Larry Mollin (Executive Producer/Writer) Tells All!

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Here's an incredibly and brutally candid interview with Larry Mollin (writer and later showrunner of the original 90210 from Season 4 - 7) from 2010 where he reveals a lot of pretty tough behind the scenes drama and why he thinks the show was totally ruined after Season 7.

Here are some of the biggest things he talked about:

ABOUT SHANNEN'S FIRING

The Shannen one, we wanted her to work. I mean, the writers loved Shannen. She’s a child of this business. You give her a script and she’ll just read it exactly like you wrote it. Never change a word, never ask a question. She had a photographic memory. She could be doing anything she wanted the night before and just come in and nail it–and the other kids hated that. She’s tough on the set. She’s just a child of the industry. It’s not really who she is. She’s just whoever she plays, in a lot of ways. She’s just a kind of unusual, very talented professional but hard to get along with. She just kind of pissed everyone off eventually and she pissed off the most important person, which was, you know, Tori [Spelling, Donna]. And not only that, she introduced Tori to a man who beat her. So that pretty much put the death card on her. So that was pretty much that. I think they were willing to go with her but, basically, what happened was, in the middle of a show, she cut her hair and totally screwed us up for continuity so everyone was pissed off at her. Like I said, not the writers so much, but the producer people. And the other kids were out to get her head, because she had pissed everybody off, and they basically went to the old man [Aaron Spelling] and said she had to go. He was happy to let her go because, like I said, she had introduced Tori to the guy who beat her. I’m not going to mention his name. So that was just the way business was done there. The old man was never the bad guy. He would let everyone else be the bad guy and then he’d get rid of her and then bring her back again [in Charmed]. But it was unfortunate she left, because we had all intention of keeping her there......But we, obviously, always kept her alive in season 5, 6 [by mentioning her]. We always meant to keep her and, of course, that’s the big relationship. Our largest triangle–her, Dylan and Kelly–that’s the crown jewels, as far as we were concerned. We would never do anything to harm that so we always just kept it going."

ABOUT THE DEPARTURE OF LUKE PERRY IN SEASON 6 (AND HIS RETURN IN SEASON 9)

"Luke, he was tired of it. All the kids hated the show by season 5, other than Tori. They all just hated it. Every day they would come in was just torture for them. We were making them do things, making them play these characters. Luke is a wonderful man and a good professional but he just wanted to go..... Luke left and we knew we were certainly going to miss him. We were floundering for guys after that a little bit and went through a bunch of different ones but I guess he came back [in Episode 9.08, You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello] and needed the money or whatever. He would’ve been too embarrassed to come back when I was there or any of the regular [writer-producers] from his time because we knew him so well and we’d know why he was coming back. He was just too proud a guy to come back when Chuck (Charles Rosin, showrunner until Season 5) or me or the Wassermans were there. He wouldn’t have done it."

ABOUT SEASON 8, 9 and 10:

" I never watched after season 7. What they did there was so appalling to me. Our thesis was always that we basically tried to write them as ordinary kids living extraordinary lives. But after I left, they were ordinary kids living ordinary lives! Like they couldn’t get jobs. What do you mean, they couldn’t get jobs? They went the wrong way. Brandon was supposed to have a great job! What the hell? They made them struggling. It was just wrong. Every choice they made was all wrong. They didn’t understand how to tell stories. Michael Braverman [the new writer-producer] was a disaster and Jason was supposed to take over and he didn’t take over. It lived on and it did its thing but it just became more of a Melrosian soap opera. They didn’t follow the thing that we had set up. These kids were supposed to be having great lives and that would’ve made the show fantastic.

THEIR APPROACH TO THE CHARACTERS AND ICONIC RELATIONSHIPS

"Let me see if I can remember it. It was emotion, passion, bonding, fun. If it had that, we felt pretty good about an episode. And then Chip and I added another 4, which was kind of the reverse. I have try to remember this now. Commotion, fashion, blonde-ing, sun. That was the reverse. It was a chance to really reflect on what was going on for us but be true to these characters. And we got a long game in them. We knew what our big rooting interests were, we knew who our big couples were and we were going to take our time to get to them. We obviously knew David and Donna were really, really important no matter who they were with at the time. It was always going to be when they would get back, because that’s what the audience wanted. The same thing with Dylan and Brenda or Dylan and Kelly or Brandon and Kelly. You had all that stuff there. We put people in between them and made you suffer and wait for them but we knew where our money was buttered on that stuff. It was just trying to get there and not jump the shark, not go for the cheap jolt. Don’t do anything indiscriminately because you have to deal with everything. There’s ramifications. You have to deal with the reality. We tried to keep emotional reality. That was really important to us."

