obsessed with making sure that there was a uniqueness. The DNA to an HBO show was different.

And so you didnt see a lot of cop shows. You didnt see medical shows. You saw very, very particular shows. And the other thing that they did, which has served them very, very well through the years, was that they made sure that they were a place that people who had worked in both television and movies before and didnt have a lot of control because studios like to have the power and networks like to have the power they gave them to the creators.

And so, somebody like Garry Shandling and somebody like Larry I mean, Larry David, I asked he could have never done Curb Your Enthusiasm for a network. He gets to do whatever he wants to do. And giving the creators and giving the stars that kind of flexibility and freedom was also a big powerful engine for their growth.

I think when most people and again, maybe Im just reflecting the people that I talk to think of HBO in like, what was the first big show, when did it all change they tend to cite The Sopranos. But you said Oz. I mean, what were the big successes that really made the difference in HBOs trajectory?

First of all, there were amazing documentaries that were winning lots of awards about the AIDS Quilt, about they took on sexuality and gender issues. They took on Vietnam. They took on race way before the networks ever did. And they got a lot of attention. Documentaries and original movies were incredible drivers. But in terms of series, there was a little show called Dream On that was done by the duo who would live on to create Friends. It was a popular little hit. It wasnt going to bring in millions, but it got a lot of attention.

So did 1st & 10, which was this wacky, very sexually provocative show with Delta Burke and a guy named O.J. Simpson, which had a lot of male viewers. And of course Larry Sanders, which predated any of the other comedies that we associate with HBO. And it was the first show that got enormous attention inside Hollywood. And what that meant was that people loved it, they loved what HBO was doing in terms of giving freedom to creators. And it brought in a slew of talent into the network.

You mentioned earlier that you had these long conversations with Jerry Levin. Who were some of the other really key sources for you on this book? And maybe did any of them surprise you in how valuable they were?

One of the things that struck me was just how emotional people were. First of all, HBO was a place that people didnt date, they married. There were people that were there for 20 years, 25 years, 30, 35 years. They stayed there for their careers. And they were very, very wedded to it. And, I mean, Im not bragging about this, but, look, Im sure there were at least more than a dozen people who cried during interviews. Who cried. Who called me back the next day and said, Now I have PTSD revisiting some of what I went through. Or, I sat down with my children last night and started telling them some of the stories that we were talking about.

Who cried? I want to know.

Laura Dern, who I mean, she started acting when she was 14. She comes from acting royalty. Shes won all sorts of awards. When she was talking about her series Enlightened, she was incredibly emotional. She won the Golden Globe, then HBO canceled it the second year, after the second year. And just going through that and what she went through in that show was incredible. And I think that Lisa Kudrow, again, who had just come off Friends, she was in a show that HBO canceled. And it was very, very emotional. People talking about Jim Gandolfini dying and all sorts of things.

One of the things that I realized was that this was not just a place that people checked in on a time clock and left. It was like a tsunami that washed over their lives. And a lot of times, they met their spouse there, or their work ethic caused a divorce, or there were all sorts of tangential things coming off of being part of the HBO experience that I try and cover in the book. And they wind up being incredibly powerful.

There also was a very, very significant amount of important people who got fired and were there for a long time. And for them to talk about those experiences, I think was very, very powerful, and I was deeply grateful for how open they became. Sometimes they were saying things that they hadnt even said to their own families.

Who wouldnt talk to you?

Eddie Murphy said no. But I was told it wasnt personal. It was about his comedy special back in the 80s. And when you look back on that comedy special, I think it was somewhat politically incorrect.

Right. Has not really stood the test of time in some ways.

Yes, yes.

What would you want to ask him if you had gotten to talk to him?

I wanted to talk about the impact that that one night had on his career. I mean, look, Roseanne Barr, she said without her HBO special, forget about it. I mean, it was just huge in her life. And there were many, many others. Billy Crystal said HBO saved me. He was going to be on Saturday Night Live, which I chronicled in the SNL book. And then he actually wound up walking out with his manager on opening night before the show went on the air and wasnt able to get back on that cast for many years after.

But in between, he said there was a life raft, and it was called HBO and it came along. Person after person, HBO elevated them to a level of notoriety that they just had never experienced before. I wish I would have been able to talk to George Carlin and Robin Williams, and of course, Jim Gandolfini. Theres always that situation where some important people are no longer with us.

