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Jan Eliasberg: Breaking Barriers from Cagney & Lacey to Miami Vice | 80s TV Ladies Episode 4

Melissa Roth: Weirding Way Media.  

Jan Eliasberg: I was quite set on theater. I was going to go out to Los Angeles for one year and that was it. I was going to go back to New York and devote myself to the theater. Didn't work out that way.  

Amy Englehardt: 80s TV Ladies, so sexy and so pretty. 80s TV Ladies, steppin’ out into the city. 80s TV Ladies, often treated kind of sh#*ty. Working hard for the money in a man’s world. 80s TV Ladies!

Melissa Roth: Welcome to 80s TV Ladies, with your fabulous hosts Sharon Johnson and Susan Lambert Hatem.

Sharon Johnson: Hello, I'm Sharon.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And I'm Susan. I am always fascinated to learn about female directors, especially female directors who started in the 80s. So our next guest is part of our ongoing Director Ladies series.

Sharon Johnson: Today's guest not only started in 80s television, but her first directing job was on Cagney & Lacey, of all things.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I love it.

Sharon Johnson: Jan Eliasberg is an award winning and ceiling shattering director, writer and producer. She was the first female director on Miami Vice, Crime Story and 21 Jump Street.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And other 80s TV shows she directed include Dirty Dancing, LA Law, Dawson's Creek, Party of Five, Sisters, Parenthood, Nashville. Okay, those are more than 80s, I have to say. They just—But-- A lot of television!

Sharon Johnson: And the list continues. So I’ve got to throw out a few more: Bull and NCIS: Los Angeles and Supernatural. She is also a writer who has written television and has several projects in development for film and television.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And if that wasn't enough, Sharon, she recently made her debut as a novelist with Hannah's War.

Sharon Johnson: Please welcome to 80s TV Ladies, Ms. Jan Eliasberg. Thank you, Jan, so much for joining us today. We're very excited to talk with you.

Jan Eliasberg: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. and really eager to talk with you as well.

Susan Lambert Hatem: We are so grateful to have you come on our show. We look at 80s television, both from sort of a modern feminist perspective, and we also, kind of try to appreciate the stories of everybody who made them. So we are so grateful to hear about your journey to directing and writing. And, just to throw it back, you started off in theater?

Jan Eliasberg: I did. I trained at Yale School of Drama. I was in the class of 81. It's a three year program, three year directing program. I was the only woman, not in the entire time of the three years that I was there, but the only woman in my class and for several years, the only woman in the directing program. It was an extraordinary program for a director because there is no way to get that famous 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about as a director because you have to be doing it. And to do it, you need an awful lot of people doing it with you and that costs a lot of money. So you can't be in your garage like Bill Gates, you know, programming away for 10,000 hours. And I had known, that I wanted to direct, my mother would say, from the moment I was born, certainly the moment I started doing plays with my brother and sister and anybody else who would be part of them, and then creating stories and making them into plays and telling everyone where to be and what to do and being extremely sort of bossy or creative, depending on your point of view. And, I had gone to Wesley University. I had started a, theater there called the Second Stage, which was a student run theater where I began to direct. And I went to London and got a sort of amazing apprenticeship at the theater, and then had a dilemma, because I was actually offered a job in London as the associate director of the Royal Court, and I had to become an English citizen, because in England, all of the arts are supported by taxpayer money and the government, and they can't justify hiring an American over an English person. And so I debated and debated and realized that I was a little young and a little homesick. And then when I was accepted at Yale, I thought, okay, that's a good trade off. It was a high quality problem I was facing. and I ended up, at Yale for three years, and I think I directed about 60 plays between, you know, the summer cabaret, which I ran, and the, you know, just playwriting workshops and then actual big productions. And then I also started a summer theater, with Yale students in between. So by the time I came out of Yale, I think I probably had my-- Close to my 10,000 hours. Also, just when you're in a rehearsal room with actors like Frances McDormand and John Turturro and Angela Bassett and-- Let's see. Who else? Courtney Vance and Tony Shalhoub, you learn very quickly what actors need and how to speak with actors and how to break down material and how to find beats and character arcs and how to say, hopefully the right word at the right moment. And so having that much time directing before I went out professionally was really invaluable in the sense that I had a kind of confidence I would not have had without that depth, and breadth of experience, and also had a kind of, I wasn't going to be knocked off my feet as easily. I would say, just having had that background.

Sharon Johnson: For you, what would you say was the key, or is the key in working with actors, to figuring out or understanding the best way to approach them? Because everybody's different. Everybody has a different process. Everybody has a different way.

Jan Eliasberg: Well, that is the key. There is no one size fits all approach. And that array of actors I just talked to you about, they are all extremely different in what they need and what they want. Some actors want to really dive in and discuss things and talk about things. Some want to go away and do the work themselves. But then if they're stuck on, the set and they're not quite getting there, they need just the right moment or just the right word in their ear. Sometimes I've experienced it where someone is just very stressed out because they know they're hitting the edge and they're not quite getting where they want to go. And sometimes it's as simple-- I remember one day, actually, on the set, it was a night shoot, and there was a lot of pressure for time. You know, we've got to get it. We've got to get it. And, I just took the actress aside and I said, you know, let's go over. We were by the river. I said, let's just go over by the river. And we ended up sitting down and just doing, like, a little bit of yoga, believe it or not. But she just needed, like, somebody to sort of take her out of the stressful situation and then allow her to go back in. So I think working with all of those actors allowed me to very quickly size up what an actor needs also, I think. And, you know, this is going to sound a little silly in the context of 80s TV, but working on Shakespeare, directing Ibsen, directing the Greeks, and, Brecht and the classics, there is something that I learned about structure that is not even a, conscious learning. It's internalized. And so, you know, where the act breaks have to be, you know, where the climax has to be, you know, what the inciting incident is, because who knows better than Shakespeare, you know? And who knows about backstory better than Ibsen? So, you know, there's a lot to be said for learning from the masters.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And so how did you decide to go from theater into movies and TV?

