Barr none: Roseanne slams Hollywood system

Roseanne Barr has written a scathing essay on Hollywood and the trouble she encountered during her days on the 1980s sitcom, Roseanne.

Lately she has been asked a lot to comment on the Charlie Sheen / Chuck Lorre feud, as one who has been at the heights of the television machine. By the sound of things she has also done a lot of fighting.

“It’s hard to tell whether one is winning or, in fact, losing once one starts to think of oneself as a commodity, or a product, or a character, or a voice for the downtrodden. It’s called losing perspective. Fame’s a bitch. It’s hard to handle and drives you nuts. Yes, it’s true that your sense of entitlement grows exponentially with every perk until it becomes too stupendous a weight to walk around under, but it’s a cutthroat business, show, and without the perks, plain ol’ fame and fortune just ain’t worth the trouble,” she writes.

Barr was lured to her own ABC sitcom by Marcy Carsey (The Cosby Show) who had convinced her it was time for a sitcom with a working class hero based in her stand-up act. Barr invested considerable faith in a female producer with form but was devastated to discover her name wasn’t credited as creator -but a male writer.

“I confronted Marcy under the bleachers on the sound stage when we were shooting the next episode. I asked her how I could continue working for a woman who had let a man take credit for my work—who wouldn’t even share credit with me—after talking to me about sisterhood and all that bullshit. She started crying and said, ‘I guess I’m going to have to tell Brandon [Stoddard, then president of ABC Entertainment] that I can’t deliver this show.’ I said, ‘Cry all you want to, but you figure out a way to put my name on the show I created, or kiss my ass good-bye.’

“I made the mistake of thinking Marcy was a powerful woman in her own right. I’ve come to learn that there are none in TV. There aren’t powerful men, for that matter, either—unless they work for an ad company or a market-study group. Those are the people who decide what gets on the air and what doesn’t.”

Barr even made a chart of names and hung them on her dressing-room door, listing every person who worked on the show, noting every one she intended to fire.

“When the show went to No. 1 in December 1988, ABC sent a chocolate “1” to congratulate me. Guess they figured that would keep the fat lady happy—or maybe they thought I hadn’t heard (along with the world) that male stars with No. 1 shows were given Bentleys and Porsches. So me and George Clooney [who played Roseanne Conner’s boss for the first season] took my chocolate prize outside, where I snapped a picture of him hitting it with a baseball bat. I sent that to ABC.”

Barr eventually won her way with the staff, began to fire all the names on her checklist and began to hire writers she wanted to work with.

“But at least everyone began to credit me. I was assumed to be a genius and eccentric instead of a crazy bitch, and for a while it felt pretty nice. I hired comics that I had worked with in clubs, rather than script writers. I promoted several of the female assistants—who had done all the work of assembling the scripts ­anyway—to full writers. (I did that for one or two members of my crew as well.) I gave Joss Whedon and Judd Apatow their first writing jobs, as well as many other untried writers who went on to great success.

“Call me immodest—moi?—but I honestly think Roseanne is even more ahead of its time today, when Americans are, to use a technical term from classical economics, screwed.”

It’s a great read. Check it out at The NY Mag.