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Chuck Lorre has been entangled with some of the most notoriously difficult TV comedy stars in modern memory: Roseanne Barr, Brett Butler, Cybill Shepherd and, of course, Charlie Sheen. Of the four, he’s only made up
with Sheen — and that rift took years to repair, as their “Two and a Half Men” meltdown was perhaps the ugliest clash of all.
In his new book “Sitcom: A Memoir” — ironically titled, since he hasn’t traditionally been a fan of the term — Lorre recounts the highs and lows of his career. He often names names — many of whom don’t necessarily come off well in the book.
“Roseanne” producer Carsey-Werner is taken to task, as is former CBS boss Leslie Moonves. Lorre shares his befuddlement in the actions of some of his TV show co-creators and admits he was disappointed when the cast of “The Big Bang Theory” wouldn’t take a salary haircut to share the wealth with some of the show’s newer stars.
Lorre also — half-jokingly, half-not — blames the Writers Guild’s 2007-2008 strike for the death of democracy, noting how the lack of scripted TV product led the networks to rely more on reality series like Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice.”
But most of Lorre’s barbs are directed at himself. He details his rocky relationship with his mother, his struggles with “alcoholism, soul-crushing poverty, life-threatening illness, decade in a religious cult, three failed marriages, lifetime prescription for Valacyclovir” and bad choices he’s made. That includes signing away the games and home video residuals to the theme song he wrote for “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
“I decided if I’m going to do this, I’m going to tell the truth as best I can,” he says. “There was no point in doing it if I was going to sugarcoat my life.”
Among his admissions, Lorre’s ten-year journey through Scientology may be the most surprising thing that execs, stars and producers who have worked with Lorre over the years may learn. For the first time, Lorre reveals that as a young, starving musician, he was invited to a Church of Scientology event. Soon, he had signed a Sea Org employment contract for one billion years.
Lorre spent the next decade as a Scientologist — and he admits that as his dad was dying, “I actually thought I could heal him with Scientology.” Soon after, Lorre contracted severe ulcerative colitis. But as his own illness got worse, Lorre still believed, “no worries, Scientology would heal me.”
When Lorre and his then-wife, Paula, decided to finally quit the church, they were immediately excommunicated by their Scientology friends. But because Lorre at the time was destitute, the church didn’t make an effort to keep him. “The church is known to chase members who leave, imploring and/or threatening them to return,” he writes. “Turns out this is only true if the departing thetans have any money. We were so broke, no one noticed we were gone.”
So, why did Lorre never reveal his Scientology past until now? “It was always a great source of embarrassment to me,” he says. “I burned a decade of my life up in that thing. I can wallow in regret, but I’ve chosen to recognize that even that was a step that had to be taken to get to where I am.”
Here are a few more things we learned about Lorre from “Sitcom”:
- He changed his last name to “Lorre” because he hated “Levine,” which he says his mother used like a curse word. His wife at the time suggested he change it to “Laurie,” keeping the “CL” initials. “I chimed in with the clever idea to spell it fancy, Lorre, completely unaware that it’s the name of a closeted gay English actor or a misspelling of the men’s clothing store my mom worked at when I was a latchkey kid.”
- On “Roseanne,” writers would frequently pen scripts — and then have to attach Tom Arnold’s name, as if he had written them. Lorre also recounts required attendance at Arnold’s many sobriety parties and how exec producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner were banned from the set. “If ABC execs had a problem with the show, they had to go directly to the star and beg to be heard,” he writes. “I remember seeing Bob Iger, then the president of ABC, unhappily trudging to her dressing room in the hopes of getting the network’s notes addressed. I can’t confirm this, but I was told she liked making him do his while she was getting a massage.”
- When “Roseanne” writer Amy Sherman (now Amy Sherman-Palladino) told Lorre, she would never marry, he bet her $10,000 that she would before 30. She did, marrying Daniel Palladino. Years later, he ran into the couple in a valet line and brought up the unpaid bet. “I let Amy off the hook by suggesting she donate the $10,000 to a charity of my choosing,” he writes. “I’m still waiting.”
- “Grace Under Fire” was “just a big, heartbreaking nightmare” under star Brett Butler, he writes. “She hated that her romantic interest was Dave Thomas, and insisted she could do better. She hated the scripts. She very quickly decided she hated me. She threw a full can of Coke at one of my writers, barely missing his head. She asked me to give a speaking part to an extra — for reasons left to my imagination. She rubbed up against young PAs who had no choice but to quietly sit and wait it out. To my knowledge, Carsey-Werner did nothing.”