Jan Eliasberg: Oh, that's a great question. Okay. So I was quite set on theatre, particularly, I think, because of my time in London. I have always been interested in the social and political context of work, of stories. And in Shakespeare, in the Greeks, in all of the people I just mentioned, that's very important. These are not kitchen sink plays about two people in a bar. They're about people in a very large world. So those were always the plays that really excited me. which is not to say that they weren't a new plays, because somebody like Tony Kushner, Angels in America, is certainly a play that has massive social and political context in it. And what ended up happening when I graduated Washington, there was a retrenchment because Reagan was the president, and his budget decided that chopping the arts completely was definitely the way to go. And so the National Endowment for the Arts, all of those government grants were about to be decimated. And I was very lucky to get the last grant, that the NEA gave to train what they said, train the next generation of artistic directors. And so I went out to St. Louis as the associate artistic director. And being from New York and having lived in London, I somewhat naively thought, oh, well, St. Louis will just be like Chicago, but a little smaller. And I discovered, in fact, that St. Louis was really quite a provincial town and quite a southern town and quite a segregated town. So I came in with all of my ideals, and I was running the experimental theater and directing on the main stage, and came in and programmed, Athol Fugard's Lesson from Aloes, which I thought, what better play to do in a segregated community than a play about apartheid? And I had Athol Fugard come out for workshops and Q and A's for the community. And I won't say it fell on deaf ears, but I was disappointed in how little the theater was interested in doing community outreach and developing an audience in the very large black community in St. Louis. I would love to do work like this. So I quickly felt like this road was going to end up if I continued on it. I would end up being a fundraiser, and I would be living in a community where I felt like I would have to do a lot of education in order to do the work I wanted to do. And I wasn't ready to do that. I'd just gotten out of graduate school. I wanted to fly. So when I was in St. Louis, I heard about a program at the American Film Institute called the AFI Directing Workshop for Women. It was a very early, new program, relatively new, and its specific intent was to develop a pipeline of women who could direct in television and film, because at that point, half of 1% of all television shows and films were directed by women. That's not 1%. The woman who ran AFI, a, wonderful woman named Jean Picker Furstenberg, had started this program because she knew at some point the industry was going to need to hire women, and she wanted to find women who essentially had the skills of directing, but didn't necessarily have the access or the training to work with film equipment. And so I applied, and when I got in, I thought, aha, let me see what this is all about. And I think I said to you before we started recording that being such a snob, as I was, from Yale School of Drama, I thought this would be a year long thing. And then I'd go back to New York and do like, independent films and, ah, plays. But in the end, I just got addicted to filmmaking because the toolbox is so extraordinary. You know, I've worked in the theater where you have, obviously, your work with the actors, you have design, you have blocking, but if you can imagine going from that to oh, my God, I can put the camera where I want the audience to be. I don't have to block the actors so the audience sees them. I could put the camera there, and I can put it even closer than the audience would ever get. And as a director, it was just like, I don't know, it was like being offered, you know, a Pandora's Box of fabulous and maybe some not so fabulous stuff too. But I was absolutely hooked. I made a short film, and I had a lovely young actor-- And when I say young, I mean six years old, Lucas Haas, who went on to some, you know, something. But as a six year old, he was astonishing. I had an actor named Richard Masur, who, he was in Transparent. He's quite a wonderful actor. And the film got some awards, including, the Los Angeles Film Festival Best Short Film, Best Short Fiction Film. And so I began to get a name and a reputation.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Now, it looks like your first directing job was on Cagney & Lacey.

Jan Eliasberg: That's correct. Actually, technically, that's not correct. My first directing job was a commercial. I did a series of, sort of business films for a local TV station, which got my feet wet. It was a kind of nice bridge. But my first real professional job was Cagney & Lacey..

Susan Lambert Hatem: Cagney & Lacey, because we've covered Cagney & Lacey on the show.

Jan Eliasberg: Yes, I heard your great interview with Karen Arthur, who is still one of my heroes. So how did that happen? It's a great story. I was not a, Hollywood kid, obviously. I came from New York, but my father had been the vice president of research at CBS. Now, research was statistics and ratings, so nothing to do with the creative side. In fact, the creative people basically hated my father because he was the one who was saying—

Susan Lambert Hatem: Nobody likes you.  

