valuable lessons - Nicholls + Vickers

Valuable Lessons
1
VALUABLE
L E S S ON S
How I Made (And Lost) Seven Million Dollars
Writing For Over A Hundred Shows You Never Heard Of
ANDREW NICHOLLS
Valuable Lessons
Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is
idiots. Don’t let this get around.
Herman J. Mankiewicz, cable to Ben Hecht
People are going to fuck you. Things are going to not
work out. You’re going to get lucky some days. Most
days, you’re not going to be lucky. Why dwell on this?
Paul Schrader
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter
someone else’s draft.
H.G. Wells
2
Valuable Lessons
3
FADE IN
The desire to see things blow up spectacularly created the summer movie as
Americans know and love it. It has also sparked a small shelf of books
about famed Hollywood disasters – books like Steven Bach’s “Final Cut”
and Julie Salamon’s “The Devil’s Candy,” describing the creatively and
fiscally chaotic Heaven’s Gate and Bonfire Of The Vanities, respectively.
Terry Gilliam alone has spawned a small cottage industry of schadenfilm,
from Jack Mathews’ “The Battle Of Brazil” (book and film) and Andrew
Yule’s “Losing The Light” to the documentaries The Hamster Factor and
Lost In La Mancha, and Gilliam’s own splenetic introduction to his and
Tony Grisoni’s screenplay of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Art Linson
describes the self-detonation of many a movie in “A Pound Of Flesh” and
“What Just Happened?” There are thick books about the dark sides of
Guber-Peters Entertainment; about Michaels Eisner and Ovitz, AOL-Time
Warner, MCA and Ronald Reagan; ‘70s filmmakers, ‘80s filmmakers, ‘90s
filmmakers...
Few authors however have been bold or foolish enough to take us on a
proper tour behind stillborn television shows. Daniel Paisner’s 1992
“Horizontal Hold,” a look at Bruce Paltrow’s almost-but-not-quite CBS
series E.O.B., and Lee Goldberg’s 1990 compendium “Unsold Television
Pilots” are the only two that come to mind and the latter sold mainly to
sitcom writers who wanted to see if their talking duck pilot made the cut.
Perhaps because Paisner and Goldberg were spectators at these debacles, not
wounded riflemen fresh from the barricades, the two books don’t convey the
panicked urgency I associate, from years of experience, with television gone
horribly awry.
In the press, cancelled or faltering shows seldom rate more than a
smug kiss-off in the year-end Best and Worst lists. Maybe this is because
runaway cost makes such a good news peg for a whacking good “troubled
production” story of the type that plagued Ishtar, The Last Action Hero and
Waterworld long before those films even wrapped. Flip through Nancy
Griffin and Kim Masters’ page-turner “Hit And Run” and numbers so big
they’re almost meaningless hit your eye on every page: “... lost $80
million,” “... lost nearly its entire $100 million...”
It’s hard to find a sitcom pilot that leaped out of the studio under the
whip of an egomaniacal director and took off for the tropics to spend a
hundred million dollars recreating a suburban living room in the Philippine
jungle. So why read a book about failure on the small screen? Television
Valuable Lessons
4
doesn’t die like film, up on micro-perforated Draper AT1200 vinyl for all to
see and hoot at – it crawls away like a firecrackered cat to expire alone under
the porch. Do a hundred-odd whimpers add up to a bang?
These thoughts gave me pause for a good few days when I began this
book in 2000, three weeks into the new millennium and a divorce, sitting in
my tiny apartment facing a nook scalloped into a wall where a couch was
supposed to go. I didn’t have a couch. What I did have was a pile of posters
and mugs, jackets and caps, autographed scripts and other mockingly
cheerful detritus of the career that had brought me to Hollywood seventeen
years earlier. If I’d gathered those vanity jackets, matchbooks, posters,
scripts, clocks, show binders and yellowing TV Guide clippings and hauled
them to a flea market in a sack I might have been able to trade them for a big
box of army surplus shell casings to schmuck myself over the head with.
Television is all about learning lessons – at least, the kind I write has
been. So where was the lesson in this?
Type into eBay the names of all but two or three of the 130 shows
I’ve worked on and you come up with nothing. No DVDs, no toys, no
flammable Hallowe’en costumes. Fred Allen wrote that all the radio
comedian had to show for his years of work and aggravation was the echo of
forgotten laughter. All the TV writer has to show is the VHS of all-too-wellremembered canned laughter. I didn’t even have that. How had I earned so
much money and wound up with so close to nothing? Were my financial
state and the creative impoverishment of most of the shows I’d worked on
somehow related?
In the 2004 TV Season, seven of the top-rated twenty programs were
so-called reality series. Friends and Frasier were gone; the half-hour
comedy seemed to be dying a slow and largely unlamented death, and TV
pundits were plaintively asking why. What had happened to sitcoms?
