Imperfect past comes back to bite Ben Affleck

Not long ago, when I was producing a television sitcom, one of the lead actresses asked me for a meeting. She had, she told me, some thoughts on that week’s script.

That’s always a terrifying announcement. Actors can talk endlessly about a script. I’ve had script conferences with actors that began before lunch and ended as the sun was going down. Actors – especially, infuriatingly, really gifted ones – love to talk.

What this actress wanted to talk about was aspirin. Her character in that week’s script was suffering from a headache, and in one scene we had written a short moment where she takes two aspirins.

“I’m just really uncomfortable,” she told me, “taking aspirin. My personal philosophy is very anti-that.”

Apparently, this actress had a personal philosophy, and that philosophy was hostile to the generally accepted practice of taking pain-relieving pills. And before she sat me down to explain in excruciating detail why that was so, I held up my hand.

“Totally get it,” I said. “No explanation necessary. We’ll cut that moment out of the script.”

It was an easy compromise to make. The aspirin-taking wasn’t a central or even terribly interesting moment – the line we had written for her wasn’t really getting the laugh we wanted – and if it made her a fraction happier and more upbeat about the show, well, why not let her have a small victory? She was nutty, obviously, but also extremely talented, and a big part of being a successful executive producer of a television show is recognising that great comic talent and irrational beliefs about ordinary things often go hand in hand.

But as willing as I was to indulge her about the aspirin, I wasn’t about to sit through what I knew would be a tortuous explanation, the only outcome of which would be me getting a splitting headache, for which I’d need to take some aspirin – probably in front of her – and that would just make things awkward.

So, as I said, it was an easy decision to make. But television producers aren’t always so lucky.

Henry Louis Gates is a professor at Harvard University who is also the executive producer of a show called Finding Your Roots. It's a documentary-style series produced for American public television that celebrates the diverse cultural make-up of the United States.

Finding Your Roots investigates the ancestry of celebrity guests, taking them on journeys around the world to discover their heritage. In a country like the US, where everyone comes from somewhere else, the show asks a question that a lot of Americans ask themselves: who am I? Who were my forebears? Where did they come from?

One of its most famous celebrity guests, the actor Ben Affleck, got an answer to those questions that he didn’t like so much. Affleck discovered while shooting his episode that one of his forebears was a slave-owner in the days before the American Civil War. He didn’t like discovering that, of course – who would? – but he also didn’t want anyone else discovering it, so he asked Gates to snip that segment out of his episode. In other words, he told the executive producer that he had some thoughts on that week’s script, but instead of aspirin, his problem was slavery.

Ordinarily, this kind of thing is handled discreetly. But because Henry Louis Gates is a professor at Harvard and not a seasoned television producer, he wasn’t sure what to do. So he emailed a friend of his – the CEO of a large movie studio – and asked him for advice.

That friend was Michael Lynton and the studio he runs is Sony Pictures Entertainment, and the emails they exchanged were part of the enormous pile of electronic data that was hacked and released to the public, which means that everything that Ben Affleck didn't want out there – that his ancestry includes at least one slaveholder – is now out there, along with the slightly unsavory depiction of a big star throwing his weight around, demanding that a show called Finding Your Roots become, essentially, a show called Finding Your Roots, Subject to the Approval of the Star.

What the Sony CEO told the Harvard professor to do – and I hope this won’t shock you – was give the star what he wants. That’s pretty much the standard operating procedure for a Hollywood executive – whatever the star wants, the star gets, as long as it doesn’t cost too much.

The part about Affleck’s slave-owning ancestor was cut and replaced with something about another ancestor who dabbled in weird occult practices, and no one was the wiser. Until this week, that is, when the associated emails were made public by the WikiLeaks website. The result is that the integrity of the series – as well as the honesty of its executive producer – have been seriously called into question. Henry Louis Gates may end up being a full-time Harvard professor.

Sometimes when the star makes a demand you give in. Sometimes you don’t. Knowing which to do and when is headache-inducing work, for which aspirin is needed. Unless you’ve got a problem with aspirin.

Rob Long is a Hollywood writer and producer

On Twitter: @rcbl