Jan Eliasberg: Yeah, I know you think your show is so great, but here's who's watching it, and here's when and here's when. And they stop watching it. And that's why it shouldn't be picked up. so, but that was my, you know, my dad was a mathematician, so, that was my big connection to anything Hollywood-ish. And so when I had my short film, just sending it at that point in the post office where I would drive around and drop it off for people that I didn't know. And I had a small connection to a guy named Harvey Shepherd who had just been made the president of programming for CBS. And the connection was that he had worked for my father. And when I was twelve or 13, running around my father's office, he was one of the sort of, you know, guys in the little cubicles running numbers. And I didn't know him, but I thought, well, at least there's some connection. He'll recognize the last name for sure because how many Eliasbergs are there? And so I sent him my film with a note asking him if he would watch it and consider meeting with me. And, most of these things that I sent out had no response. But a couple of weeks later, I got a phone call on the days of answering machines. And the message was Jan, this is Carla Singer. I work with Harvey at CBS. Harvey, put your film on my desk because you're a woman and I'm a woman. And he thought that we might understand each other or I might be able to help you. I'm sure that Harvey did not watch the film, but she said, but the thing is, I think your film is actually quite good. So I'd like you to come, if you're interested, and meet with me. It was pretty much the greatest thing that had ever happened. So I did my homework and I looked at the CBS schedule. And at that point, I don't know if you remember, but it was mostly the nighttime soap operas. It was mostly dynasty and Dallas. And the one show that really seemed up my alley was Cagney & Lacey. So when I met with Carla, she said, well, you know, the thing that I could do is I could probably call one of our executive producers and have you shadow. Which is now something that happens all the time. But then it was pretty infrequent, I think. But it was a way for her to introduce me to a show. And I said, well, I would love to shadow on Cagney & Lacey. So she made the call and I went down and I started shadowing. Ah, I did not shadow Karen Arthur. I shadowed an older director who was very good, but not exactly innovative, particularly. You know, he'd been directing for a very long time, but he was, you know, he knew his stuff backwards and forwards. And I also shadowed Sharon Miller. And, you know, Barney Rosenzweig had, a good reputation for hiring women. He was one of the few that did. Karen was there, and Sharon Miller was there. I'm not sure there were that many others, because there just weren't that many women directors. I mean, he was hiring the ones that were out there. So I shadowed. And this is where Yale was both a blessing and a curse. Part of me felt like, I'm already a director, what am I doing? Like, watching these people? I mean, they're good, but I'm good, too. And that was the kind of confidence, or maybe you could say arrogance or fearlessness, that it takes to go into a field that's predominantly male and actually make a dent, get a job. So I sort of felt like, okay, I'll do this, but I'm going to show that I'm a director, and I'm not going to sit, just watch somebody else direct for too long. And I was fortunate in that one of the writers, on the staff had seen my short film and had really liked it. And so he and I cooked up this scheme that I would go to Barney and I would tell him, and this is exactly what I did. If I take a script for next season, because they were breaking the next season, and I present you with all the directorial work, cast lists, locations. I will break down the script. I'll give script notes. I'll do blocking. I'll do shot lists with all my diagrams. You do not have to hire me, but will you hear me out? So I went and I made this proposal, and he sort of said, sure, why not? So I spent the next month, basically, while they were on hiatus, doing all my homework and breaking down the script and pages of notes. And then I called his secretary to set up an appointment, and she was very protective of Barney. So, she's a lovely woman, and she's actually a friend now, but I used to call her the Gorgon, because she was so protective that she would just say, he's not here, you know. So I called and I called and I called, and he was somehow never there and was getting very frustrated. And finally she said to me, look, dear, you got your foot in the door. And now Barney is. I think he's probably regretting it because he didn't think you were going to do all of this work. So, he may just not call you back, and maybe you just shouldn't call again. Now, I don't know if she was saying that on Barney's behalf or if she was just being very protective of her boss, which was her job, but I was furious. And so I called Carla Singer, remember at CBS, and I presented the situation and I said, what should I do? And she said, well, you have two options. I can't do anything except I could go to Harvey Shepherd, who is Barney's boss. And if I do that, you have to know that Barney will not like the fact that you've gone over his head and you could end up having somebody very resentful, or you could do nothing. And so I thought about it for maybe three minutes, and I thought, if I do nothing, I go nowhere. I have no job. I've done all this work for nothing. If I go over his head, he resents me, but I've got a shot. I said, call Harvey. And I've told this story on panels because it's really about that moment of. I don't know if it's confidence or leaping out of a plane without a parachute, but that moment of fear of, doing the thing that the amount of fear you feel, I think, is commensurate with the odds of something really good happening. So the next day, I got a call from Barney as if we were the best friends. Never mentioned Harvey. Never mentioned Carla. Like, I owe you a call. I'm just so sorry. Come on down to the studio. So I came down to the studio, and, he was in very good mood. I remember this so clearly because he went to the little refrigerator and he had a Creamsicle. He said, do you want a Creamsicle? I'm like, I don't think I'm okay. Then we went back to his office and he said, so, you know, I'm a very rich man. And I said, yeah. He said, but I could be even richer. Do you want to know how? I said, yeah, sure. He said, if Cagney & Lacey gets picked up for another season, it will go into syndication. And the only way it won't get picked up is if Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly aren't happy with the directors. He said, I happened to do a little homework. And Richard Masur, who was in your short film, has been on a couple of episodes, and I know him, and I like him very much. And he spoke very highly of you. He said, so I'm going to give you an episode in the next season.

Sharon Johnson: Wow.

Jan Eliasberg: And I was like, but don't you want to hear my work, my shot list? Nope. He says, absolutely not. I'm convinced. And that's how I got my first job.

Sharon Johnson: That is absolutely amazing on so many levels. Wow.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And it sounds just like Barney.

Jan Eliasberg: It was. So I got my first job because Barney wanted to be even richer than he already was.

Sharon Johnson: And he gave you an episode that I consider to be fairly, for lack of a better word, important. I mean, it wasn't, in a lot of ways, a regular episode of Cagney & Lacey.

Jan Eliasberg: Not at all. It was not the episode I broke down, by the way. As you know, Tyne went on pregnancy leave, and, so they pre wrote scenes so that she would be in every episode, but she wasn't the co-lead with Sharon. They were Sharon heavy episodes. And then in my episode, they brought in this new partner, temporary partner for Sharon, played by Michael Moriarty, who was spectacular.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Really good.

Sharon Johnson: Oh, yeah.

Susan Lambert Hatem: For our listeners, it's season five, episode 13, Act of Conscience.