I think I have an idea. After twenty-five years of contributing to
hundreds of pilots and series there’s nothing I know better than how
television comedies blow up.
So I ploughed into what follows, reasoning that a little petticoat-lifting
on the TV shows which for one reason or another nobody got to watch, or
which no one long remembered, might have, if not entertainment, at least a
timely sociological value.
Americans no longer believe their politicians are unimpeachable, their
priests are chaste, their God is unitary and just, or that big business plays
fair. But, every clay-foot revelation about performers and directors
notwithstanding – despite all the behind-the-scenes stuff littering DVD
releases and A&E – they’re still bizarrely, almost purposefully naïve about
Valuable Lessons
5
how their entertainment is made. It doesn’t help that the entities and outlets
purportedly committed to exposing backstage goings-on – ET, People
Magazine, TV Guide, Biography, all those miles of “extra footage” – are in
fact just adjuncts of the myth machine, leaking out only enough insider dope
to let inquiring minds know who spatted with her director on what set, but
never enough to tell them why. People feel hipper having been shown that
the Emperor has no clothes but everyone in his employ has known for years
that he has no skin.
There are many legitimate reasons to dislike television, even if your
participation in the medium extends only to turning it on. I have the
additional provocation that for twenty-five years Mr. Farnsworth’s invention
has taken the best work I was capable of producing and turned it into almost
unwatchable glop. If an audience gets the TV it deserves, what does that say
about this country? A secretary finding me in a dull mood some years ago
said in an attempt at consolation, you’ve entertained an awful lot of people.
I said no, I’ve entertained a lot of awful people, there’s a difference.
I set out wanting to do interesting, original work. My heroes –
Thurber, Kaufman, Perelman – managed it. I idealistically thought it’d be in
everyone’s best interests. I thought my clever words would be welcomed
with flowers in the fake New York streets of Hollywood. I never anticipated
the Ansar al Islam brigade that was already in place to keep each meaningful
contribution I might airdrop from reaching the clamoring hordes for whom it
was intended. As much as I’ve tried to hold the small part of television over
which I’ve had any control to some modest standard of originality, as hard
as I’ve tried to gain inches on the Quality Mountain, I feel as though I’ve
spent the last twenty years tied to a straining rope like that guy in Touching
The Void, being dragged on my ass toward the icy abyss.
The education that this tirade should provide may be the proper
province of the television critic, but if for example the average Outdoors
writer knew as much about fishing as TV critics know about sitcoms he
wouldn’t be aware that you needed bait. They watch it, but anyone with a
face and a beer can do that. Someone should let television’s professional
critics and its armchair analysts into the writing rooms, the pitches, the edit
bays, and especially the notes sessions that make television comedy what it
has become. The souls of all the lost jokes and mangled stories cry out for
revenge. With that small intent: this modest book.
Valuable Lessons
6
EVERYTHING ABOUT IT IS APPALLING
August, 1994: I was sitting with my writing partner Darrell Vickers in
Jerry’s Deli, in Studio City, California. We were in a window booth, eating
with a Well-Known Director and a Well Known Actor, and all four of us
were bitching about the shows we were on. The Actor hated the tantrumthrowing star of his prime-time sitcom, the Director hated the female lead of
his top-ten comedy, and Darrell and I hated three-fifths of the cast of the
show we’d created and were running, most of the simpletons at the network,
and the TV-viewing public whose taste, as expressed in the focus groups that
had put this piece of dreck on the air, we spent every waking minute
laboring to satisfy.
The question arose: why were we, this energetic foursome, toiling to
produce this crap, when all of us would rather have been hunched over a
table somewhere with a Bolex making award-winning Claymation shorts?
The answer, as I voiced it that day, was this: the Director and I had
big houses, in Encino and Studio City respectively, the Actor had just lost a
big house to an ex-wife in Malibu (the Director would donate his, likewise,
three years later), and Darrell had lost nine-tenths of a house to the 1994
L.A. earthquake.
We were doing jobs we hated, writing, performing and directing lines
and scenes and business we found tediously stupid and unfunny because it
was the only work we were being offered, and because between the four of
us we owed nearly five million dollars.
Old houses need a lot of tender loving care. For two years Darrell had been
hiring painters and carpenters to finish his 1927 hillside manse. When I
showed up for work and when I left they were there painting, grouting,
sanding. I called his top floor The Never-Ending Second Story. (Darrell got
talking one day with a painter and found out he was an actor. Had he done
anything Darrell had heard of? Yes, he was the fifth-billed lead in Papillon,
with Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen. So is this stipple pattern okay?)
In 1992 heavy rain had cracked the seventy-five-foot-long, ten-foothigh retaining wall holding up the hill on which Darrell’s house stood. He
hired L.A. contractors to replace it. Rather than do it a bit at a time, they
removed the entire wall, took a long look at the 7,500 square feet of
suppurating mud now facing the street, and announced they couldn’t tackle
the job for insurance reasons. The Great Wall Of Mud shifted. Other, more
enterprising contractors were brought in and, after watching them sink
Valuable Lessons
7
pylons in some cases twenty-eight feet into bedrock for a year, Darrell and
wife Judith ponied up $300,000 for the finished wall.
