Scott Council
Scott Council
Scott Council

Star

Fox
Fill 1
Fill 1
December 09, 2016
Features

This Much Is True

Telling truths in television — personal or universal — comes at a cost. But that doesn't keep the candid co-creator of Fox's Empire — and the upcoming Star — from keeping it real... at least, as he sees it.

Jenny Hontz

For Lee Daniels, every day starts with prayer.

"I'm so blessed," he says, sipping Kombucha fermented tea in the office of his new drama, Star, on the Fox lot in west Los Angeles. "It sounds so queer, but I pray every morning for an hour with gratitude that I'm here. It's like quasi-meditating, a little bit of Bible reading, and it gets me centered."

His assistant enters the room with an egg sandwich. "You're gonna kill me," she says, starting to explain. "I totally got you the wrong thing."

"F—k it!" Daniels snaps, playfully swatting the sandwich from her hand. "It's the same ingredients, just different forms," she pleads.

"Except starch, sweetie, starch. Look at the starch," he says. "Of all things, you embarrass me now, in front of the white lady."

The scene unfolds with perfect comedic timing — an exclamation point on the complexity and contradiction that is Daniels.

Brash, blunt and wickedly funny, he simultaneously exhibits a degree of vulnerability and insecurity that's surprising for the co-creator of Fox's hip-hop melodrama Empire, the top-rated broadcast TV series among adults 18 to 49 for two straight seasons.

He's also the first black director to have a film (Precious) Oscar-nominated for best picture — and the director who subsequently splashed his name across the title of his feature Lee Daniels' The Butler.

"My dad told me that I was going to be nothing," he says. "So in the back of my head, I'm still fighting with that. I'm always trying to prove something to someone that is no longer on this earth."

Black and gay and born in West Philly, Daniels is the son of a cop who beat him up and  threw him in a trashcan as a boy for wearing his mother’s high heels. The incident inspired a key scene in the Empire pilot between Lucious Lyon and (Terrence Howard) and his gay son Jamal.

His grandmother — the model for Empire matriarch Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) — was the first to tell him as a kid that he was gay. She did not mince words,

“‘You're a faggot,'" he remembers her saying. “‘You don't know it yet, but life's gonna be rough on you. But you have to learn under all circumstances to be honest. You will be criticized, even by your own people. But you're gonna be special.'"

Indeed he is. And Daniels is every bit as colorful as the characters he has created on screen, many of which are based on him and his life. Empire, which launched its third season in September, features a family that has risen from dealing drugs to running a musical empire, much like Daniels rose from a life of violence, drugs and abuse to become a successful film and TV producer, director and writer,

And just like that of the characters in his new Fox drama Star (previewing December 14, with a January 4 premiere) and the comedy he's developing for comedian Ms. Pat, Daniels's childhood was marked by chaos and loss. His father was shot and killed in the line of duty when Daniels was 13, after which much of his family turned to crime.

Several family members are now incarcerated, including his brother, whose twins, now 21, Daniels adopted and raised.

"Once my father was killed, my entire family went into a direction of hell, and they all went to jail, and me too," he says. "I grew up with drug dealers, That's what they did once my dad died. That's real, and it's painful. And that is the America that I know and that people don't want to talk about. Because there's millions of people that are in the exact same shoes that I'm in."

Surrounded by gang violence, "I should've been killed," Daniels says. "I've dodged physical bullets. As a kid, I witnessed people die in my hands. Two of my best friends have been shot. One died in my hands, the other one died in the hospital."

Being gay actually saved Daniels's life. His mom didn't think he could survive on the streets, so she asked a neighbor to convince his boss to let her use his address in school records. As a result, Daniels, then an eighth-grader, switched to an all-white public school in an affluent area,

"My mom knew that if I stayed in the neighborhood — in that school and that environment — I would end up dead," he says. "She said, 'You can't be here.' That's why I cherish her."

Still, it wasn't easy escaping his past. Daniels dropped out of college at 19 and wound up back on the streets. "I came to Los Angeles with seven dollars in my pocket," he says. "I borrowed it from one of the few girls I slept with. She gave me a bus ticket and seven dollars, and I came out to Los Angeles with dreams."

Homeless and broke, Daniels made his way to a church that he knew would take him in. There he began producing plays. His new drama, Star, about a striving girl group (newcomers Jude Demorest, Ryan Destiny and Brittany O'Grady portray the trio), was inspired by that period in his life.