Jan Eliasberg: It was a gift to me because he was such a wonderful actor, and the episode itself was really rich with a lot of undertones, and it was a very good episode for Sharon, too, who had been a little bit under Tyne's shadow. She'd won the Emmy, I think, which at that point, I'm not sure Sharon had. So it was a wonderful episode to do. I had a great time. I also remember, I mean, Carl Lumley, you know, was such a good actor. There were so many great actors on the show in general, but it was a very special episode, and Barney was really proud of it, and then went ahead and claimed credit for finding me, and I was happy to give it to him. So.

Sharon Johnson: So, looking back on it, were there things that. That you learned about directing network television that you took forward into other shows that you went on to direct?

Jan Eliasberg: Oh, my God, yes. First of all, you know, as much as you can say, directing is directing. There is no equivalent in theater to editing and a short film. I learned a lot in the editing room, but I certainly didn't learn to what I needed to know. So I was lucky. I prepared thoroughly. I mean, when I got the script, I did go to the editor of my short film, and I went to the editor that was going to be cutting my episode, and I talked about coverage, and I talked about things that were going to be important so that I made sure that I knew at least enough, to get the material that I needed to get. I knew what I could do with the performances, and I knew not so much what I could do with the camera in the large sense of all the shots, but I certainly knew how to cover a scene. That's not what I thought directing was. I thought directing was telling a whole story and having a point of view and all of those things fitting together in a much bigger scheme with themes and with the political and the social, going back to my love for Shakespeare and Ibsen and Brecht. And so it was a great episode for that. But I also remember I had a very good first AD who had been on the show. We had talked, and I said, it's my first big film, except for my little short. And, if you see that I'm missing something, please tell me. And he did. And so, in a funny way, I think what I learned was that although there were a couple of people on the crew who were testing, you know, there were certain men who'd, you know, been in the union for a really long time and just, you know. But there were also people, men, because they really were mostly men, who were really happy to share their own, knowledge and their own ideas, as long as I asked them. And that became an incredible revelation for me as I went on to do Miami Vice, for example, where I felt I was out of my league for sure. But I realized that everybody who does those jobs, a DP, a cameraman, they have creative ideas, they are invested. And so there were ways to engage people to get the best ideas and the best work. That's a gift. Then everybody gets excited and involved, and then everybody starts contributing. And as the director, of course, you get to say yes. You get to say no. But I will take a good idea that comes from anywhere because it makes the show better, and that's what counts. So there were so many things that I took away.

Sharon Johnson: What a great first experience for someone to go into directing. That's awesome. directing a network television show, that's awesome.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And so how did Miami Vice happen?

Jan Eliasberg: So the next thing that happened was, there was a show called LA Law. Nobody's heard of it, I’m sure.

Susan Lambert Hatem: One of those little old shows.

Jan Eliasberg: At the time, it had not aired. It was in prep. It was the first season, and I was offered the 7th episode, I believe, of the first season. It was, called, let's see. Was it Raiders of the Lost Bark?

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes, it was.

Jan Eliasberg: I think it was. Okay. So--  

Susan Lambert Hatem: That's very good. I had to look it up.

Jan Eliasberg: And it was a new show, and there was a lot of excitement about it, but nobody had any idea what it was going to turn out to be at that point. And again, I was very lucky. I got a script that was written by somebody named David Kelly. And it was his first script ever for television.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Was it really?

Jan Eliasberg: Yes.

Sharon Johnson: Oh, goodness. Wow.

Jan Eliasberg: Yeah, yeah, I have a lot of stories like that, and it was a very good story, but particularly the Raiders of the Lost Bark part, which was kind of the funny part of the script. It was a Jimmy Smits story, and I loved Jimmy. Just got along with him like a house on fire. And he hadn't had a lot to do yet because I think at that point, he was kind of the token. You know, there were a couple of token diversity characters, and he was one of them. He, got stuck with this case that Harry Hamlin kind of, like, knowingly just saddled him with. It was a continuance. He said, oh, go do the continuance with the judge, no problem. And Jimmy goes and does it, and the judge is furious because, in fact, Harry Hamlin has been continuing this case forever because he just doesn't want to deal with it. And so the judge says, we're going to try it and we're going to start now. And so Jimmy has to try it, and then he becomes determined to win it. And they make a bet because Harry says it's the complete loser of the case. And so Jimmy makes the bet, and you can imagine what happens, but hijinks ensue. and Jimmy was very funny, and no one really thought of him as a comedic actor, but he was great. it involved a dog. I've since learned. I learned about dogs, but no children.

Susan Lambert Hatem: No dogs.

Jan Eliasberg: No children, no dogs. and no horses, which I found out on another show that was a Dennis Weaver show. So that was LA Law. And there was now this buzz about women. We have to get women. We have to get women. I did not know it at the time, but the reason this buzz existed was because six women directors, we've called them now the Original Six. It was Lynn Littman, Victoria Hochberg, Susan Bay, Joelle Dobrow, Nell Cox, and one other. They had sued with the DGA, all the networks and all the studios because of the numbers. And it was a class action suit for discrimination against women directors. And there was a wonderful head of the DGA at the time named Michael Franklin, who took the suit, and they gathered all the statistics, and this suit was working its way through the courts. And so even though the suit had nothing settled, there was a fear striking the heart of the industry that if they didn't do something about hiring women directors, that something could come down like fines and penalties and big publicity. And so they were desperately looking for women. And as I said, I didn't know this, but there weren't a lot of us out there. So the ones who were out there got work and got a lot, you know, got a lot of work. So off of the buzz of the Cagney & Lacey and the LA Law, Michael Mann had been looking specifically for a woman to direct Miami Vice. Because there had not been a woman. It was considered testosterone blatant show, very male. Although it turned out, in my mind, that was not true at all, but that was the perception. so I got a call that, Michael wanted to meet with me.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Okay, this is probably a good time to take a break. We'll be back. And we're back and better than ever.