Then, on January 17, 1994, the Northridge Earthquake knocked their
house down. But the wall was fine.
Darrell and Judith had bought (well, Judith had bought – Darrell
doesn’t know the PIN # for his ATM card) the most expensive insurance
they could: full earthquake coverage, full replacement, rental of an
equivalent property during repairs. They pointed this out to Allstate, which
essentially said ehn.
Somewhere around that time The Bride and I called several L.A.
roofing contractors to assess some small leaks on the large, mostly flat,
multilevel roof of my 1946 Rudolph Schindler house. They said there were
three roofs on the house already; to add another would contravene L.A.
building codes, if such a thing is possible. They had to remove the old to
install the new.
Rather than do it a bit at a time, one day while I was at work they
removed the entire roof, leaving only the joists and some flimsy covering
material before leaving for the weekend right before the largest downpour of
the year. I returned from work to find it raining in every square foot of my
home. Water was pouring out of the track-lighting sockets downstairs into
my son’s crib. When I finally reached Ignacio at midnight and got him up
topside to help me spread tar on the thousand cracks with our bare hands, I
asked, screaming over the deluge, why he hadn’t tarped the house. He said,
“I didn’t know it was going to rain!” The coming storm had been on the
news for twenty-four hours. My roofer was the only person in L.A. who
wasn’t expecting it.
Did this end up costing me a lot of money, you ask? Can Aretha
Franklin spell Respect?
All of which led to my current Theory Of American Television:
L.A. REAL ESTATE ENTERTAINS THE WORLD
If it wasn’t for the million-dollar houses owned and expensively maintained
by writers, producers, actors and directors, we wouldn’t need to do three
quarters of what’s offered us. We could wait until something decent came
along – or, by holding out, force the studios and agencies to take a second
look at the projects they were offering us and allow us to make them decent.
Valuable Lessons
8
In 1998 I stood on the set of a sitcom on which I was consulting and
watched our director hold up the studio run-through while one of the stars, a
kid whose first series this was, signed the loan papers for his first house. I
wanted to go over, grab his arm, and urge him, “Stay in your apartment!
You think this show’s no fun? Wait till you see the garbage they’ll offer you
after it’s cancelled.”
Which it was. I haven’t heard of the actor since.
Dorothy Parker, some time after moving to Hollywood, lamented to a
friend still in New York, “Out here money isn’t even money, it’s snow; it
melts in your hands.” (She also memorably and heartbreakingly told an
interviewer, “If you’re going to write, you can’t write down. It has to be the
best that you can do and it’s the fact that it was the best that you could do
that kills you.” Amen.)
In early 1990 I’d asked my accountant at the giant firm Laventhol and
Horwath what I should do to protect my money. His reply was quick and
unqualified: buy the most expensive house you can afford.
I did. The nineties weren’t good for Southern California real estate, or
for Laventhol and Horwath, which declared bankruptcy in November of
1990 with $1 billion in debt. When your accounting firm goes bankrupt,
your ears pick up. Nine years later I sold my house, at a loss of well over
half a million dollars – if you add nine years of mortgage payments and
upkeep and landscaping, roof repair and a new floor, probably a million and
a half, or two and a half million before taxes. Which was my life’s earnings
(nobody in L.A. has savings), and which is why, despite the sometimes
impressive numbers following the $ signs in this book, I’m living in an
apartment and eating Beanie Weenie today.
In 2002 our investment adviser of three years called us to his office to
show us a chart he’d prepared, projecting Darrell’s and my retirement
income. He had used as his funding basis our average annual Plan
contributions over the previous decade. We tried to explain that our highearning years were over; that we were writing cartoons for a few hundred
dollars each a week. He didn’t get it. He tried to explain the numbers to us
again: “Okay, you just have to each earn $400,000 a year until you’re sixtyfive...”
These money guys weren’t working in Boise or Schenectady. They
were working in Hollywood, with Hollywood clients. But they each had no
insight into even the simplest economic details of showbiz, notable among
which is the fact that for TV writers, by the time you’re thirty-five you’re
standing on the Bell Curve of your lifetime earnings at approximately the
point where beginners are taken to learn how to ski.
Valuable Lessons
9
At that Jerry’s Deli lunch, Jon Voight stopped by to say hi to The
Director. They exchanged pleasantries. Was he working? Yeah, you too?
Hey, always. Jon left, to his nice house. In 2004 this fine actor appeared in
Baby Geniuses 2 and Karate Dog.
