Building ‘Bridge’ : Goldberg Taps Memories of Growing Up in Brooklyn

Pitching a new TV series to the networks is a bit like trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge: There aren’t many takers, and those who do go for it often discover upon delivery that what they bought is not what they were promised.

So when Gary David Goldberg--a writer-producer with one hit TV series in eight attempts--pitched a show to CBS called “Brooklyn Bridge” late in the network’s fall-season development schedule last spring, nobody would have been surprised had CBS executives turned tail and fled.

But they fell for the pitch--hook, line and sinker. CBS Entertainment President Jeff Sagansky has been a solid Goldberg believer ever since the executive’s days as a programmer at NBC, where he witnessed the long-running success of Goldberg’s generation-gap comedy “Family Ties.”

So in April, while other shows were handing in their pilot episodes for the new season, Sagansky asked Goldberg for a script. The 47-year-old Goldberg gently reached into his cherished memories of growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and fashioned a story in three days.

The result was “one of the best scripts I’ve ever read in my career, and I’ve read a lot of scripts,” Sagansky said. He bought it on that basis--without a cast, without a foot of film being shot. Since then, Sagansky has been singing the virtues of the new series to anyone who would listen.

Now, with the fall season grinding into gear, it appears that “Brooklyn Bridge” may be everything its creator--and the programming chief who stuck out his neck to back him--promised it would be.

The pilot episode of “Brooklyn Bridge,” boasting Marion Ross (Mrs. C. on “Happy Days”) as the only recognizable cast member, reportedly tested higher than any CBS series in history. TV reviewers last week gushed in an effervescent fountain of praise: “It’s the best new series of any kind on any network this year,” Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote.

“This makes me feel nervous,” Goldberg said last Friday when the first warm wave of reviews washed in, celebrating his series’ universal themes of childhood, family and community. “These are staggering. The expectations here. . . .”

His voice trailed off and Goldberg took a deep breath.

“I’ve realized I’m the custodian of a lot of people’s memories, and the pressure to live up to that is strong now,” he said.

While overall ratings were not spectacular--last week’s premiere finished 57th out of 87 programs--the series was a solid No. 2 in its time slot on Friday night, when TV audiences are low. The morning after the premiere, Sagansky called Goldberg at home and woke him to share the good news.

Goldberg calls “Brooklyn Bridge” a personal triumph. The small, everyday stories of growing up under the eye of a strong matriarch (Ross) are told from the perspective of Alan (Danny Gerard), the wise-cracking, 14-year-old main character. (In his own family, Goldberg was actually the younger son, played by Matthew Siegel in the series, who idolizes his big brother.)

After writing the autobiographical pilot script, “I was satisfied,” Goldberg said. “I was happy. That was a successful event. No matter what else happened, I had confronted a time of my life I wanted to write about, was able to write about it and liked what I wrote about it.”

As a Jewish kid growing up in Bensonhurst, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood rich in ethnicity and overflowing with affection, Goldberg’s singular identification of himself was as an athlete. His ideal career was in pro sports; his realistic one as a physical educationteacher in Brooklyn. But a 1962 basketball scholarship to the liberal Brandeis University changed all that.

“When I went to college, I literally didn’t know what right and left mean in politics,” Goldberg said. “I was so unprepared to deal with the real world. I had come from this homogeneous world where my worth was never questioned, and I had nothing to answer for. Then all of a sudden you go to a place where someone says, ‘Oh, you play ball. That’s nice. What else ?”

His narrow world view shattered, Goldberg dropped out of school and spent a couple years bumming around the world with his Greenwich Village girlfriend (and now wife), Diana Meehan, and pet Labrador, Ubu. When the couple learned that Diana was pregnant in Israel, they moved to Berkeley and opened a day-care center so they would have a place to raise their child.

Goldberg didn’t write his first TV script until the age of 31, while finishing his college degree at San Diego State. Shortly afterward, he walked into the office of “The Bob Newhart Show”--for which he later became executive producer--armed with 23 story pitches.

Most of Goldberg’s TV series have reflected the narrative thread in his personal life: “The Last Resort” was about college kids working summers at a Catskill Mountains resort in Upstate New York; “Family Ties” was a culture clash between hippy parents and materialistic kids and “Day By Day” centered on a yuppie couple who open a day-care center in their home.

Goldberg’s 1989 entry into feature film writing and directing, “Dad,” about the renewed bonds between an ailing father and his son, was also a reflection of Goldberg’s relationship with his own father.

The reason “Brooklyn Bridge” got off the ground so late last spring was because Goldberg didn’t know whether his NBC series “American Dreamer” would be canceled. It was.

“American Dreamer,” starring Robert Urich as a man in search of a simpler life (read: Goldberg), broke the invisible “fourth wall” of television as Urich periodically stepped into a black set to discuss his thoughts with viewers. Goldberg said that NBC tried to make him drop that portion of the series, and he would not.

“I felt humiliated by NBC last year with what they did to ‘American Dreamer,’ ” he said. “Not the fact that they canceled it, but they didn’t believe in any of the things I believed in, and were constantly undercutting what I thought were the best elements of the show.”

“We put a lot of Gary’s series on the air. None had the success or audience acceptance of ‘Family Ties,’ ” NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield said in July. “I felt I gave him a decent shot, and that was his choice (to leave NBC).”

In any case, Goldberg was not jumping for joy over CBS’ offer to do another show. He felt unhappy with the state of television and his place in it.

“My fear is that I don’t think television is for grown-ups anymore,” Goldberg said. “It’s not for grown-ups to work in, not to watch, and it’s just become plain silly and pointless. These network people do not seem ready to allow a writer’s voice to be heard. They’re going to put it all through their blender and make it pointless.”

But Sagansky had been pursuing Goldberg relentlessly from the first day he took over as head of CBS Entertainment in January, 1990. “I had one prior experience with Gary--’Family Ties’ on NBC--and it really came out of his heart,” Sagansky said. “I knew the only way Gary would come back to television was if the project came from inside of him.”

The idea for “Brooklyn Bridge,” in fact, was based on bedtime stories that Goldberg tells to his third-grade daughter, Cailin. “She seemed really enthralled by this mythical place,” Goldberg said. “What appealed to her was not what we had, but what we didn’t have--our own bedroom, our own bathroom.”

Goldberg finally relented, because Sagansky gave Goldberg the freedom to tell his story without network interference.

“I said to (Sagansky), ‘I’m a writer. I take my work very seriously. I don’t want to be diminished by this experience, and I don’t want to be toyed with.’

“This is only the second show I’ve ever written,” Goldberg said. “In the last 10 years, there have been three things that were mine: ‘Family Ties,’ ‘Dad’ and ‘Brooklyn Bridge.’ So you can say, this is a guy who doesn’t come up with a lot of ideas, or this is a guy who believes in the ideas he comes up with.”