Jan Eliasberg: So I got a call that Michael wanted to meet with me, and I was over the moon. And I, to this day, don't know exactly what it was that he saw in me that made him decide that I was the one, but he did. And so, I mean, Michael actually went looking for a woman. And he said to me later, one of the reasons that I think he did hire me was that he felt I had a certain confidence that I wasn't going to get swamped by the atmosphere on the set, because he knew that whoever was the first in this particular show was going to be under a lot of scrutiny, and he wanted it to work because he didn't want to hire one woman and have that be the end of it. He wanted to hire women. So I felt a lot of pressure.

Sharon Johnson: But still, what a vote of confidence that, he chose you.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: So you ended up directing three. But the first one was season three, episode eleven. Forgive Us Our Debts.

Jan Eliasberg: Yes.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Big Don Johnson episode.

Jan Eliasberg: Big Don Johnson episode. And a wonderful criminal, a wonderful villain of that. To this day, people still on the fan sites and everything are still, like, up in arms about this guy. Okay. But, you know, there's a lot of luck. I mean, there is a lot of luck because as the director, you are as good as the script you get. And in the case of somebody like Michael, he was always very open to making the script better because he started as a writer. So I got this phenomenal script. And the setup is that, Don Johnson had a partner before he met Rico, who was killed in cold blood. And this guy has been in prison. He's on death row, and I won't tell the whole story, because it's like any Vice show. It's, like, very involved. And there are all these interesting characters, and some of them die. And at the end, Don has succeeded in getting this guy off of death row, and getting a governor's pardon. And so there's obviously no double jeopardy, once he's been pardoned for that. And Don and Rico go to the prison where he's going to be released, and Don realizes that he did the crime and that he got completely played. And the look on his face at the end and the performance of the guy that I cast to play Hackman, it just became one of those episodes that people couldn't believe that the good guy did not win. Not only did he not win, he released the guy who killed his partner.

Sharon Johnson: He was completely fooled. Completely.

Jan Eliasberg: Completely.

Sharon Johnson: Wow, yeah.

Susan Lambert Hatem: It’s an excellent twist.

Jan Eliasberg: As I think was the audience.

Sharon Johnson: I know I was.

Jan Eliasberg: We were all on the journey with Don, and, you know, great performance by Guy Boyd, who played Hackman. Other excellent performances. I had a guy named Bill Raymond. I had. I can't even tell you. I had the time of my life directing that episode. Every second was just amazing. I loved it. I loved it. I loved everything about it. So in that confessional scene, the way it was originally written, he didn't really talk about having done other murders. And it was Michael who called me and said, I think we need to do a reshoot on that scene. And this was when we were in editing, and he invited me to direct it, which he did not have to do. So that was another way in which I felt like I was really getting the Michael Mann Good Housekeeping seal of approval. But I saw the new pages, and what Michael had added was the confession that he had killed other people. And what it did to that scene was it really made you believe him, because he wasn’t saying, oh, I’m a good guy, and, I’m so innocent. He was saying, I’ve done terrible things, but I didn’t do this crime. And, I mean, that’s the way Michael would think. He would always, always keep asking the question and keep making it better.

Sharon Johnson: Such a great episode. I admit I was not, a viewer of Miami Vice when it originally aired. And I was totally floored when I watched it the other day because I didn't know the ending and I didn't see it coming. And I was just gobsmacked. It was awesome. It was absolutely awesome.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: Me too. Very, very impressive. I think Sharon's gonna start watching the whole thing. I was gonna just watch all 78 seasons of Miami Vice.

Jan Eliasberg: So I wanna say the thing about Miami Vice that people don't understand, and I hope this is what you probably got, is it wasn't just flash. It wasn't just the visuals. It wasn't just the MTV cops. It wasn't just the music and Miami and the pink and the green and all, and Don Johnson with no socks on and, you know, I mean, that was a large part of it. Those guys were gorgeous. They were really good to look at. The costumes were incredible. The, you know, we had-- We created Miami. I mean, Miami had these little bits of beautiful architecture. Like South Beach had three hotels. The rest of it was boarded up. It was a crime scene, basically. But by shooting those three hotels, people on TV saw them and thought, oh, my God, there's a whole neighborhood filled with hotels like this. And five years later, there was. So we were creating a world that didn't exist. It existed in pieces. It wasn't just that the stories were great. They weren't always great. No television stories are always great. It's hard to do a 22-episode season and have every story be good. But there were stories like that one that ran against what every other television show was doing, where the good guys always won. Right? The next one that I did was called God's Work, and it was about AIDS and the Catholic Church. Now, this was in 1986. Maybe AIDS was not being talked about, and certainly the Catholic Church was not talking about anything to do with homosexuality, with, you know, with AIDS. And, I mean, I remember NBC had to meet with the diocese many, many, many times, and the script kept getting rewritten because there were things that the diocese would refuse to let them say. But somehow we prevailed, and we made a show that discussed the Catholic Church's denial and Catholicism's denial of homosexuality and AIDS. And put it in this context where you have, like, Esai Morales playing a gay son of a Latin American crime boss. Esai Morales. I mean, that's pretty awesome. I think, anyway, yeah, absolutely.

Sharon Johnson: Absolutely.

Jan Eliasberg: No one was doing that stuff but Michael at that time. So when I, you know, I go back and I sort of say, well, my vision for theater, of doing all of these socially and politically interesting stories, was realized on Miami Vice.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That is not, a line I thought I would hear.