I have a son whom I encourage to always do his best in everything he
tries except for cattle rustling. One day, years from now, he’ll be watching
TV and a show will come on bearing my name, and he’ll watch it with his
increasingly judgmental eye. I want him to realize that even though I raised
him with the money I made writing for television there’s a good chance
Daddy doesn’t really like the episode he’s about to see with my name after
Written By. Things are this way for a reason. That reason is opaque even to
some people who write about TV for a living, so I can hardly expect Cody to
understand it without a little background.
THE ‘SHWA
My father is a printer, so when I was growing up in Oshawa, in Canada,
there were always odd scraps of paper lying around the house: off-cuts from
binding jobs, stationery trial-runs where the embossing and print ended up
out of register, paper and card stock in sizes the folks at General Printers had
realized no one would ever order, or in a color you’d only use to paint the
bottom of something too heavy to lift. My Dad brought this stuff home and
my brothers and I scribbled all over it, writing, cartooning, folding paper
planes. If the paper was thin enough to roll around the platen of my mom’s
portable Brother typewriter I composed awful poems and short stories.
I’d been writing jokes and songs with a friend, Darrell Vickers, since
the day after his Grade 7 Christmas party. We were both British, our parents
were part of the great mid-1960s England-to-Canada exodus, and we were
idiotically amused by the same things. Darrell knew I wrote songs, and
when he asked me to perform at his party I took my Harmony guitar and noname amp and played and sang my twelve-year-old heart out. He phoned
the next day and suggested that since he played guitar too we should write
something together.
One night I gathered a few hideous sheets of shiny orange sixty-pound
bond which my mom had been using for shopping lists, and began rating the
comedies I watched at night. I recorded the name of the show, the air date,
and the name or names that appeared after “Written By.” Then I rated the
episode: Funny, Not Funny, Stupid, Really Stupid.
Valuable Lessons
10
Darrell persuaded me to stay up to watch a funny American series, All
In The Family. This was twenty years before he semi-seriously suggested
that Norman Lear, by inventing the Very Special Episode, had singlehandedly ruined television comedy. (See The Comedy Wall Of Shame.)
After a while I began to notice there was no particular correlation
between the writers’ names and the episode quality. Sometimes Joe Scribe
wrote a terrific episode, and sometimes he came up with a tedious piece of
formulaic nonsense.
Young Mr. Vickers and I continued to write together – books, songs,
limericks, sketches, one-liners, cartoon gags, a rock opera – and continued to
critique each morning the shows we’d watched the night before. The
comedy gods, in our eyes, were the Pythons. We couldn’t understand why
American sitcoms, on the other hand, were so hit-and-miss. They didn’t
seem very clever and the rare intelligent characters weren’t believable, or
were fact-spouting geeks, or quickly departed the show. The stories seemed
to be recycled from series to series: The Camping episode, the Cyrano
episode, the I-Lied-To-My-Mother-About-Being-Married-And-Now-She’sVisiting-So-You’ll-Have-To-Play-My-Wife episode. The one where the star
gets to sing.
Some time before we graduated from Oshawa’s McLaughlin
Collegiate and Vocational Institute, Darrell and I had decided we could do
better.
WHY WE DIDN’T
I’ve made a living since I was a teenager by persuading otherwise sensible
people they needed my jokes more than they needed their money. In this
book I’ll attempt to understand why, despite having written and rewritten
several hundred TV episodes, often as Executive Producer, occasionally as
Creator, I’ve found myself unable to do much to improve them, even when I
was paid a lot to do expressly that.
I feel bad about this, for my sake and yours. I often feel as though
I’ve worked at a GM assembly plant for twenty-five years and have been
unable to persuade anyone that perhaps we should assemble the engine
before we stick it in the chassis. I have made mistakes and seen mistakes
being made, but when I saw those mistakes being made again by others –
writing mistakes, production and casting and directing mistakes – I have
Valuable Lessons
11
never to my recollection been able to convince a single person to change
course.
This may be because showbiz is still the Wild West. The myth of
filmed entertainment is that there is no rule book; anything goes. A nobody
can walk out there and become a star; a first-time director can sweep Cannes
with a $7,000 budget; a wacky idea tossed off at the last minute by the focus
puller can become the poster shot. Next week that cute extra in the crowd
will be the co-star and the gofer will be the director. Nobody Knows
Anything.
William Goldman’s famous axiom is quoted to me more often by
mid-level executives and talentless would-be writers than by any other
category of showbiz hopeful:
“This is awful. We should fix it.”
“Hey, Nobody Knows Anything.”
“If we change this line, the second act won’t make any sense...”
“Come on, man, Nobody Knows Anything.”
Consequently I’ve seen a lot of shows cancelled, which has freed me to
work on a lot of other shows that would then also be cancelled. Thus the
resume grew, while the TV Guide New Fall Season issue and I both
annually bemoaned the poor quality of what’s served up each September to
Bob and Edna Viewer.
If I’d gotten on one successful sitcom, or been left alone to deliver one
flat-out funny pilot, who knows? I might have three or four shows on the
resume as some successful writers do, instead of over a hundred.