Last question. For many years, obviously, when you talked about HBO, it was in the context of cable television. And now, of course, were in a world of streaming. And HBO for so long, I mean, it, as you mentioned earlier, it changed ownership. But for so long, it was essentially within the Time Warner family. And now its Discovery. How well poised do you think is HBO in this very different future? New ownership, really completely transformed ways of viewing content.

Thats a great question. Its something that the people at Discovery are wrestling with now as they wait for final approval. But, look, sometimes when the Lord wants to punish you, he answers your prayers. And HBO had such a successful run, particularly from 1999 when Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm just exploded on to the culture. And then there was other hits right after that Six Feet Under and The Wire, whatever that I do think that they got a little complacent.

And for a company that had been so savvy technologically, there was this thing called Netflix that they paid attention to. At one point, there were people inside HBO who said, Lets just buy this thing. But that didnt work out. One of the things that happened around 2016, 2017, was it was no longer a level playing field. And they started to be instead of the dominant player, they started to be the one who had their nose pressed up against the proverbial window, wanting the kind of subscriber base that Netflix had.

Look, I think that the next two or three years is going to determine maybe perhaps the next decade in the streaming wars. Theres going to be obviously consolidation, and theres going to be some winners, and theres going to be some losers. But I dont think it can stay the way it is. And HBO went through some real hiccups with HBO Max. But I think that David Zaslav, whos coming into Discovery, and Casey Bloys, who runs all the content, I think theyre determined to get back on terra firma and somehow keep the brand alive for a new era.

All right, well, we will all be watching. And until then, we can read about how HBO got here. The book is called Tinderbox: HBOs Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, by James Andrew Miller. Jim, thanks again for being here.

Thanks for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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Mayukh Sen joins us now, like many debut authors, from Brooklyn. His first book is called Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America. Mayukh, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me. Im so honored.

So tell me, where did this idea come from? How did you decide to write this book? To decide on seven immigrant women where did this originate?

I first had the idea for this book back in 2017 when I was a staff writer at a site called Food52. I was 25 back then. And I was writing a lot of stories on figures who belonged to marginalized communities who worked in the food world in some capacity, whether they were chefs, restaurateurs, cookbook authors, what have you. And these were usually figures I felt had not been honored sufficiently in cultural memory in the same way that someone like, say, Julia Child has.

And oftentimes, these people were immigrants, immigrants of color. People of color more generally, women of color, queer people, folks who belonged to all of these different communities. And so a friend of mine looked at my budding body of work at Food52, and he was like, Huh, I wonder if theres a larger project here. And maybe it focuses on immigration and food. And I was like, oh, thats interesting. But Im 12 years old right now. I am far too young to take on a project like a book.

So I put it in my back pocket. Fast forward a year later when Im the ripe old age of 26. Im like, OK, I am ready to write a book. And I had noticed over the course of that year the proliferation of so many talking points in the American food media that were along the lines of, immigrants get the job done and immigrants feed America. And I want to be charitable here and say that maybe the editors and institutions who are peddling these talking points were well-intentioned. Yet to me, these talking points continue to center a certain kind of reader whom the American food media has privileged for so long.

That is someone who is white, middle to upper middle class. And immigrants themselves and their labor and their aspirations gets abstracted when you say something like immigrants get the job done and immigrants feed America. Theres this presumed us there who is that privileged consumer. And I felt as though the best way for me to orient readers away from that sort of perspective was to write the stories of seven immigrants, and immigrant women in particular, who had really labored to shape the way that Americans cook and eat today. And I felt as though that was all I could really do within my very limited skill set as a storyteller. So thats where this book began.

At the old age now of 29 with the book out, presumably.

Yes.

So did you immediately say it was going to be just women, and why? And was there a man that you thought, oh darn, I have to lose this person?

I was pretty firm in my resolve to focus just on women, just because so much of my storytelling at places like Food52 early in my food writing career had focused on women. And I struggle to understand or articulate really why at first. Because I realized that to this world, I present as a man. Im a queer person. And over the course of writing this book, I really came to put words to this experience in my perspective. And I came to understand that as a queer person, I have throughout my entire life had a complicated relationship to gender and gender expression.

And that might explain why I feel a sense of kinship with the stories of women more often than I do with the stories of men. And I think thats why I was gravitating towards these stories early on in my career. So it felt natural to me. Yet I still had to fight that anxiety as I was writing this book. The sense that I do present to this world as a man, even if that doesnt quite reflect the inner weather of my own gender identity, gender expression.