Jan Eliasberg: It's not a line I thought I would say. And, Crime Story, too, which is what Michael went on to do next, which I also went on and directed. So, you know, I give him an enormous amount of credit for groundbreaking television that was not just in the ways people think. The issues that were being investigated were really important.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And for not just giving lip service to putting women in the director's seat. It's a big deal to do one episode, and it's an even bigger deal to do three.

Jan Eliasberg: He gave me an open door to do as many episodes as I wanted.

Sharon Johnson: Wow.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Wow, that is fantastic. Which you didn't hear a lot about that. You still don't.

Jan Eliasberg: No. And I always try to say it because, you know, the typical idea about Michael is that he's this, like, difficult male-- You know, writes very male scripts and, you know, but he was the most supportive. He was my mentor. I mean, he has, and he has continued to be the most supportive person in the industry to me. And I was the first woman to do Crime Story, which was Dennis Farina. Don't get me started. The man is-- Just loved him so much. It was just an amazing period of time and a really great guy.

Susan Lambert Hatem: What other actors and actresses did you love working with?

Sharon Johnson: You mentioned Guy Boyd, who was the antagonist in the first episode of Miami Vice. You did. And he was also in Past Midnight, the feature that you directed as well.

Jan Eliasberg: Yeah, he was. He was indeed. And that's not an accident because once I, once I worked with him on Vice, I thought, oh, well, I'm not going to cast anybody else. I mean, I know that guy can do this other role, and he again, just hit it out of the park. Speaking of Past Midnight, I had an amazing time working with Rutger Hauer. I have a great story to tell you about him. I had a wonderful time working with Natasha Richardson, the late Natasha Richardson. She was just a doll. And so good. I loved working with Clancy Brown, and I loved working with Paul Giamatti, who I cast in his first ever film role. Yes.

Sharon Johnson: Oh, wow. Yeah.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I'm like, doing the math. I'm like, yeah.

Sharon Johnson: I didn't go look-- I saw him. It took me a couple minutes, and I went as I was watching, oh, that's Paul Giamatti. And I figured it had to be early, but, oh, my gosh.  

Jan Eliasberg: Here's what happened. So there was one thing that happened in my career that was, quite painful. And, there's a very good LA Times article, which I can refer you to, which tells the story off of the Miami Vice. I got my first feature, which is, of course, where I wanted to be. I considered myself, to be an auteur. I wanted to create the world. And the producer was Michael Shamberg. And I went in, the writer was a woman named Terrel Seltzer. And the movie was called How I Got into College. I really liked the story, and I pitched it as a bittersweet, character driven comedy along the lines of Say Anything or Stand By Me, along the lines of those kinds of films that were very successful at that time. So I had Robert Elswit, who went on to win the Academy Award for There Will Be Blood as cinematographer. I had Ida Random, who as the production designer. and I just found. I had Anthony Edwards was playing the college admissions officer long before ER, and we could not find the girl that he was in love with until we got a tape from Chicago of a woman named Lara Flynn Boyle, who was like it. So I had, you know, and I had done what I do all the time. You know, I had done all of these color palettes because it was set in this sort of romantic college venue. Well, I did not know this, but the studio didn't want a bittersweet comedy. They wanted Porky’s. And Michael Shamberg had actually hired me to deliver the bittersweet comedy. That's what he wanted. Anyway, long and the short of is I was fired on the second day of filming.

Sharon Johnson: On the second day of filming?

Jan Eliasberg: Second day of filming, there was a college fair sequence, which was sort of the, it wasn't the climax of the film, but it was like a big set piece. I had the producers on the set complimenting, like, this is amazing, you know, the way you did this. So fantastic is, you know, exactly why we hired you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then after two days, I was called in, and told that the studio had a few problems with dailies. And I was shocked because I had been told for two days running that the studio loved the dailies. So we were supposed to sit and screen the dailies and have a meeting so we could all get on the same page. And so I prepared for the meeting and I got to Fox for the screening of the dailies. And there was a sign on the door that said that the screening had been canceled. And I looked around and I found the producer's assistant and I said, so where is Michael? Where's the president of Fox? Where are all the people that we're supposed? And he said, oh, well, Michael is shooting with the new director.

Sharon Johnson: That's how you found out?

Jan Eliasberg: Mm.

Sharon Johnson: Oh my gosh.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Aren't there some DGA rules they just broke?

Jan Eliasberg: They had to pay me.

Sharon Johnson: Wow.

Jan Eliasberg: But, so the article was written by Michael Ciepley in the LA Times. And it talks about the fact that within about a three month period, five women directors had been fired off of studio films within prep or the first few days of shooting. It almost never happened. Generally, the studio always would try to make it work. So. And the story was tied to me because I was the last of the five. So it was Mary Lambert, Martha Coolidge, Joyce Chopra, Claudia Weill, and me.

Susan Lambert Hatem: You gotta send us that article.

Sharon Johnson: Wow.

Jan Eliasberg: I'll send you the article. So, that was a huge.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That's a huge blow.