"What would you do to get to the top? What would you do to eat? I've done some unspeakable things, which got me in jail. I got in trouble. You name it, I did it." As much as Empire is aspirational and frothy, Star — co-created with Tom Donaghy — is a musical with a bit more grit.

With echoes of Dreamgirls, Good Times and the transgender documentary Paris Is Burning, Star is about the climb to the top. Two members of the nascent girl group are sisters who grew up in foster homes, and one struggles with both sexual and substance abuse.

Daniels understands that struggle, having used drugs himself for years. It started in his 20s, after he'd found work as a receptionist at a nursing agency, then decided he'd be better off running his own business.

"I knew how to hustle, knew how to get by, because I'd gotten by in the streets, panhandled," he says. "I stole five of the nurses, and at the end of a year, I had 100 nurses working for me." Daniels found a niche — working with AIDS patients — that no one else wanted to touch, not even hospitals.

He landed a contract with AIDS Project Los Angeles but wound up watching his friends die. "I buried all of my friends — all of them," he says. "I don't mean 10, I don't mean 15. I mean 30, at least. At least seven of them were in my arms dying, at a time when the parents wouldn't take them in."

Remarkably, he didn't contract the disease. "I was in the streets sleeping with anything that had a heartbeat, and that I don't have HIV is a miracle," he says. "I survived."

Drugs helped numb "the pain of watching my friends, lovers die," he says.

"I didn't understand why I was alive. I was on a death mission."

Daniels sold his nursing agency — at a substantial profit — after meeting a producer and deciding to break into entertainment. Starting as a production assistant, he later moved to casting but kept getting fired.

"I was delusional," he says. "I was a wreck. I was a drug-riddled, pained soul trying to find himself."

Lee eventually began managing actors such as Loretta Devine and Nastassja Kinski, and while visiting his clients on set, he studied the directors and taught himself the craft. "I learned, I watched," he says. "I'm clocking everything, what everybody does, and I'm keeping the actors happy."

Soon Daniels plunged into producing with the film Monster's Ball, for which Halle Berry became the first African American to win the lead-actress Oscar. Nevertheless, Daniels missed the Vanity Fair after-party because he was "high out of my mind with a couple of men in the room" at the Chateau Marmont, and "I didn't think I deserved to be there."

Daniels had enough confidence, however, to reject studio offers that soon came his way — staying independent, trying his hand at directing and keeping at it even after his first film, Shadowboxer, flopped. His second movie, Precious — about an obese, abused inner-city teen (Gabourey Sidibe) impregnated by her father — earned him an Oscar nomination as best director.

The lure of a payday ultimately convinced Daniels to try TV. '"All these Oscar nominations and wins that you've been getting, what does it matter?'" he recalls actress Whitney Cummings telling him. '"You're still looking for that next check.'

"I said, 'Right. God, you're right. Okay.'"

Daniels co-created Empire with Danny Strong, serving as executive producer, writer and director. Premiering in January 2015 with 9.9 million viewers, Empire increased its audience in its next 11 consecutive airings, a rare feat. While the show stumbled creatively at the start of season two, and (as of press time) its ratings haven't rebounded to freshman-year levels, it remains a huge hit for Fox.

"I can't possibly underestimate the importance of that show to the network," says Fox Television Group chairman and CEO Gary Newman. In an era of fragmentation, Empire manages broad appeal, while tackling hot-button issues such as police shootings of unarmed black men and the Black Lives Matter movement.

"We do it with tongue in cheek, so that it's palatable and makes people think," Daniels says. "We don't want to turn people off, and we're not here to scare white people away. It's a universal show with universal themes about parenting and what's happening right now in America."

Still, Daniels likes to push boundaries. In the season-two opener, he put Cookie in a gorilla suit inside a cage.

"That was not in the script," says executive producer-director Sanaa Hamri. "That was something he came up with. It's a very strong image of the caged African American. It has a Fellini-esque quality. He said, 'No one wants to do it, but we have to be fearless and speak the truth, Sanaa.' That resonated with me. That is who he is. There are no rules with Lee."

Empire works because "we're not afraid to be politically incorrect," Daniels says. "People know the truth. They don't shy away from the truth. And I'm always looking in that camera, and we're winking at you. The joke's on all of us, guys, because I know what I'm doing."

Daniels has consistently embraced taboo topics: incest in Precious, pedophilia in the 2004 film The Woodsman, homophobia in Empire. He's often been criticized for failing to portray black characters in a positive light, starting with Monster's Ball, in which Halle Berry's character has an affair with a racist prison guard.

