A Party Room and a Prison Cell: Inside the Friends Writer’s Room

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The Friends writers’ room was simultaneously a party room and a prison cell. Read an excerpt from saulausterlitz's book 'Generation Friends'

Here’s proof that they were really friends. Photo: Copyright © Bruza Brother Productions, LLC Every writer knew the sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. David Crane would enter the room, toting a script full of notes scribbled in the margins. He would sit down in his chair and begin drumming his fingers on the table before announcing, “All right, we’ve got a lot of really good stuff here.

The Friends writers’ room was simultaneously a party room and a prison cell, a wild daily gathering whose participants, like the dinner guests in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, could never leave. Participants were thrilled to be granted the privilege of being a part of the work of writing Friends. Each day was a marvel, and it was an honor to be granted the opportunity to work alongside such gifted, committed, fiercely original imaginations.

This was in part because Crane and Kauffman themselves were still relatively new to the ways of television. They had never been writers in someone else’s room, having gone directly from theater to freelancing to running Dream On. Crane, by his own estimation, lacked time-management skills, content to let his staff wander far afield before returning to the task at hand.

Writers would have to endure the process of watching their scripts be slowly, steadily dismantled and rebuilt. To bristle at the process, or to attempt to defend a rejected joke, was counterproductive and would reflect poorly on the writer who attempted it. Writers soon learned that it was far better to jump in and help fix your own script than attempt to protect your original work.

It was fun to be in a room of raconteurs, entertainers, and one-liner machines bantering, debating, and performing for each other. But there also was no specified end to the workday, no moment when the writers would punch out and head home. Ordering dinner at the office was a matter of course. All-nighters were a fairly standard occurrence. On David Lagana’s first day on the job as a writers’ assistant, he showed up for work at nine-thirty a.m.

On the rare evenings when he was able to leave the office early , Adam Chase would get home, smoke some weed, and turn on the eleven p.m. rerun of Law and Order. Working on Friends was so intense that Chase needed some time to decompress at the end of the day, but he found that his mind was still coming up with jokes — only now they were for Jerry Orbach’s Detective Lennie Briscoe.

 

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