Jan Eliasberg: It was a huge blow. Huge blow. And I was clearly not protected, by the producer. In fact, I was sandbagged by the producer. So I had to recover from that. I, of course, wanted to do features, but that put an enormous dent in my ability to do. So I went back to television. I went on and did a pilot, three pilots, actually. And I was trying to get back into features, but it was not easy when you got fired off your first feature, and it's pretty public, you know, it was devastating. And there was a wonderful guy named Larry Estes, who ran Columbia Tristar Home Video. And he loved my Miami Vices, and he wanted to get me a film. I mean, God bless these wonderful men who love women. That's all I can say. And Larry kept trying. And, he introduced me to CineTel films and a project called Past Midnight. I read the script and I thought, this is a B movie, but it's a good B movie. It's women in jeopardy. I wasn't being offered 10,000 films at that point, and I knew I had to do a film if I wanted to move out of television. And in the end, I thought, I think I can do this well enough that it will really have at least a good directorial stamp. I had two and a half million dollars to make the film. I had to convince Rutger Hauer that I would be the right director because he wanted to play the lead. So I went to wherever he was staying, and we just adored each other. He was so smart, he was so charismatic. He was not at his slimmest Blade Runner gorgeousity, but he was still gorgeous. And he approved me. And so we were looking for the girl, and an agent named Joan Heiler suggested Natasha Richardson. And I was like, would she do it? Can we get her? And we got her. So I thought, okay, I'm going to build this up. This is exactly what I was hoping. We shot it in Seattle. Between Rutger and Natasha, they took $2 million.

Susan Lambert Hatem: A blessing and a curse.

Jan Eliasberg:  Okay, so I cast Guy Boyd as, spoiler, the villain. And then there was the character of his brother. And the character was written as somebody on the spectrum. And I really wanted to hire somebody on the spectrum. And I had auditioned and auditioned and auditioned. So I began to see actors. Well, in walks this guy, Paul Giamatti, and I thought he was on the spectrum. I couldn't believe that he was just, you know. He blew me away, and he blows me away still. He has one scene, and he just. He just nailed it. So that's how Paul Giamatti got his first film role.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Wow. So you have an eye for talent.

Sharon Johnson: Indeed.

Susan Lambert Hatem: What do you think that is?

Jan Eliasberg: Yale.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, yeah. Okay.

Jan Eliasberg: Right? I mean-- I mean, nobody knew Fran McDormand was going to be Fran McDormand when she was at Yale. I just knew she was a good actress. I will see films. I will identify people that I think are going to go places or become big stars. Years before. I picked out Daniel Craig in the Road to Perdition.

Sharon Johnson: Oh, gosh, yeah. Great movie.

Jan Eliasberg: Where he plays Paul Newman's son, and he has, like, two scenes. I said, that guy is going to be huge. I just. I don't know what that is. I love casting directors. Casting directors have that, the really good ones. They have to. Here's another story. My third Miami Vice was called Contempt of Court, and it was based on John Gotti. The villain is this guy, Frank Mosca. Right from the beginning, you can see that he's going to try to control everything and driving Don crazy. He makes this circus out of the courtroom, which Gotti did. He's blackmailing witnesses. He's going. Sending his goons around or going around himself.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That sounds familiar to these days. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Jan Eliasberg: Yeah, exactly. Killing witnesses before they can testify. So Mosca obviously is a very important character. He's the key to the whole thing. And I think we wanted Danny Aiello because Moonstruck had just happened, but it was clear we were not getting him. So I, I talked to Bonnie Timmerman, who was like, you know, the casting director of all, and I said, you gotta have that ace up your sleeve, Bonnie. Right? And she said, yeah, I do. I said. She said, you know, there's this guy who I, Al Pacino, does these readings, and this guy was at a couple of readings, and I think he's really good. You know, I. She said, you're just gonna have to trust me on this. And I said, I do, I do. I trust you. Stanley Tucci, first film role.

Sharon Johnson: Oh, gosh, I did. Wow, wow, wow.

Jan Eliasberg: Yeah.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Well, in that episode, Hal, so has Philip Baker Hall in it.

Sharon Johnson: Yep.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yes. Meg Foster.

Jan Eliasberg: And Meg Foster, the original Sharon Gless.

Sharon Johnson: One of the former Cagneys. Yes.

Jan Eliasberg: And Mark Blum.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, okay.

Jan Eliasberg: Ah. From Desperately Seeking Susan and then on Succession, and he died during the COVID. He was one of the first people to die. He had asthma and he got COVID. Lovely guy, but yeah, great cast.

Sharon Johnson: Wow.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, my gosh. Well, you've just worked with everybody and.

Sharon Johnson: Given first film roles to just incredible actors. That's amazing.

Jan Eliasberg: I thought, if I'm going to get to tell the stories I want to tell, I'm going to have to write them. And, so I was doing a show called Sisters on NBC with Sela Ward and George Clooney and Ashley Judd and Paul Rudd and Swoosie Kurtz and Kirsten Dunst and, ah, on and on and on.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Just a little old show like that that ran for six, seven seasons.

Jan Eliasberg: Yep, yep, yep, yep. And so I was directing that because they loved me, and it was more like being a theater director. It was easy for me to do and, go back to and not have to sort of prove myself. When you go to a new show, there's always a moment of, like, proving yourself, and it takes a lot of energy. I also had a child at that time, so I was getting my MFA, Iwas directing Sisters, and I had a daughter, and--

Susan Lambert Hatem: So you weren't very busy.

Jan Eliasberg: Not busy at all. And I thought, well, let me try to come up with an idea for Sisters, because I already know the show. They like me. I think they thought, she's a good person. We know her. How bad can it be? So they gave me, you know, when they did my directing thing, they gave me one writing freelance assignment. So that was my little bridge to writing. So I wrote the script, and then I got on staff.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And did you direct any of the scripts you wrote?

Jan Eliasberg: I never directed my own. To this day, I've only directed one thing that I wrote, and it's a show called Booker. Oh, do you remember Booker?

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yeah, yeah.