And Im sure that many people will look at me and ask, why is it that this person who presents as a man is materially benefiting from telling these stories? Which is why I want to be as sensitive and careful in how I rendered these stories.

In focusing on women, was that because it was particularly more difficult for women to enter the American food world, or was the American food world more hospitable?

My sense is that it was certainly more difficult for women to find their footing in the culinary world in America and certainly very difficult for them to be remembered as well. I mentioned Julia Child in this book. And she is one of the few women whos really had stamina in American cultural memory. Yet, so often, I found that the work of women in the culinary realm gets very easily overwritten and erased, especially in the proverbial history books.

And I really wanted to combat that with this book. Because when readers pick this book up, they might not know the names of most of these seven women. I gather they might the name of Marcella Hazan, just because she is a well-known figure among American home cooks. Her famous tomato sauce, for example.

I mean, and that one stood out. I was curious why you chose to include her.

To some extent, I wanted to provide an easy entry point for some readers who might have a passing interest in cooking. They might see this book and say, oh, I have heard the name Marcella Hazan. Im interested to see how she rose to fame and rose to such prominence. But she was such a fascinating figure for me in narrative terms, because she is someone whom many detractors, lets say, may have characterized as a, quote, unquote, difficult woman, which is, of course, such a sexist dog whistle. Yet, in spite of such prejudices, she was able to rise to a place with such prominence in the American mind in a way that a lot of these other women in my book have not been able to. And I really wanted to understand why through writing a chapter on her.

All right, I want to go to the other six women. But while were on Marcella, lets stay here for a moment. Where did she immigrate from? Obviously Italy, but where in Italy? And how did she become so prominent as a cookbook author in particular?

So she had been born in oh my goodness, Im going to butcher the pronunciation here Cesenatico, I believe, which is in the region of Emilia-Romagna.

Ah, the food center of Italy.

She came to America from there. And she moved to Queens, I believe, in the mid-20th century with her husband Victor, who is still alive although she is not. And she fell into food. She was not an able cook by any means when she came to America. She only knew how to make gruel for pigs during World War II. That was the extent of her culinary expertise. Yet once she came to America, she moved to Forest Hills, Queens, I believe, and she felt extremely lonely. And the food made her feel so lonely, because she just found American food culture completely baffling. She went

Not good.

Yeah, exactly. And I dont blame her. But she went to a cafe in her early days, for example, and had a hamburger. And she was totally perplexed by the idea of ketchup and this idea that you could pour just a bunch of the sludge on this glorious meat or whatever. And she hated supermarkets. She just could not quite get used to culinary life in America. And so she felt as though the best way to make a home for herself, really acclimate to this otherwise unfamiliar environment, was to begin cooking.

So she began spending time with the cookbooks of an Italian food writer named Ada Boni, whose name I hope Im not mispronouncing but I probably am. And through that, she became a more skilled cook, and she eventually began teaching cooking, which led to her first cookbook in 1973. And then she became a huge star.

How did she even get that first cookbook deal in the early 70s? Was that a time in which cookbook editors were more open to women cookbook writers, and particularly the immigrant women?

I would say after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act is when you see an increased appetite sorry for the pun.

Thats OK. Puns and mispronunciations of names are perfectly acceptable on this podcast.

Wonderful. I hope listeners feel the same. But I believe its after 1965 when you see a lot of publishers becoming more open to publishing cookbooks by immigrant female authors in particular because of loosening of immigration laws. And so that was the time in which Marcella was entering the fray, so to speak. And around that same time, you have figures like the Indian-born actress and food writer Madhur Jaffrey, who comes out with her first cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, in 1973. And there are a few other figures in my book, like the French-born Madeleine Kamman, whose first book comes out in 1971. Its called The Making of a Cook. So there certainly is an increased fervor in the publishing landscape for those sorts of cookbooks.

You chose not to include Jaffrey as a chapter.

Yeah. And its tough, because I have to admit, when I was in the proposal stage for this book, I did include her, because she is such a rich, compelling character in narrative terms. And Im someone who grew up wanting to be a film critic, actually. And so the fact that she straddled these two worlds of food and film because of her work as an actress fascinated me endlessly. Yet I found myself gravitating more towards the story of Julie Sahni, who was very much her contemporary and whose narrative I feel does not get as much attention as it might merit, especially because she is reportedly, and according to my research, the first Indian woman to be an executive chef of a New York restaurant, which is quite an accomplishment.

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A New Oral History of HBO - The New York Times