Like Brett Butler Before Him, Charlie Sheen Is Committing Professional Homicide

It is remarkable how certain individuals, handed the Golden Ticket of success, proceed to bludgeon everyone with their new-found power

I had been overseas for the last few months and arrived home to Los Angeles to the media fusillade regarding Charlie Sheen. While I was away, my morning regimen consists of a stiff cup of coffee and the International Herald Tribune. The Tribune gave scant lineage to l’affaire Sheen and was much more intent on reporting the fall of fashions bad boy, John Galliano.

Galliano’s racist fulminations were in the paper ever day after the initial report and video evidence, then his suspension by Dior then swiftly his dismissal from his lofty position as their Head of Design. Dior’s decision to remove him from view (”I love Hitler!”) went faster then CBS’ endgame.

Now both individuals are without those six-figure paychecks, and who’s to say if we will ever see them return to their star status. To me this was more then professional suicide, more then wanton self-destruction, it was professional homicide, perpetuated on themselves. They both willfully committed grievous hair-raising acts with little thought of repercussions, feeling safe in their personal orbit, free from reproach. The “winning” has now moved into the loss column.

Listening to one of Sheens screwball rants, I grew anxious and quickly flipped off the program. I realized that what made me so uncomfortable, beside the obvious reasons; exposure to madness, what prompted my willies, was it cast me back to My Season In Hell, when I ran an earlier Chuck Lorre creation, “Grace Under Fire.” Grace was portrayed by a stand-up converted to an actress by the name of Brett Butler. Brett was plucked from relative obscurity to be the namesake of a new ABC comedy hammocked between juggernaut programs, “Home Improvement” and "NYPD Blue."

Initially grateful for this once in a lifetime opportunity, Brett rapidly took on the less than grateful diva characteristics. I came on the show in the second season, after Chuck had had his fill of Brett’s unflagging bad behavior and he moved on to work with Cybill Shepherd, which by most accounts, turned out to be a further warm up to working with Mr. Sheen. It was my first experience running a show, and it was like learning to shoot a gun by firing it into your own thigh.

It is remarkable how certain individuals, handed the Golden Ticket of success, proceed to bludgeon everyone with their new-found power. In Brett’s case, the more successful the show became, the more difficult she became. Brett never personally attacked me, and I don’t know why I enjoyed this immunity, but I was the exception. When we would assemble on the stage for our run-through, there was always a fun atmosphere, actors and crew looking forward to showing off the work in progress.

Then Brett would walk on to the set and the tone would alter, she could chill a room down in a matter of seconds. Often braying at the writers or her fellow actors, unchecked by anyone, we were on an emerging hit show and no one who could control her was anxious to kill the star goose. 

After a few months of this debilitating environment, I went to see Brett in her trailer. In my hand was the Nielsen confirmation that the show had reached a zenith, “Grace Under Fire” was the number one show on television that week. I closed the door behind me, she made some crack about how I had come down to strangle her ( and no jury in the land would have found me guilty). I showed her the Nielsen numbers and she was genuinely excited.

I spoke in paternal tones, tried to reason with her, pointing out that appearing as the lead on the most popular show on television doesn’t happen all that frequently and perhaps she could relax and stop carping about the scripts, the other actors, the crew, the sets, the costumes and even the selection of snacks at the craft service table. In short, be happy with what we all have worked so hard to accomplish.

No dice. Her behavior didn’t change a whit, no, that’s not true, it got worse. The network was so thrilled with their sophomore hit, they kept ordering more episodes, instead of 22 we were now told to produce 26 (yikes) mercilessly prolonging Our Season in Hell. I had signed on for a two-year run and by January, looking ahead to a seemingly endless production year, I went to the folks at Carsey Werner, who owned the show and handed in my resignation, six months in advance.

I would not be rejoining them for Season 3, in spite of the very generous fee I would be making if I returned and the whopping sum if I stayed on until the end of the run, but I had already arrived at the end. 

“Grace” continued in production for a few more years, dipping down from its Top 10 status, partly because Brett decided to make some substantive changes to her character which pleased her more then the home audiences and marbled into the mix was her growing dependency on pain killers. Year after year a new Executive Producer was brought in to corral Brett — and just as quickly their resignations followed.

The last year of the show, on one Friday evening's taping, with an audience in attendance, annoyed by something said or unsaid by the current Executive Producer (number 5 or 6), Brett hurled a soda can at his head and it found its target. They got through the taping that fateful night, but the plug was finally pulled, not quite finishing the fifth season where it was now languishing in the lower depths of the ratings (another reason to delete it from the schedule).  

The title of the show, now so laden with irony, for everyone but Grace had been under fire for four and half years, and now the fire was out. 

The shared trait of these three knuckleheads most certainly would be their marathon drug and alcohol pursuits which hastened their professional demise but that was just a contributing factor perhaps they thought they were invincible. The can of soda that was flung actually and metaphorically ended up ricocheting right back at them.

Another set of hard-earned careers D.O.A. Pity.

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