- On “Cybill,” Lorre says that in success, star Cybill Shepherd “became a different person. She made her toady manager a co-exec, and angrily demanded complete control of the stories, scripts, casting, cameras, lighting, editing and probably craft services. After every table read and rehearsal, I would be ordered to her trailer, where I had to sit on a footstool while he gave me script notes, enthroned in one of those giant leather vibrating Sharper Image chairs.”
- CBS casting head Peter Golden was vehemently against casting Jon Cryer in “Two and a Half Men.” “I asked why. I was told … he was the death of comedy,” he writes. But Cryer nailed it, and Moonves reluctantly gave in: “I’m going to give you enough rope.”
- When Warner Bros. and CBS looked to bring up “The Big Bang Theory” episodic fees for Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch, the show’s original five stars (Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki, Simon Helberg and Kunal Nayyar) were asked to take a 10% pay cut to accommodate those raises. “I assumed they’d quickly agree, you know, all for one, one for all. Wrong again. They were outraged that they would even be asked to take a small cut in order to reward the two newer cast members.” But, he added, “despite becoming insanely wealthy and famous on a global scale, most everyone in the cast of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ is filled with gratitude. Only a few don’t take my calls.”
- CBS also pushed back on casting Melissa McCarthy in “Mike & Molly.” “Believe it or not, they wanted a hot young woman to play a woman struggling with her weight. It was even suggested by one exec — a female exec — that I consider casting a more attractive actress and put her in a fat suit.”
- Lorre was reluctant to hire Anna Faris for “Mom,” and writes that “as the years went by, it became apparent that my initial reluctance to hire Anna was, in fact, correct. After six years, she left the show for mysterious reasons that were not mysterious to anyone on the show.”
- Before Michael Douglas was cast as the star of “The Kominsky Method,” Lorre held a table read with Al Pacino in the main role. It didn’t go well. “He was all over the place, improvising dialogue, losing his place in the script, throwing off all the other actors … Afterward, Mr. Pacino told me the only way he could do this was if he improvised his dialogue. I finally sprouted a pair of balls and said, ‘No fucking way!’”
- Lorre has a new theory on what may have led to Charlie Sheen’s meltdown on “Two and a Half Men.” When it appeared on set that Sheen was struggling, Lorre cut the season early — and two episodes short. “Here’s the guess: In my wildest dreams, I never considered that Charlie might have needed the money that two more episodes would’ve paid.” He theorizes that Sheen may have lost some serious money on sports bets, and perhaps needed the money to settle a debt with some bad people.
Lorre spoke to Variety about “Sitcom.” Here’s that chat, condensed for clarity and length:
What made you decide to share some really personal stuff?
I decided if I’m going to do this, I’m going to tell the truth as best I can. That includes the truth about my — let’s be gracious and call them missteps, but blunders could also be a word. There was no point in doing it if I was going to sugarcoat my life.
Your decade in Scientology was a surprise. Why have you never discussed that before?
It was embarrassing to me that I burned a decade of my life up in that thing. Seriously, 10 years of living in this artificial bubble. I can wallow in regret or I can choose to recognize that even that was a step that had to be taken to get to where I am.
At the time in the ’70s, you signed a billion-year contract with Scientology. Is that still enforceable?
If there’s a knock at the door, I’ll let you know. That’s very funny. As I was writing that, I’m going, ‘am I making myself liable here?’
When you cast Jenna Elfman in “Dharma & Greg,” you downplayed the fact that you had left the church.
In my effort to try and get ‘Dharma and Greg’ to actually become a reality, I downplayed the fact that I’d run for the exits — so as not to polarize myself with Jenna, because she was deeply enmeshed in it with her husband. Yet I truly understood her worldview because I had lived it. I remember saying to the writers, I wasn’t going to tolerate making fun of her for her beliefs. She was a joyful, happy, productive part of that ensemble, and given the journey I’d been on with Roseanne and Brett Butler and Cybil Shepard, Jenna was a delight. I thought it was really important to disregard her personal beliefs. Of course I probably was hiding the fact because of my very insecure attitude about my own involvement in that organization. A year to two later, after the show was over, when I approached her with the idea for a series called “Three Cinderellas,” that’s when apparently her mind had been changing about me.
You call out Carsey-Werner for being absentee producers as their stars were behaving badly.
