Secrets of The Simpsons

It turns out Matt Groening was not considered a great asset by many in The Simpsons writers room; he was not a sitcom writer and didn’t really didn’t know how to tell those kinds of stories, and Sam Simon let him know it. Once while discussing a script where Marge finally lets her hair down, Matt really wanted to reveal that underneath her beehive, Marge had Rabbit ears—Sam, of course, said no. One witness to the early days was particularly annoyed that Groening took so much credit for the show's success, when "the fat fuck just sat up in his office all day, figuring out ways to make more money [with merchandising]" while Sam Simon and the writers churned out brilliant script after brilliant script.

As original Simpsons writer (and the head writer of Frasier), Jay Kogen put it, “I keep reading books about Star Trek where [creator] Gene Roddenberry was not the guy who was necessarily at the head of it, or the stuff about The Godfather, where it’s Coppola and it’s a bunch of other people. It turns out that what they say about TV and movies being a collaborative effort is really true. It’s a large collaboration. But those are hard stories to tell for the press. They like to make stars out of people, so they pick one guy and say, ‘This guy’s the guy who did it.’ And that’s a pretty good story.”

And that was the story James L. Brooks and Fox wanted to stick with. Fox tried to get me to write a different story, “How about,” one flack told me, “you do a history of how The Simpsons Movie came to be,” adding that this was something they could get on board with (Entertainment Weekly did this exact story when the movie premiered—with quotes from Brooks, Groening, and the cast—you can fall asleep to it here). I declined this very generous offer and continued to work on the story, resulting in some hilarious calls from Fox publicity, with them informing me “There is no Simpsons story in Vanity Fair. We said ‘no’!”

Something I gleaned early from this experience is that Hollywood publicists are so used to journalists kowtowing to their every request that they no longer understand what journalism actually is. We’re talking about cartoon characters here, not Watergate, but the light subject matter doesn’t exclude the possibility of doing real research and telling interesting stories. They actually thought that we were all on the same team, trying to get their client the maximum exposure, using our words and outlets only to extend their message. Vanity Fair and other magazines are complicit in the lionization of celebrities that has led to this imbalance of power, but the editors at Vanity Fair understand that at the end of the day they’re very much a journalistic entity, and pursue stories accordingly.

The story ran in the August 2007 issue, and by the fall I’d signed on with Faber and Faber to expand the material into a book. When word of this got out, Brooks sent a letter to every current Simpsons employee, and all the former ones he thought mattered, asking them not to speak to me. The writers’ agents sent denial after denial for interview requests and eventually stopped responding altogether. When I asked a mutual acquaintance to put in a query with Ari Emanuel, chief of the Endeavor agency (now WME Entertainment)—where many of the Simpsons writers were represented—Emanuel told my friend he couldn’t even begin to talk about it. James L. Brooks was on the warpath.

At one point in my research for the book, I was poring over court papers, trying to decipher what really happened when Tracey Ullman took Fox to court back in 1991. Ullman and the other executive producers of The Tracey Ullman Show were entitled to part of The Simpsons money, because it had been spun off from their show, and had felt like they were not being properly compensated. It was a complicated trial, and Ullman ultimately lost. I emailed Brooks’ representative on the case to see if he could explain some of the finer points—I was coming to Los Angeles later that month, and suggested that if he preferred to talk in person, we could meet over a coffee or lunch. I got back a very formal memorandum, telling me that under no uncertain terms would he discuss James Brooks (still a client) or anything to do with The Simpsons. Furthermore, they knew about the book and would be watching it closely, and so would the lawyers at Fox, copied on the memo. I wrote back, “Does this mean you don’t want to have lunch with me?” That was that.