ROB LONG: What I Learned From Jimmy Burrows.
On my third day in show business, I went to Stage 25 on the Paramount Studios lot to get a cup of coffee and a doughnut. It was January 1990, and I had just been hired as a staff writer on the long-running hit comedy Cheers, and so far I had made two important career discoveries.
First: that every working soundstage has a table somewhere groaning with snacks and treats. It’s called the craft services table, even though it often sprawls across two or three tables, a deli-sized refrigerator, and a bank of toaster ovens. The entertainment industry is filled with nervous eaters—and no one is more nervous than a newly hired staff writer on a 10-week contract—so this area is replenished hourly with pastries and bagels and mini sandwiches, and it’s where everyone associated with the production self-medicates with sugary carbohydrates, high-fat dairy, and gossip.
The second thing I discovered was this: No one in show business will ever teach you anything, or explain what’s going on, or patiently show you the ropes. If you’re new and want to learn something, go get a cup of coffee and a doughnut at the craft services table and hide in a corner and watch. This is what I was doing on my third day in show business when I watched my boss, James Burrows, sitting at the piano on the set—You remember that, don’t you? Upstage left, in the alcove of the bar under the stairs?—and he was idly playing “I’ll Know” from Guys and Dolls. The rest of the cast and crew were on their mid-morning break, so it was just me and James Burrows—everyone called him Jimmy, but I didn’t feel like I could do that on my third day in show business—in the empty Cheers bar with a doughnut from craft services.
As Burrows himself wrote on the brilliant design of the Cheers set, “strong attention was paid to detail. More than anything else, we wanted class and warmth. We hired Richard Sylbert, an Academy Award–winning art director, to make the set look as beautiful and inviting as possible, since the characters were drinking what many in America still considered ‘devil’s brew.’ Richard was very dignified, often decked out in a safari jacket while smoking a pipe. He had never worked on a television production before. He asked for a salary of 500 dollars for every show produced, which was unheard of. I told Paramount, ‘Pay him, even if you have to take it out of our share.’”