"[Television is often] too afraid to insult, and in telling the truth, somebody is going to be insulted," Daniels says. "You cannot please everybody."

Daniels is an equally controversial figure behind the scenes. Star's original showrunner, Charles Murray, was replaced because of creative differences (Chuck Pratt stepped in; the show's other executive producers are Daniels, Donaghy, Pamela Oas Williams and Effie Brown).

Daniels concedes he's not the easiest boss. "I demand a lot from people because I demand a lot from myself," he says. "I'm really hard on myself. I'm hard on people that work around me, too, My dad was really hard on me. And I have to learn that everybody isn't perfect, and that's the beauty of life, the imperfection."

Newman describes Daniels as "a very, very emotional person. So when you work with Lee, you're on a bit of a roller coaster. He has tremendous highs, and that emotion can inspire people and lead to great creative achievement. But there are also lows and challenges. Part of the challenge for us is helping Lee channel that emotion, as much as possible, in positive ways."

Newman remembers receiving the pilot script and network notes for Empire while on Christmas vacation in Fiji with his family, when he was head of the studio.

"It's a very small resort we went to, and we look across the room, and there is Lee Daniels with his partner and two kids," Newman recalls. "I walk over and say, 'What the hell are you doing here?' Because no one had heard of this place. We were the only Americans there. He said, 'Yeah, we're here for the holiday,' and realized we were going to be spending the next seven days together."

When the network notes arrived, Daniels grabbed Newman at a cultural dinner. "With tears in his eyes, he said, 'I feel like you guys are taking the teeth out of this show. It needs to be my authentic experience.'"

Daniels admits, "My knee-jerk [reaction] was, 'I don't want any notes from you. Go away! You don't know my world. You don't know me. So shut up. But what I found is, the Fox people give smart notes, and they know great TV. They really embrace me. They know exactly what they're dealing with."

Newman laughs about it now. "Spending the week with Lee in Fiji when he was dealing with network notes was not my idea of a perfect vacation, but it bonded us quite closely."

For Hamri, Daniels's mercurial nature is a part of his brilliance. "He has a kind of improvisational way of doing things," she observes. "Lee's work will never be duplicated. He has a stamp. You know a Picasso when you see it, and you know Lee Daniels."

There's certainly a larger-than-life quality to Daniels. One moment he's interrupting the discussion in the Star writers' room to take a call from actress-model Naomi Campbell (seen in Empire, she'll also appear in Star). The next, Larry Jackson, head of content at Apple Music, arrives to share stories with the writers about his time as an A&R executive working with Whitney Houston, Fantasia, Monica and Jennifer Hudson.

"Lee knows everyone," Newman says. And "everyone knows Lee, whether it's Oprah or the president and his wife, the Clintons. He's so charismatic — people want to be his friend. You'll hang out with Lee and think you're just going to have a TV conversation and it's, 'They just asked me if I would speak at the Democratic Convention,' or, 'I'm on my way to the Met Ball with Oprah.' Lee lives a crazy life."

But the line between the facts of that life and the fictions he creates is sometimes blurred. Daniels tells a story, for instance, about being high on meth when his brother asked him to take in his twin babies - and how the kids subsequently inspired him to get  clean.

"I vividly remember the last time I did drugs," he says. "My kids were infants. We were living on the Upper West Side, and they were five months [old].

"They were watching TV on their big teddy bears, and I stepped over their little bodies to leave to get to drugs. I went outside, went three blocks and realized that I had left my kids. I turned around, and I haven't done drugs since. I thought I was saving their lives — they were saving my life. And so I've been sober, at least from drugs."

Within the same hour-long conversation, though, Daniels reminisces about being high on Oscar night, years later.

Daniels may not always be a totally reliable narrator, but perhaps the facts are overrated. A theatrical version of his story is what Daniels fantasizes about telling someday.

"You know what I wanna do? I wanna do a musical," he says. "I wanted to do a musical about my life on Broadway, but I find it so egotistical — and I'm scared that I might die right afterwards. I'm too afraid.

"There's something about [having] the audacity to do a story about yourself, then direct it, write it and then [make] a musical on top of it. I think, 'Who does that?' You know, they end up dying." If anyone can pull that off, it's this writer-producer-director-survivor.

Lee Daniels: The Musical? It's not hard to see that up in lights.


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 10, 2016

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