Jan Eliasberg: So I directed 21 Jump Street. First woman. Yep. Great guy named Patrick Hasburgh. And they were doing a spinoff, which was Booker with Richard Grieco. Everybody thought that was going to be the big show. They were talking about some kind of episode that they wanted to do about Booker's father. And, so I came up with an idea and I pitched it, and they said, it's a pretty good idea. And they let me write it. I was rewritten, but I got the credit and I directed it. And that was like. I mean, I've practically forgotten, but that was 100 years ago. But to this day, that is the only thing I have written and directed myself. I've written tons and I've directed tons, but never at, the same time. That is still the holy grail for me.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And so I want to just hit a couple of things. One was about your novel, Hannah's War.

Jan Eliasberg: I thought, you know, this thing about women who've been erased from history, this is really important to me. And I see this paragraph says, the key component that allowed the allies to develop the bomb was brought to the Allies by a female, non-Aryan physicist. Her name was Lisa Meitner. She was Austrian Jewish. She was a genius. She was working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Considered herself not even Jewish. Considered herself an intellectual physicist. She was working with Otto Hahn. So I thought, I want to write the story of this woman. And I wrote, ah, a book called Hannah's War, which is set at Los Alamos. And it is about a woman, Hannah Weiss, who is suspected of being a spy because somebody is leaking secrets back to Germany. Anyway, Hannah's War is well worth a read. I know there are things we have-- We haven't even covered Dirty Dancing.

Susan Lambert Hatem: We haven't discussed Dirty Dancing. Was it fun?

Jan Eliasberg: No. Okay. Yeah, it was a show. It was a show that was grudgingly supported. I think, I think it only aired maybe seven—II don't think it aired all of the 13 episodes that were made. They had no money to do the dance stuff properly. I directed the Outsiders, which was Francis Ford Coppola's TV version of the film. And I remember every actor because Fred Roos did the casting, and they were all spectacular. You know, they were young people. I mean, Patricia Arquette was in my-- Patricia Arquette, yes.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Everybody in the 80s and 90s wanted to be in your thing, because then they were going to go on.

Jan Eliasberg: Just look for my name.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I had one more question, a quick one.

Jan Eliasberg: Okay.

Susan Lambert Hatem: A conversation you had with Tony Shaloub, and, you talked about there being short windows of opportunity for women, like where a window opens and then it closes. Do you think we're in an open or a closed time for women?

Jan Eliasberg: The window is closing.

Sharon Johnson: I couldn't agree more.

Jan Eliasberg: There are three films this year directed by women up for best picture. I do not think we will see something like that again for a long time. I watched the DGA awards. Of course, I voted for them this year. Lessons in Chemistry, which was almost directed exclusively by women, you know, walked away with a lot of the awards. There's an article out from Gina Davis Institute saying that, in fact, women directors in film is at an all-time low. Money is getting tight. The strikes and streaming change the industry as we know it. And unless something happens where the independent world kind of takes over, which I don't see happening right now, generally, it's women and people of color who get taken out of the game first. I've seen cycles of advancement and retrenchment. the cycle I told you about, that I rode the wave of was after that lawsuit of the Original Six. I was involved myself with an incredible woman named Maria Geiss in another lawsuit in 2012. We went to the ACLU. They published an open letter. They sent their statistics, which we had compiled, and given to them, to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But after that happened, there was this huge wave of women. That is this wave that we're seeing now at its crest. I think it was a result of the ACLU and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission action, and I think it will take something else like that to really-- I mean, I think these things need to continue until we are at 50/50. Nothing less will do. It just won't. The stories that are told shape the culture, shape the global culture, not just America, all over the world. Because American television and film is the voice of storytelling around the world. And if women are not telling those stories, are not carrying those stories, are not the lead in those stories in 50% of them, the stories will not really reflect the reality of women's importance and women's voices. And I believe that.

Sharon Johnson: Yep. I agree. Sadly, I'm not surprised, but it doesn't make it any easier to watch happening.

Jan Eliasberg: Yeah, I hope I'm wrong.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I hope we're all wrong in what we're thinking, but I'm glad that we're talking. I think talking about it is important. I think taking action whenever you can is important, and I really appreciate your voice out there in the wilderness, so.

Jan Eliasberg: Well, I also think, honestly, that knowing our history is a prerequisite to changing it. So the fact that you're doing what you're doing and highlighting things that people maybe don't know about the women who were working in the 80s and making these strides that allowed all of these other things to become possible, I think it's really-- It's important work. As I say, many many times about Lisa Meitner, she was erased from history. She was there. She did what she did. Nobody is saying that didn't happen, but nobody knows about it. So the excavation and the replacing of women in history where they belong is hugely important work. So thank you for doing some of that.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Awesome. Thank you for joining us in that.

Jan Eliasberg: This was just a blast.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, God, I'm so glad, I'm so.

Sharon Johnson: Glad you enjoyed our time. We, this is, this is awesome. Can’t thank you enough.

Jan Eliasberg: Thank you.

Susan Lambert Hatem: In today's audiography, you can find out more about Jan at janeliasburg.com.

Sharon Johnson: You can find her book online through her website or we'll have links in our description to Hannah's War. We'll get a link to the LA Times article that she mentioned, and we can include that as well.

Susan Lambert Hatem: All right. Let's do it. Take us out.

Sharon Johnson: We hope 80s TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows to watch, all of which will lead us forward toward being amazing ladies of the 21st century.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Open the windows.

Sharon Johnson: Keep them open.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And doors and keep them open. Let's go.

Amy Englehardt: 80s TV Ladies, so sexy and so pretty. 80s TV Ladies, steppin’ out into the city. 80s TV Ladies, often treated kind of sh#*ty. Working hard for the money in a man’s world. 80s TV Ladies!

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