“Bombshells”
If you thought House was simply a medical show, you were wrong. It was the rarest of all the shows out there. Bending the rules and changing its formula and structure several times a year with episodes that moved through time. That were real. That were imagined. Never changing though, was that the medical mystery needed to be solved and we found the best way to tell that story. No form of writing was off limits. It was one of many things that made House the most watched show in the world for three years with nearly 90 million worldwide eyes seeing it each week.
As Director, I won an Emmy® award for an episode called “House’s Head” in the show’s fourth season. It was one of those out-of-the-box episodes where House traveled through his broken memory after being in a terrifying bus crash. He journeyed through his mind and imagination searching for clues and finding answers. Even bringing to light things he would have been better off not knowing. Really, a relatable allegory that so many of us have lived through and grown from.
In the 7th season of the show, I was now a producer for House. Directing a third of the season’s episodes and overseeing all of them creatively. I was the bridge between the writers’ ideas and the show’s ability to physically execute them.
Liz Friedman and Sara Hess wrote “Bombshells.” They were a writing team of wit and smarts. Two female voices who wrote clean and engaging stories that could make me laugh out loud or have me furiously turning the page to find out what happens next. They were friends as well as colleagues, and I loved being on set directing their work and having a few laughs along the way.
For House fans, “Bombshells” is the “House and Cuddy break-up episode.” The official turning point.
Five dreams.
Each dream was a genre: a sitcom, a shot-for-shot recreation of Butch and Sundance, a horror movie, a 50’s melodrama, a musical.
It was an episode of TV unlike anything I have read.
During a cancer scare, House’s girlfriend, Lisa Cuddy, has a series of dreams that give her insight into her failing personal relationship with House. Fans had waited patiently (and not so patiently) to get them together and now we were ripping them apart. And not just ripping them apart—we were blowing the relationship up on an epic scale.
The brilliance of the script came not just from the showiness of these dreams but the humanity and seeming suddenness of the break up itself. As a viewer you were sucked into the dream world and when the break up happens—it is truly a bombshell.
My first idea was to find the best director for each of those genres to “guest direct” that segment. As a producer, this idea most excited me. The show deserved the best. Wouldn’t it be amazing to get the best of best directors to come and share their talents with the show? Gather the “super-friends” of the directing world and assemble them all?
My union—the Director’s Guild of America (DGA)—frowns on such an idea. I serve on the Union’s negotiating committee and “one director to a film” is the very foundation that the DGA is built on. To have multiple voices in one film was not a healthy strategy or a sanctioned one. As fun as it would have been, it would not have been possible in this format.
TV is executed at such a pace, on such a fast schedule, that there often isn’t time to plan and pull off more than one big idea per episode. For example, when I directed “House’s Head,” the bus crash was our one big idea.
Here I had five.
And each idea was more than big.
Five genres I had never worked in.
Cuddy dreams that House, Wilson and her now teenage daughter, Rachel, all live together. The scene begins when a local mall cop brings her daughter home after catching her shoplifting.
I had never worked in multi-camera. When you direct TV, you are instantly pigeonholed in the genre or field you start in. I went down the path of one-hour drama and only the rarest of directors moves between half-hour and one-hour TV. I was not one of them. Sitcoms are an art. They are shot in front of a live studio audience and are pieces of theater. They are three-walled sets, the “fourth wall” being where the cameras are lined up and where the audience sits. Although I wasn’t steeped in watching them, I will tell you that the pilot director of Friends and Cheers (and every other great sitcom), Jim Burroughs, is a genius. What he does to create laughs is amazing and his work is invisible. You just enjoy the show.
For me to go from never attempting a particular genre to creating something worthy within that was daunting. Since I no longer watched sitcoms, I needed a crash course. It’s a very delicate balance of shots and cutting. It’s not simply lining up three cameras next to each other and “hosing it down” as we say. It’s a complicated dance of staging and timing to achieve a laugh.
I was dreading it. My brain simply didn’t think like this. House had humor and jokes, but not jokey jokes every three lines.