But if you have a rep for fixing troubled scripts, they only put you on
troubled shows. Troubled shows – does it need to be said? – are in trouble.
They get canned. Or moved to 11:00 Friday night, or up against whatever
the latest reality-trend show is, and then canned.
And on their way to said cannage they get diddled by everyone who
parks within two miles of the studio in which they’re shot. The Director of
Comedy Development, the Manager of Development, the V.P. of
Development. The Director of Current Programming, the Manager of
Current, the VP of Current. The Studio Head, the Network Head, the Head
Of Entertainment for the network. The director, the cast. Outside writers
brought in because they’re being paid by the week anyway on a studio deal.
The network’s research and trends people. The Standards And Practices
department.
Valuable Lessons
12
And the only person on the sound stage, the sole individual who
cannot say, “put this in,” “change it to that,” “no, no, to work, it has to go
like this”...
... is the writer.
I’m a devoted amateur student of mathematics. Often, a careful
analysis of the underlying math of a situation will resolve a seeming paradox
like this. Quick example: consider the guy who walks to the train platform
at a random time each day, having decided he’ll visit one girlfriend if the
Northbound train arrives first, and the other if the Southbound beats it. He
wanders to the station without checking his watch but ends up visiting one
girl five times more often than the other. He’s baffled. In this case what he
hasn’t figured is that the Northbound train always comes on the hour, and
the Southbound at ten-minutes-to. From any random time on the clock, his
next train is the Southbound, five times out of six.
So perhaps the puzzling situation in which writers find themselves is
somehow predictable by John Von Neumann’s Game Theory: it’s a default
state of any hierarchical competitive environment where the folks near the
top are under such financial pressure they must always back down.
Or maybe it’s just that everyone gets ideas – if they can’t write, they
take those ideas to the one person who can incorporate them. That’s a lot of
information going in one direction and if you’re on the receiving end it’s
hard to push back. Just statistically, it’s more likely they’ll gang up and
change you than the other way around.
Plus (switching Hungarian mathematicians for a moment), to
paraphrase Paul Erdös, a comedy writer is a machine for turning coffee into
jokes. We have our antennae up and twitching, looking for new ideas and
ways to recombine old ones. If you propose a concept to a group of gag
writers, they’re smart, alert people – they get it. But the new ideas the writer
proposes to others are frequently harder for them to assimilate. “I find that
confusing.” I hear this sentence at least three times a week, always referring
to simple declarative English sentences. And the people whose complaint it
is have, in turn, even lower opinions of the taste, intelligence and
perspicacity of the end consumer, which is you.
It kills me that the stuff I was paid so highly to write could always
have been better but I was so seldom able to improve it. I staffed Fox’s
1998 disaster The Magic Hour for three months, for which I was paid over a
quarter of a million dollars. I wrote over 300 pages of jokes and sketches for
it. Maybe ten pages of that aired. Maybe ten.
It’s been ages since I watched TV regularly. I saw a Seinfeld in 1995
and quite enjoyed it. I watched three Murphy Browns in 1990 because I’d
Valuable Lessons
13
tried to get out of reading my secretary’s spec Murphy by saying I was
unfamiliar with the show, and the next day she handed me a tape containing
three of them. The script wasn’t good and the show was little better.
I’ve never seen an episode of Mad About You, or Third Rock, That 70s
Show, Will And Grace, The Cosby Show, Law And Order, CSI... Not that
I’m sure there aren’t good ones, but there were always books to read, friends
– not Friends – to visit, or paths to hike.
When I say those Murphy Browns weren’t good, I don’t mean there
wasn’t skillful acting, deft staging and direction, many sharp lines. Props,
costume and tech people worked hard on them; a half-hour of television
represents a lot of work, done under pressure by skilled people in an
inhumanly short time.
I mean that not one of them was worth half an hour out of my
evening. I mean that watching two sitcoms a night requires giving a bunch
of Hollywood sitcom writers 6.25 percent of your entire waking life. The
big physical gag of one of those Murphys was Candice Bergen pouring ink
in a guy’s lap and the big gag of the one following it was Candice dumping
soup in a guy’s lap. They were full of clichéd characters, old jokes and
familiar situations, gaily, loudly, masquerading as novelty. They were full
of what uncreative minds had ordered people with talent to write, stage and
perform.
Frankly all of this would be but a tempest in a time-slot were it not for
the fact that the only thing most people seem to carry around in their heads
these days is the plots, characters and dialogue of television shows and
commercials. The dream of the young medium was that it would unite,
enrich and educate us. Far more often, it has pacified, homogenized and
isolated us.
Only a public inured to witlessness and repetition could watch today’s
mainstream television comedy without revolting. If one continues to
photocopy a copy, placing each spat-out page back on the glass, the image
will fade in a few generations to illegibility. Likewise, if each generation of
executives and writers learns everything they know from television, and the
following generation learns from them without ever going to the source of
human experience, the whole thing will slide into the crapper.
