Jason Ensler goes behind the camera

The making of the unofficial story of Three’s Company, a TV movie

First published in the Times Beacon Record Newspapers.

Sitting on the sofa in his parent’s new home in Hauppauge, Jason Ensler, who grew up in Setauket but now lives in Los Angeles, screens his director’s roll for the critic. His hands constantly seeking each other out for company, his fingers never still, he alternately watches the screen, which is familiar, and the viewer, who is not. On the screen are bits and pieces of things the 32 year-old has directed in his short but impressive career.

We’re here to talk about his first full-length made-for-TV movie, Behind the Camera: The Unofficial Story of Three’s Company. He is working for NBC, which is not the company that created the popular series back in the seventies. That was ABC. According to Ensler, “they passed on the opportunity. They thought it was too controversial.”

The original series was based on a British TV show called Man About The House and featured John Ritter as Jack Tripper, a man living with two women and pretending to their landlord that he’s gay, and his two roommates Joyce DeWitt as Janet Wood, Suzanne Somers as Chrissy Snow, their landlord, Mr. Roper (Norman Fell) and his wife (Audra Lindley). The plot usually revolved around the threesome keeping their secret from the landlord – who wanted to be jealous of Jack’s living arrangement, if only he could prove that Jack was straight.

“Everything was going smoothly,” said Ensler, “until the show became a huge hit. Basically the way the story goes is Suzanne wanted to be an icon. She wanted to be Farrah Fawcet. She wanted to be Lynda Carter at the time. So she contracted with Farrah Fawcet’s manager, who then proceeded to get her deals at CBS and do things that would piss off the producers of Three’s Company. It’s a whole longer story, but you’ll watch the movie. Eventually, [Somers] ended up firing her manager and hiring her husband, who was a supermarket spokesperson and game show host in Canada. Long story short, he was completely ill equipped to do the job as manager. But she trusted him because they were madly in love and he was only looking out to make her a superstar.” The journey she took, and the toll it took on her cast mates in what had been a true ensemble, is the plot of the movie. And it’s not pretty. But it is funny. And well directed.

A director’s roll consists of snippets of things the director has directed. Ensler’s begins with what he called “a musical mocumentary.” Springtime for Zucker was made to celebrate the network’s 75^th anniversary. It’s premised on the idea that Jeffrey Zucker, president of NBC, wanted Megan Mullally, channeling her wonderfully bitchy Will & Grace character Karen Walker, to make a musical using the NBC staff. We see actors from West Wing, Just Shoot Me, Frasier, Crossing Jordan, Ed, Law and Order and more being dismissed out of hand – at least out of the hand that’s not holding the drink. It’s adorable, and lots of fun, with Zucker and all the actors playing themselves.

Didn’t you love the original launch commercials for Scrubs? Well, Ensler directed those, as well as the trailer for the NBC fall season that year. That was done in black and white with no dialogue, just moody music and shots of the actors preparing to go on, cracking each other up back stage and mugging for the camera interspersed with black and white footage from the actual shows. Very dramatic.

Another fun part of Ensler’s director’s roll is a coup he scored early in his career making a short film for Brandeis University, his alma mater. The audience goes with him (Ensler is in this one on both sides of the camera) as he wanders around Hollywood looking for Brandies graduates, and then, searching for Allison Porchnik, who, it turns out, is not a real person at all, but a character from a Woody Allen movie played by Carol Kane. Here’s where Ensler gets really lucky, Woody Allen himself agrees to be in his movie! He couldn’t believe it either. But there he is, being interviewed about Allison Porchnik and asking Ensler who told him that she went to Brandeis. “Does nobody understand my films?” the famous director cries. “I said she was a Brandeis type, I never said she went to Brandeis.” And he’s gone, it’s about 40 seconds of film, but it’s really Woody Allen, playing Woody Allen, and it’s one of the highlights of Ensler’s career to date.

Back to Three’s Company. While in reality the whole thing had degenerated into “a huge scandal for the tabloids.” Ensler decided to take a different approach. “I tried, instead of being a sensationalist exposé of the tabloid culture, to really get inside the inner workings of these characters and their reasoning for doing what they did and not paint anybody as the bad guy, but let the audience decide who’s right and who’s wrong.”

Ensler sees this, his longest and largest project to date, as “a continuation of what I have been doing, just bigger,” and looks forward to doing more. His favorite part of being a director is “working with actors, and I love shooting. My hobby is still photography. That facilitates [and] develops my craft as a director to be shooting all the time. I’m really into color and composition, light and how one picture can tell a story. And you add that to the performance. And you add that to the nuances of the script. And it all sort of comes together.”

His acting career seems to have lasted only as long as that brief early film for Brandeis. Apparently someone told him that he was a far better director than he was an actor, “and I don’t think I’m a bad actor,” he said with a grin. “But I had to give it up, because I saw what people can do. I saw how talented actors can be and it just amazes me.”

His favorite scene in this movie? “The Newsweek shoot.” This is where Somers’ manager has arranged for the cast to be on the cover of Newsweek and they’re all excited, until they realize that the photo will feature her as the star and the DeWitt and Ritter and the rest as window dressing. This is a pivotal moment in the story and Ensler describes it as “a lot of conflict, combined with the subtle nuances of everybody’s performance. I covered it from so many angles. The camera movement is very organic. It feels like we’re in the shot.”

He also loves the ending, which will not be described here. “I like the whole thing,” he said. “It flows great, Brian Denehey [as Fred Silverman, then president of ABC] is hilarious. We had a good time doing it.”

And you’ll have a good time watching it. Even if you don’t usually watch “that sort of thing,” this show, which Ensler calls “a compelling human drama” and likens to “watching a traffic accident,” is worth seeing. Three’s Company airs, on NBC of course, during sweeps week on Monday, May 12 at 9:00 pm, the Martha Stewart story is scheduled to air the following week, May 19 at 9:00 pm.