ON KELLYS DECISION TO NOT CHOOSE BETWEEN DYLAN AND BRANDON IN SEASON 5

"Oh, god, yeah. That was Jessica, actually, who came up with that. That was a cop-out. That’s the “goodbye Andrea” episode, before the last of the season, and she had to choose between them. That was alright. That was kind of cute. That worked. I thought that worked well overall, because, again, we needed to sustain that. We didn’t want to kill the triangle. We wanted to keep making people wait for it. It’s an art."

ON HOW JASON PRIESTLEY GOT HIM FIRED

"It was terrible. I was the only one standing at that point. Chuck was gone. The Wassermans had totally blown up, couldn’t even be in a room together anymore. I was the only executive producer left, doing 32 episodes with a weaker staff. I brought one guy down from Canada, who I used to work with from years back, who helped tremendously. The ratings were fine–maybe they were a tick under but they were certainly really good ratings. But Jason wanted to take over the show. He had some bright ideas. Again, the kids hated the show. To make them sign their contracts every year, the company had to make assurances to them. They didn’t want the Wassermans back because they had really pissed everyone off and they kind of painted me with the same brush. Jason said, “I want to take over. I want to have a whole new show” and that was it. They decided to have a whole new show. They brought in some guy [Braverman] and then fired him six weeks later.

ON HOW AARON SPELLING THREW ALL SHOWRUNNERS UNDER THE BUS

And in typical Spelling fashion, for all of us, Chuck, the Wassermans–not Chip, because he wasn’t running the show–but for anyone who ran a Spelling show, even Frank South at Melrose, never worked for FOX again. Spelling would always stop it. He was a motherfcker. He was a loving man who could be a motherfcker. He didn’t want you to have any success beyond him because that would mean he wasn’t successful. We all learned this but it was a shock to us. To come out and then never work for FOX again."

ON WHY THE ACTORS DECIDED TO STAY ON THE SHOW AFTER SEASON 5 (DESPITE HATING IT)

"They stayed because something kicked in: the fact that they were getting paid pretty handsomely. They would never get that kind of money again, probably, most of them realized. Ian Ziering figured that out. Brian did. Brian was the youngest and he was a good kid. But they were all growing up and they hated it but they loved it. They understood it but at the same time it was hard for them. Like any actor on a long-running show, you love it and you hate it.

All the actors look fondly back on it now, I’m sure. They all knew what a good opportunity it was. And we created a very good environment for them there. They had it pretty damn good but they had to work their asses off, just like I said."

ON HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH JASON PRIESTLEY AND HOW THE SHOW WENT DOWN THE DRAIN

"Jason I talk to occasionally now. He probably cost me millions of dollars but we’ve become friends again. He’s a good man. He just didn’t think that he was putting someone out of a job. He just wanted to take over executive producer and then six months later he didn’t. Like I said, he hired this guy Michael Braverman and they had no idea what to do. They totally floundered. They cut the order down. They were fcked. They brought in this one guy that we had worked with, John Eisendrath, [and] with him they driveled it out til the end [of the series] and even repeated storylines, which was kind of annoying.......I never watched after the start of the new season, the Hawaii episode [Episode 8.01-2, Aloha Beverly Hills]. I saw that and went, “Nope, that’s it for me. They don’t know what the fck they’re doing......The show probably should’ve ended after college or, like I said, it should’ve gone to a different post-college life for them. Not this struggling, ordinary life that they wrote. They just totally missed the opportunity with where the show was supposed to go. But there was a decision to keep actors in place even though they were bored and they wanted something different. And they got something different. But it struggled for the next 3 years and the ratings went down and they finished the show off.”

ON BEING FORCED BY AARON SPELLING TO KEEP DONNA A VIRGIN

"You know, it’s funny. It was kind of endearing for many years. The old man, that’s how he controlled what he considered his daughter. Even though he couldn’t control her in real life because she’d be out there having sex with everybody, he was very concerned about keeping Donna a virgin. And we went with it because it was kind of good; we got lots of good stories out of it. We had lots of “almost”s and stuff. So, at the end, going into it, I went to him and said “Should she go to a priest? How should we play this thing?” and he said “No, just do it.” I always felt pretty good about that scene I wrote there. “How did I get so lucky?” “You waited.” It was kind of nice. It was sweet."

ON THE CHARACTERS DIRECTIONS IN THE CW 90210 (from 2008)

"It was just ridiculous, I thought. Jennie, she had her part and would do what they said. It’s not her fault. She was just playing the character but it had nothing to do with the character that we had set up. Then once they started making a decision about a child [Sammy] and who was the father, I just had to stop paying attention. It just irked me because they had no mandate to do these things. They had no equity. They were making decisions on this legacy, which, now, if we were ever going to pick it up again, we have to deal with.....people wanted the old show. They didn’t invest in the characters. The only thing people wanted to watch was when Kelly or Donna was there or when Brenda came. So they were all living on our work, on what we had built up so that kind of pisses you off. But it is the way it is."