Right now we’re on the lip of the crapper and there’s a stiff breeze
blowing bowl-wards.
WHAT’S IT LIKE MAKING A MILLION A YEAR?
Valuable Lessons
14
I have no idea where my money went. That’s my secondary theme – that
high-living forces the creatives to pump out dreck and to take notes they
wouldn’t countenance if they were living in trailer parks with no alimony
payments.
But I didn’t live high, did I? Sure I bought some art and autographs
(Charles Dickens, Orville Wright, S.J. Perelman) and other fun nonessentials, but when the Animation Finger beckoned I sold most of those,
and all at a profit, so they don’t show up here on the negative side of the
ledger. So where did it all trickle down to? I’ve never owned a boat or a
plane, I’ve only got about 200 CDs, and I don’t collect wine or hunting
falcons. Until mid-2004 I didn’t have a stereo or a coffee maker in my
apartment and I still don’t have a blender or a toaster. I don’t hold foreign
currency, I don’t own real estate and I’ve never financed a Broadway show
or bought a horse. No sycophantic posse. No dating, no club memberships.
I’m still playing the electric guitar I bought in 1976. Gambling losses?
About $300, and I made over half of that back while attending a recent
wedding in Las Vegas. I’ve never had to pay a ransom, a speeding ticket or
a hospital bill. I seldom go to concerts or sporting events, I don’t “shop.” I
don’t own a dog – I never thought it was a good idea to get too emotionally
attached to something that might one day have to eat me.
When the money began flowing I worked long hours, I got married. I
ate at the places I usually eat – coffee shops, cafes and, yes, McDonald’s. I
flew back to the U.K. for the first time since I’d left at the age of nine and
spent two weeks driving around England, Wales and Scotland, staying at
Bed and Breakfasts. At home, I read the same books and magazines I
usually read. I added some new plants around the house, got some old
pictures framed, bought a barbecue. I splurged on my family at Christmas,
didn’t worry so much about long-distance phone bills or leaving the air
conditioning on, and got my dishwasher fixed. I had some long-delayed
dental work. I bought a laptop and put a TV in the guest bedroom. I
continued driving my ten-year-old BMW 325.
This isn’t the picture I always had of how millionaires live. But then,
we all get our ideas about the things beyond our immediate ken from
television... and as I hope to show elsewhere here, television is a lie with a
fruitbowl on top. (With flat-screen TVs, maybe just a banana.)
Anyone who’d bitch about the life I’ve lived (I mean in large general
terms; allow me my petty circumstantial beefs) should be buggywhipped.
But maybe, I don’t know, there’s a financial correlate to Parkinson’s Law
Valuable Lessons
15
that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Maybe
something like:
The perceived necessity of goods and services expands
proportional to the money available for their acquisition.
Perhaps no matter how much money you earn you spend a hair more. Later
in this book I’m going to toss in various Expenditure subheadings and see
how much I can account for.
AND THE BEATING GOES ON
There’s a brilliant joke or piece of physical business in the first draft of a
situation comedy, something the writer is proud to have thought of, that got
howls of laughter in the writing room. It’s the funniest, best, maybe the
truest thing in the show.
By the time Friday’s taping rolls around the joke is gone. You never see
it, you never hear it. Why? Here are twenty reasons.
1. The actor doesn’t get the joke or thinks of a “funnier” line by himself.
Asking a studio exec for a little backup in the fight to restore it, the writer
is told, “Hey, it’s his face on the billboards.”
2. The joke zings a celebrity the director knows is hoping to get a sitcom
next season, and for which the director would like to lucratively shoot the
pilot.
3. The line contains an “s” and the child actor, having just lost a tooth and
wearing a dental “flipper,” can’t say it without lisping.
4. Standards and Practices (S&P) thinks the line is crude, or could be
misconstrued as something crude.
5. The line mentions a type of household product that’s made by a potential
sponsor or their competitor. The network removes it.
6. On tape night the actor forgets or fumbles the line eight times and we
eventually skip it and move on.
7. The audio feed to the audience fails during the reading of the line. The
line doesn’t get a laugh because nobody hears it. The studio executive
viewing the rough cut a week later demands we lose the gag because it
obviously wasn’t funny.
Valuable Lessons
16
8. The prop associated with the line/business breaks, or doesn’t “read”
(show up as what it’s meant to be) on camera.
9. The actor who is supposed to say the line is not getting along with the
actor/actress to whom he is supposed to say it. He refuses to speak to
that actor in this episode, or even enter a scene at the same time, which
would require them waiting together behind the set for their cue. The
line makes no sense when spoken to a different actor.
10.The actress decides Friday night at 8:00 that her religious beliefs prohibit
her from saying the line, which contains the phrase “I swear.”