I watched about twenty hours (that’s forty episodes) of Two and Half Men, Friends, and Will and Grace to prepare. Trying to see patterns that worked. These were complete shows. My dream was just one scene.
First, we transformed House’s apartment into a three-walled sitcom set. Softened the look and altered the set decorations so the audience knew it was House’s apartment but the sitcom’d version of it.
We lit the set so it was even and bright. It needed to be optimistic looking.
The dream was in large part an homage to Two and Half Men. Hugh wanted to wear a bowling shirt and alter his hair and makeup slightly to take some of his characters’ edge off.
The set. The camera. Just a small part of it. It needed to be uncharacteristically stagy. When you are shooting a drama, people move and act as close to real life as they can. In a sitcom, like a stage play, you are opening yourself to the audience. So you try to find ways to deliver lines in their direction and not turn your back in delivering jokes. It was Robert Sean Leonard (Wilson) who pointed out the style of acting that was needed. He had to play the sitcom version of “Wilson.” Making unnatural moves to open up to camera. This was theater, but not the theater I thought I would be making.
Everyone needs a “Fonzie-like entrance” into a scene. Hugh got his. In the early part of the scene he walks into the room, sees a cop and delivers the show’s catch phrase: Whatever it is, I didn’t do it. And the audience erupts in screams and cheers. We didn’t have an actual live audience so the actors had to leave room for these type cheers. Pauses you would never take in a drama. At first, we tried having a laugh track with the intent of turning up the volume after each joke. This went horribly wrong on the first take. The laugh track had a mind of its own and the actors would hear laughter in all the wrong places. In the end, the actors just left room after their lines.
When it worked, it worked. When it didn’t, you knew it. It didn’t look or feel like the right thing. It was that binary. It went quicker than I thought. We did the scene all the way through four times and had what we needed. Sigh. If everything on a drama could go that quickly.
I was really pleased that I pulled it off. I wish I had gotten another run at it to more enjoy the process, but the challenge and the edgy feeling it creates as an artist when you’re out of your comfort zone is a great thing to savor.
This was easy.
The scene was recreating the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they held up in a church in Bolivia surrounded by soldiers. Butch and Sundance know they are going to die and the brilliance of the scene isn’t the talk of their impending death as it is the fantasy of the life they going to have when they head to Australia. The film ends with its famous freeze-frame as they run out of the building shooting.
In our version, House and Cuddy are talking about their future as a couple, all the while knowing they (and their relationship) are about to die when they walk through the door.
We used stills from the final scene of Director George Roy Hill’s film storyboards, putting red lines through Newman and Redford as we got each shot. We detailed the set and costumes and props and the behavior after the film. We letterboxed the letterbox to get the film into widescreen format. If you see them both together, it’s a great homage.
We nailed every detail.
Shot for shot.
I’ve done action, but not horror. We hired conceptual artist Christian Scheurer to take our cast and turn them into zombies. The staff of Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital would become the walking dead in a dream where Cuddy is in jeopardy and House needs to fight his way through the flesh eaters to save her, and ultimately does not.
The segment was challenging because it had a major tone shift halfway through it. At first it starts out in 28 Days Later territory. Grounded, frightening and gritty. One “good thing I brought my ax-cane” later, we were in Evil Dead Two territory, making skillful camp, which Hugh navigated perfectly.
Horror was a blast. It was tricky due to the volume of pieces. More than action, it was actually five mini-scenes within the larger scene. Each member of House’s team was a zombie with a motive to kill House and eat his brain.
I move pretty quick as a Director in how fast I push through a day, but this day I treated myself and indulged my every desire. It came out as a cool sequence. It made me crave directing a show that was thriller in nature. High stakes. Lots of opportunity for heightened visuals.
The 50’s melodrama was tricky since there was no clear reference for it. It was My Three Sons in tone and the style would be close. We shot in black and white and followed the makeup of the time and costuming.
