TV veteran makes equity her cause
“I realize that ‘hire qualified women!’ is the sort of outraged demand that’s often met with a sigh. No one disagrees and yet gender inequality in high-paying positions extends to all professions.” Nell Scovell wrote those words several years before the rise of #MeToo and the belated push for diversity — gender and otherwise— in the entertainment industry. A veteran TV writer, director and producer, Scovell raised several well-groomed eyebrows in Hollywood with her 2009 piece in Vanity Fair, recounting her own experience as only the second female writer for “Late Night With David Letterman” just after Letterman admitted on
air, “I have had sex with women who work for me on this show.”
Scovell, 57, is hardly the first woman in the entertainment industry to fight the system, but her entire career has been about “sneaking into the Hollywood Boys’ Club,” which is part of the subtitle of her candid page-turner memoir, “Just the Funny Parts.”
The diminutive author, who manages to laugh with her whole face, was in San Francisco this week to talk with Recode founder Kara Swisher at the Commonwealth Club about the life of a career TV writer when she was almost always the only woman in the writers’ room.
And she has been in many writers’ rooms over time, including those for “The Simpsons,” “Monk,” “Murphy Brown,” “Newhart,” “Coach,” “NCIS” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”
Dressed in black jeans, a white T-shirt and a sleek black leather jacket, Scovell sat down before her chat with Swisher to talk about what has changed and what hasn’t if you’re a woman working in Hollywood.
“When I wrote the Vanity Fair piece, I got a lot of Internet comments calling me a ‘fame whore,’ I’m ‘not talented,’ I’m ‘whining.’
“I’m not getting that this time around. I think men are a little more cautious about attacking women in that sort of knee-jerk, dismissive ‘whatever you say, I’m going to disregard it’ type of way.”
The Letterman incident not only got a lot of attention in the industry, it also helped Scovell focus her own thoughts about gender bias.
“Like many women — some out of choice and some out of necessity — I leaned out,” she writes, referencing her friend Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In,” on which Scovell collaborated. “I shifted my career goals away from securing power and creative control and toward simply continuing to work.
“I’ve never felt compelled in that way to speak out,” she says. “I was a feminist, but I don’t think I would say I was an outspoken feminist. But when I decided to speak out about Letterman and (Jay) Leno and (the dearth of female writers on) late-night TV, we met with our accountant to make sure that if I never worked again, we’d be OK; the kids would go to college.”
For the record, one of her two sons with husband Colin Summers is studying political science at Reed College and the other is at Harvard studying biology.
“It turned out to be the best thing I ever did,” Scovell says.
Scovell grew up in Newton, Mass, the middle child — “I’m funny! Pay attention to me,” she cracks — in a family of five kids where humor was celebrated.
“The best training for jumping into a writers’ room is growing up in this very funny, verbal family.”
“Just the Funny Parts” is far more than “and then I wrote this joke” (although there are lots of knee-slappers peppered throughout). It’s also very candid, not only about great and notso-great experiences working in the Boys’ Club, but about her own decisions. One bad decision early on in her career was hooking up with Jim Stafford, the head writer on the relaunch of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”
At first, she writes, “I worried that if I rejected him, he’d retaliate by not hiring me. Later, it struck me that the reverse outcome was just as undesirable.”
She had felt that because Stafford “wanted something from me ... I was the one in control. The truth was not so flattering. I had been manipulated.”
Scovell worked hard to ensure that she didn’t “shorthand the story,” but rather would “tell it with all the nuance and attention it deserved” because “I think there’s a tendency to think about someone successful, ‘nothing bad ever happened to her; she managed to get through it,’ and that’s not always true.”
That’s the reason she “allowed myself to be embarrassed — not ashamed, but it is embarrassing.”
While there are women in powerful positions in TV — Shonda Rhimes, Jill Soloway, Channing Dungey and others — progress in diversification has been slow. But what does that mean for TV viewers? Why should they care if there are more women at the writers’ table?
“You have different experiences if you’re a female in our culture or if you’re a minority,” Scovell says. “And when you’re breaking stories, it’s invaluable to have that range of experience.”
That doesn’t mean that men can’t write female characters, or women can’t write male characters.
“I’ve been in (writers) rooms where the women were the raunchiest people in the room,” Scovell says. “It’s like, Jews write the best Christmas songs. Women write the best dick jokes.”
Not only is there a scarcity of women in general in the business, but there’s also a scarcity of older women behind and in front of the camera on TV.
“I do think that as you bring younger women up, it’s to replace older women,” she says. “Hollywood still loves the potential of a young woman more than the experience of an older woman.”
She also believes younger women get hired for writing and other behind-the-camera jobs because “when someone’s up-and-coming, it’s harder to challenge” male bosses.
Scovell has many favorites among the shows she’s worked on, including “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” her first job as a showrunner, and “Murphy Brown,” which will be revived by CBS this fall.
Scovell can’t help but reflect on a few parallels between “Murphy Brown’s” run from 1988 to 1998 and the present day.
As older viewers remember, the show caused a political dustup when Candice Bergen’s title character had a child out of wedlock and then-Vice President Dan Quayle criticized her “lifestyle choice.”
“I remember Candice saying if you’re an actress, you want to be on the front page of the arts section, not the news section,” she says. “But now we’re in 2018 and we still have a vice president who would criticize her for having a kid out of wedlock.”
Noting that both Quayle and Vice President Mike Pence are from Indiana, Scovell adds that “in a weird way, it makes sense to bring that show back now.” Would Scovell want to write for the reboot?
She says no; then she says well, maybe; then she says I don’t know.
One reason she is hesitating is that it’s hard to try to replicate a great experience. But another reason is that sitcoms went from 26 minutes to 21 minutes (plus commercials, of course) “and they became this kind of joke delivery systems.”
“It’s harder to tell a story,” she adds. “I like stories.”
The title of her memoir notwithstanding, she could also add, “and not just the ‘Funny Parts.’ ”