11.Another completely different joke that used some of the same words was
in the opening scene of a different series on the same network last year
and that series tested badly. The network insists this joke be removed
lest it jinx the current series.
12.The animal in the show gets such big laughs from standing up and
begging that the network insists the line you like be replaced in editing
with another shot of the animal standing up and begging, in the hopes
that the critter will become a “breakout character.”
13.The guest actor by whom, or to whom the line is supposed to be
delivered dies Wednesday night. The line doesn’t sound right read by his
replacement on Friday.
14.The laugh – a big one – goes to a secondary actor. The series star
demands the line be removed because it “stops the whole show.”
15.The line is shot but cut because it’s too similar to something the producer
swears he saw once on Bewitched.
16.The piece of business only plays if shot from a certain angle. On tape
night the director, anxious to get to a dinner party, tells the showrunner
he “can’t get a camera back / in / up there.”
17.The director rushes through the shot anyway but it’s technically
unusable.
18. In every take, the audience laugh/applause the line receives is too big
and can’t easily be shortened.
19. The gag is said by an actor to a dog. The actor leaves it until Wednesday
to reveal to the showrunners that he is so allergic to dogs he can’t even be
in the same studio as one, or sit on furniture a dog has sat on.
20. The line was written for a child actor to say in the concluding “Tag” of
the show, but the taping goes long and by the time the Tag comes around
we’ve exceeded the legal number of hours the child can be on the set and
the Child Welfare Worker pulls him or her off. The Tag is hastily rewritten around other characters.
Valuable Lessons
17
Not even counting the possibility that the show ran long and the line was cut
for time. All of these examples are taken from personal experience. I could
give you stranger ones – like the Executive Producer who cut a line for no
discernable reason, then a few months later used it in the title song of his
next series.
Then there are the good lines that don’t even get into the script in the
first place. On a table-written show this is usually because the author didn’t
yell loudly enough and there are one too many stand-up comedians at the
writers’ table (one is one too many) and the table has devolved to Ridiculing
A Person Or Object. A lot of stand-ups rely heavily on ridicule, insults, putdowns. It’s a defensive mechanism from being heckled in clubs. When they
get onto a writing staff they require An Object in order to work this funny
stuff into a runner within the conversation. Any writer who suggests a gag
or a line or a piece of business about something the comedian hasn’t heard
of becomes such an Object:
“Hey thanks a lot, wanna go pitch that down the hall at PBS?”
“You know, the fact that you can even pronounce that scares me.”
“Gee I think you got the wrong room; the History Lecture’s next
door.”
“Could this be why you were so unpopular in school?”
“And the Who-Gives-A-Shit Award goes to...”
The purpose of these put-downs is to make the room laugh, at the
expense of any half-way intelligent observation that might otherwise have
been put into the mouth or mind of a character on the show. On one sitcom I
know of they were called Drive-Bys. Female staff members were regularly
reduced to tears by these unprovoked potshots. Do you know the work of
the late cartoonist B. Kliban? Remember his 1970s panel cartoon, “The
shallow sophisticates laugh at Judy’s tiny head”? It’s that.
These are also the guys you always hear saying, “Everyone knows
there’s only eleven basic jokes,” or “Everything’s already been written
anyway!” You know what? If that’s your attitude get off the track and let
people pass.
If there are eight guys and only one or two girls in the room, the
Alpha Male room-domination schtick becomes even more pheromonally
unbearable. It’s why in the first-season sitcoms you watch, the characters
spend most of their time blipping out sexual insults. Very little half-hour
dialogue that reaches the air nowadays is typed by one person, with full
reflection, onto a page to be edited, shifted around, re-worded, or thrown out
in favor of a better idea or direction. It’s yelled out across a table by two
former standups and a dozen Harvard grads in between cell phone calls to
Valuable Lessons
18
their car dealerships and architects. Written that way, Leviticus would have
been full of tit jokes.
Plus, seeing it done this way every day encourages executives to think
that writing is just talking. And anyone can talk, right?
Which brings us to the Number One Reason by far that the line comes
out of the script:
THE EXECS DON’T GET IT
Usually they just flat-out don’t understand it. Sometimes they understand it
but think it’s risky. If it’s in a kids’ show, maybe it involves the character
going to a library or reading a book, or doing something that their instincts
tell them will read as too “uncool” or “un-hip” for today’s youth, costing
them valuable ratings points in the 6-11 demographic. (These examples
from Nickelodeon execs while I was writing the animated series Pelswick in
1999-2000. The library became an internet café and the evil book was
dispensed with.)
Television writing is reductive. Things come out. If you give a piece
of writing to any three people, I don’t care who they are, and tell them to
remove anything they don’t like, don’t understand or find offensive, it
doesn’t matter if it’s “Harlot’s Ghost” or “Harold’s Purple Crayon,” that
piece of writing will get shorter. When ten people all have this power, the
only things left at the end of the process are the lines that offended no one,
and that all understood and found amusing. Draw ten circles on a page
blindfolded and check the overlap, the material left on the page that’s still
inside every circle. It’ll be a thin sliver. That’s what survives. It’s always
the least interesting thing on the page.