It starts with Cuddy coming home all cheery from a great day at work to her perfect family. Rachel is eight-years old and studying for her LSATs and House is baking a cake. Wilson shows up as “The Milkman” and then the perfect world is shattered when she realizes it’s been a dream.
It was the least specific of the five-dream sequence and slightly goofy, but fun all the same. The timing worked where we shaved Hugh’s beard, since a beardless House is not quite “House,” so it gave the dream a very off-kilter feel.
We shot it on film (we were shooting digital at this point on the series). The lighting of the time was fairly theatrical and the framing of shots was very static and center-punched.
It was cool to make, if only to see how sophisticated TV has become. When it was born, TV was largely filmed pieces of theater. I Love Lucy, Honeymooners…that sort of thing. Now TV is highly stylized and rivals big movies in its looks. The camera moves as if it had wings.
When I got to this part in the script, the words laid there in silence. There is nothing musical about reading a musical on the page. The hardest of all genres was staring at me.
The script said only this: what begins is a House-ian version of Judy Garland’s, “Get Happy.”
One sentence.
How hard could one sentence be?
The script for Gone With The Wind simply said: “Atlanta burns,” which became a grand five-minute piece of the movie where they built sets to torch and took weeks to film.
One sentence.
The poster for Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz hangs in my office. I remain blown away by that film. The visual style. The dream-like feel. The precision of the dancing. The world that was created.
I am also a huge fan of Moulin Rouge. When I saw it (four times in theaters), I sat there with a smile on my face the entire time. Such pleasing visuals and high-energy dancing and cutting were going into my eyes.
And now it was my turn.
I take a certain amount of pride in “knowing what I don’t know.” In this case, I knew my limits. It didn’t daunt my ambition, but I knew I could only take it so far and have it only be so good.
On a purely technical level, it involved both our actors recording “Get Happy.” Hugh is a singer and on world tour as I write this. Lisa isn’t a singer, but can sing great. And in it, it needed to be something special and different. There was a chance to build a dream world from scratch. If this were to work, the song and the choreography and world would all be of a piece. Each influencing the other to the point where you have chicken or egg conversations about it.
That was the goal.
Jon Ehrlich was the composer of House across its 178-episode run. He is also, as I would learn, not only a lover of musicals but also a composer of them between TV scoring gigs. This was his dream and his chance to take everything he had done and turn it on its ear. While I had one-third of my puzzle, the other two hung before me, looming.
I had general ideas of what I wanted it to feel like. What I wanted to experience. I often speak to my department heads in more emotional terms and intentions rather than results. I do the same with my actors. You don’t want to go to an actor and tell them to cry. You want to tell an actor what is the intention behind them crying. This devastates you. This brings you joy unlike any you’ve experienced. You’re mourning this. It’s a far better way to communicate and try to understand that we all come from a place inside us that is deeply feeling. For the musical, I wanted to feel this from Cuddy’s perspective. I wanted to be in her head. I wanted to experience their relationship and ultimately what wasn’t working for them. I wanted to see it in symbolic terms. I wanted House to feel like the messenger of death and I wanted to experience a push and pull between them. All that was well and good but ultimately it needed to be shot and at some point you need to build something. How many carpenters would it take to build what I was feeling? The answer was: the world and what happens in it needed to be created.
I am a fan of the dance competition show So You Think You Can Dance. Without question, Mia Micheals designs the best sequences of choreography. She created a style of movement like nothing I’ve seen, and not just had dancers dancing—but living out deeply emotional stories. She would turn breast cancer into a dance. Or the death of her father into a dance. All in rich and passionate and emotional sequences that would inspire or devastate in their beauty. The costuming. The sets. She filled a stage. She built worlds.
In a piece of serendipity, a few months before I was handed “Bombshells,” I saw an ad in Variety congratulating her on her second of three Emmy® award wins and saw that we were at the same agency. I took note then about a week after that, Mia did a piece to Sting’s London Orchestra recording of “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” in which she put an Alice In Wonderland-type spin on it and fans dubbed the show “Alice In Mia-land.” (All of Mia’s work is on YouTube and I beg you to check it out.)