You can understand it from a purely business economic perspective. The business model was produce 100 episodes of a network situation comedy, and then go sell it into syndication reruns, and become wealthy. It was almost a guarantee that 100 episodes equals wealth, and a windfall of income for many years to come. That was the principle I think that was at work there: Ignore the misbehavior of the stars, and do everything you can to keep it going and get to that magic number of 100 episodes. With that as an economic model, morality and fair play was nonsense. [Carsey-Werner did not respond to a request for comment.]
Your theory that the 2007 WGA strike, which helped elevate “The Apprentice,” helped bring about the end of democracy might have some legs.
I think that needs to be discussed. That the Writers Guild has to take responsibility for the end of the Western world. I’m allowed to have whatever ridiculous hypotheses I want to have.
You were surprised that the “Big Bang Theory” stars wouldn’t take a pay cut so the newer cast could get a raise.
No one involved in the show was prepared for that enormous success and the financial results. And yeah, I remember being disappointed that there wasn’t a “one for all, all for one” attitude. But when you’re talking to someone in that position and they’ve suddenly gone from a Toyota Tercel to a Mercedes limo, it’s an extraordinary transition for anybody. People’s responses were also colored by everyone suddenly having lawyers and managers and agents, wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, friends. Everybody. There was a collective response to that, and incredibly disorienting for all of us. Nobody was equipped for that kind of that kind of skyrocket that the show became.
You say only a few of them don’t return your calls. Do we play the guessing game now?
By all means, go ahead and guess. But we are not going to have that conversation.
You have a theory that Charlie Sheen melted down because the episodic order for “Two and a Half Men” had been trimmed, but he needed the money.
It’s important to point out: I don’t know that for a fact. As I said in the book, this was a theory I had way in the rearview mirror, looking backward that might have been what was going on. It’s never been discussed. I could be entirely wrong, but nothing else makes sense. It was a really dark, turbulent, frightening, angry time. A couple of years, really. It was hard to make sense of it all when it was happening. It was hard to make sense of it all when it was happening. I hope what comes through in the book is, at the end of the day, we reconciled [on Lorre’s show ‘Bookie’]. It was an enormously gratifying experience working with him again, even to the point where I reached out to him and said, “How would you feel about writing the blurb for this book I wrote?” And you look at look at the back of the book, one of the funniest things is Charlie’s blurb.
At the end of the book you say, even the things that you regret, they happened, and you wound up where you are today.
It is a treatise in regret. I don’t know that I understood this when I started writing this thing, but I think I have some perspective on it now. Regret, while a very human attitude, is an attempt to rewrite the past, right? Or at least swim in it. But my story is such that the things I would normally regret — they were what led me to a career and a life I could never have dreamed of, way beyond my dreams. So, how much do I want to indulge myself in regret?
In Chapter 24, you recount the many owners Warner Bros. has had while you’ve worked there. What do you make of the recent merger under Skydance?
None of that touches what I do for a living, which is to try to make people laugh. That’s my job. That’s why they pay me the crazy money. That’s what I do when I go to Burbank. And the corporate superstructure, whether it’s AOL, Time Warner, AT&T, Discovery, now Paramount — it really has very little to do with the work on the ground.
But there was always the business tension of CBS and Warner Bros. pushing for the best deal for your shows. Now that the studio and network are under the same roof, do you worry about self-dealing?
There was always that clash of the two corporations. That clash, I guess, now is gone. But what difference does it make? So is network television.
Do you have concerns that consolidation will lead to fewer opportunities for writers?
I’m kind of a naive optimist. I see this environment as incredibly exciting and vibrant. There’s so many opportunities, platforms where you can go and say, “Here’s an idea for a show. Give me money so I can make it.” I couldn’t have gone to CBS with “The Kominsky Method.” That’s a universe that was driven, and perhaps still is driven by demographics. They’re not going to do a show about 75- and 80-year-old men wrestling with the minutiae of growing old. I mention in the book, HBO and Hulu and Amazon and Apple all passed on it. But Ted Sarandos and Netflix said yes, and I got to make something that was really a deeply felt and personal project. I know it’s a cliche, but it was indeed a labor of love.
The one thing that you don’t mention in the book is all your philanthropy.
I didn’t want it to be in the book. That’s just self-aggrandizement. That’s not the point of doing that stuff. The point of doing that stuff is trying to make a difference, and not to pound your chest and go “look at me, look what I did.”
Are you bracing for anyone to call you after they read your book?
It’s certainly something I actually had to think about. But again, as I said somewhere in there, this is my memory of how things went down. And if you disagree, write your own fucking book.
