Voices: If You Can’t Stand the Heat...
In the early ‘90s, some TV news producer out in Tucson, Arizona thought it would be a good idea to air a series called “Hot Jobs.” “Yeah, it’s unbearably hot this summer,” I remember a reporter implying as he stood with a crew of roofers, “But it could be worse – you could have this guy’s job.”
I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be cathartic. Viewers were expected to praise corporate America for air-conditioned cubicles. But how many of those roofers, I thought, would rather die than sit behind a desk all day. Every job’s got a downside. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t have to pay people to do the work.
Thankfully, some of us are better suited than others to cope with certain drawbacks. If you can’t handle the proverbial heat, don’t even bother going in the kitchen. There’s plenty of work to be done in the rest of the house, too.
If Amaani Lyle knew how steamy it could get in the writers’ room, maybe she wouldn’t have accepted a job as a writer’s assistant on NBC’s Friends. Fired after four months for typing too slowly, Lyle now works on an Air Force base in Germany. It’s probably for the best. It’s just too bad she couldn’t leave the kitchen without suing the cooks.
Her charge of sexual harassment against writers Adam Chase and Gregory Malins and producer Andrew Reich has been rejected, but her allegation that they created a hostile workplace has held up in a California appeals court. Lyle herself was never directly a target, but she happened to be in the room when the show’s writers fantasized about the sexual experience of the show’s female cast members or discussed their own sexual preferences or drew crude cartoons in their margins or pantomimed male masturbation. She had to be there. It was her job to write down everything the writers said because any of it could potentially turn into a scripted joke.
In defense, the writers’ lawyers have tried to explain the creative process, insisting that lewd conversation is a necessary side effect of writing story lines that often relied on sexual subject matter. Final judgment is still pending and in the meantime, creative folks have their fingers crossed. I have a tendency to side with the underdog, but in this case, I’m with the writers all the way. Creative freedom in our collaborative writing rooms is essential, no matter how immature a few dorks might choose to behave.
More than a few people have chuckled at the thought of staff writer Gene Padden and I working in the same office. “I’d like to be in on that,” they say, imagining some kind of crossfire. Truth is, it’s just not that juicy. Oh sure, zingers fly and political passion frequently gurgles. People — not you dear reader, never you — get picked on. But we don’t get paid to pout. We get paid to share ideas without fear of judgment and to create. There’s no room for resentment in our work pod. Shake it off, move on and make something good. Yes it is unfortunate that writers’ rooms are predominately male, but no woman will even the playing field by crying to a courtroom that her delicate constitution has been bruised. Women need not only to handle the twisted dark side of creativity but also to dish it out themselves. It’s possible — just ask Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey.
Ratings made it perfectly clear that America loved Friends. They still love it in syndication. Like it or not, most Americans think about sex most of the time. It was the job of those writers to talk about that, to straddle the fine line of the familiar and find the jokes that would surprise viewers into laughter yet not shock them into changing the channel. Taking the sexual tension out of Friends is like taking Rude Rube out of electric city.
Comfortable working conditions do lead to greater productivity. Happy, healthy employees tend to get work more effectively. But comfort isn’t a right you can demand. Some jobs expose you to the elements. Some are necessarily dangerous. Some may give you carpal tunnel syndrome. Work is work and not all workplaces are intended for all people. If you don’t have a sense of humor you don’t belong in a comedy writing room. Lyle’s case can’t be compared to Bill O’Reilly allegedly demeaning a colleague directly and intentionally after being asked to stop or to air force academy cadets being assaulted by their classmates.
In other words, it’s not sexual harassment. It’s a lack of common sense, on Lyle’s part. If you don’t want to see people f**king, you don’t apply to work on a porn shoot.
-- alicia grega-pikul, October 21 2004.
Send e-mail to: apikul@timesshamrock.com.