That piece blew me away and I made the call that I wanted to meet Mia. Our agents arranged a coffee meeting in Beverly Hills for us and we met. Coffee became lunch and four hours later we were done. We covered so much and connected so deeply as artists. I told her more than once that I didn’t know what it was yet, but it would be something, some day that we could find each other working together on.
The day it happened, the text exchange when something like this:
- Mia!
- Greg!
- Mia, are you avail?
- When?
- Now.
- What’s up?
- I want to stick a straw in your brain and suck out what’s inside.
So that’s what I did.
Beyond being a fan of Mia’s, the producer in me needed to make this bulletproof. Hugh said in passing that if he wanted to be a dancer, he’d have to be one. Meaning, I was setting out to torture him. Lisa was a dancer, so she would know when something wasn’t going right. Getting one of the most acclaimed choreographers of all time had the added benefit making my actors feeling protected. They could trust Mia to work with them to make them look their best. Hugh, who was a self-proclaimed “non-dancer,” could of course perform anything that was ever handed to him. But Hugh’s humility is something that made working with him very special.
I explained to Mia I wanted her to build this world from the ground up.
She said she never had directed anything for film, never run a set. I told her I had her back and I would be her physical directing arms. Help her execute everything and push the day along and guide her through all the moving parts that would follow.
Watching Mia’s growth as a director during the growth of the musical was really the best part of it. At the first meeting, a very timid Mia showed up and by the last meeting, a director in full command of her craft emerged.
A million clichés couldn’t tell you how well she took to film. She created a sequence that was so complex that it couldn’t be done in one go. It had to be broken into five sections. Each section had a different title. When one section was called “Circus,” I knew I was in for something that would amaze.
Mia had her hands in everything. She would shape the song with Jon. She would design the costumes. Consult on the sets. On my end, I helped her navigate the world and prioritized her needs. We were not a movie with weeks to shoot a sequence. We were a TV show with one full day dedicated to the shooting of one of most elaborate musical sequences put to TV.
Mia’s visual mind is unmatched. The storyboards she created for the sequence were in line with the things I loved about All That Jazz and Moulin Rouge. I was watching a new favorite thing of mine be created in front of my eyes.
The day of shooting was eye opening for her. As much as you think you know what a set will be like, it’s nothing like anything you’ve seen. To see that through someone’s fresh eyes made me appreciate what I love about what I do. Watching 200 people work in concert with each other to create art right there in front of you. At the end of every day you’ve made something that wasn’t there when you arrived in the morning.
Mia and I were of one mind and one person. She worked with the actors and I guided the dance of accomplishing our day. We did 150 camera set-ups in 15 hours. It was a long and amazing day and we got everything we came for.
Mia would spend days that followed in post-production making sure the best takes of everything got used. The day of shooting was just the beginning of what was in her head. She had ideas on graphics and colors and imagery that would be part of the end result.
I don’t know when I’ve been so pleased as a Producer. Bringing out someone’s work and seeing them open a chapter of their lives. All the while, with someone I so admired and cared for.
Like anything you’re enjoying, you never want it to end. The reality is you can never recreate moments like those, just hope to find other things that move you in a new way.
To just focus on the dreams would be a disservice to what is the best acted scene on the episode and one of the best-acted scenes of the series.
After the dreams, Cuddy realizes that House is not right for her. That their relationship is built on a lie. That for House to have any kind of emotional intimacy, he needs to be high on Vicodin.
The nuance and detail of Hugh and Lisa’s work emotionally crushed me. I was going through my divorce at the time of shooting, and in some ways, I felt my life playing out in front of me—ending something that is best ended.
Hugh and Lisa each made each other better. Their support for each other and respect for each other was something that allowed me to do my best work. I’ve created that environment on my new series Banshee. Finding actors that are not just talented but push each other and myself to create and discover.
There will never be another “Bombshells,” but there will be amazing artists willing and wanting to come together to create.
I always hope to be there.
That’s the dream.