SHOWRUNNER, THE COYOTE’S AFTER YOU
Most of my writing friends have, upon telling a non-pro that they write for
television, been asked “... but what do you do all day?” I use the word
showrunner a lot in what follows, and Microsoft Word’s gently chiding spell
checker reminds me that it, and the duties of the job it describes, may still
not be broadly familiar.
Valuable Lessons
19
The showrunner is the head writer of a program, in the first season
usually the author of the pilot, charged also with hiring and supervising the
cast, the line producer, the set designer, costumes and props people, the
rotating weekly directors and the other writers. The showrunner
superintends virtually everything of consequence in the program except
lighting, catering and makeup. Editing, Guest Casting, Writing and
Shooting proceed simultaneously and all require input or supervision from
the writer or pair of writers who best know the series. There is not a
painting that goes on a fake kitchen wall that you are not called upon to
approve. The way people cluster around the director on a film shoot – that’s
how they cluster around the writers in TV, for but nine months instead of
two, and dressed worse. It’s a burnout job. You’re alone with your brain
during the writing phase; you’re still alone with eight executives during the
re-writing... but when it’s okayed to pilot, a small city of professionals
gathers in a week or two to erect sets, establish and equip an office and
communications center, create an unreasonable budget, and fix all the
problems that arise as a matter of course in any enterprise in which $1
million is spent by a hundred people in a week.
The actors start rehearsing your witty and wise script, making it look
at first like three tons of vermiculite piled on a building site. You vomit.
Slowly it goes up, takes shape – often not the shape you imagined – and then
it goes before an audience for judgment.
If the chef covers his errors with sauce, the architect with ivy and the
doctor with sod, the writer covers his with canned laughter, then a sprig of
parsley in the form of opening and closing music.
If the pilot is picked up for series, the same battalion more or less is
re-summoned to the war zone and the battle resumed – but for nine months,
with less money per episode, and with your own side shooting at you.
“I... HAVE A DREAM ON!”
The spec sitcom script seems to have replaced the Great American Novel as
the secret in every idealistic young man and woman’s top drawer, except
they’re not in the top drawer any more, they’re being waved in the faces of
people like me at parties.
A spec sitcom script is a pretty low art form as writing goes. Writing
a so-so sitcom spec makes about as much sense as painting motel-room art
for a hobby. It’s a rigid, unnatural form, demonstrating little of your
Valuable Lessons
20
imagination or ability with the language. Its only raison d’etre is to get you
a highly-paid job. As such, it requires hard original jokes and not too much
leaning on the existing foibles of the characters. In virtually every instance
the person reading your script will be a writer him or herself, often the writer
who created the series for which the script’s being submitted, and he or she
will be reading ten to twenty specs a day from would-be staff or episode
writers, most of them, in today’s lean market, with a lot of experience.
Many are culled but few are chosen.
Showrunners are snobbish judges of talent and there are only two
ways to impress them: with inventive gags, and with inventive plots +
construction. The ideal sitcom spec uses a novel story and incorporates wild
jokes that the showrunner couldn’t have thought of, all within the
recognizable format of the show. It takes the existing characters places they
have not been, but keeps them and their reactions familiar.
The principal mistake made by beginning writers is assuming that the
well-established charm of the actors will come across on the page,
supplementing the humor. But it’s not enough to write a script that “could
be an episode” of your target show. As a rule, to get a job in TV, which is
all a spec script is for, you have to write funnier than the episode you saw
last week. Because if you’re only as good as that, they don’t need you; they
can write that well themselves. The episodes which air are restricted by the
time available, the budget, the talent of the actors and director, and, above
all, the interference of the studio and network executives, whose every note
amounts to “make it more obvious.” (Peevish side-note: Microsoft’s
vigilant grammar-checker refuses to accept that last sentence unless “whose”
is changed to the incorrect “who’s.”)
This is slightly counter-intuitive, so I’ll belabor the point. It’s a lesson
I learned writing for cartoonists: you see their daily strip, you say “that’s not
particularly funny,” and you knock out thirty gags that are equally notparticularly-funny and mail them. The artist doesn’t buy any. Because he
pays 25% of his receipts to the author of any gag he accepts. He can write
not-particularly-funny all by himself and save a hundred bucks. You don’t
move ahead that way, you don’t improve and you don’t impress anyone.
The funniest, wildest, most fun draft of a weekly sitcom should be the
first draft – the writer’s spec or assigned script. After you’ve done a draft or
two, the showrunner does a pass, knowing from experience all the things in
the script that budget and executives make impossible, but also sharpening
dialogue and adding jokes. It’s then submitted to the studio Current folks
(Development, for a pilot), who give notes for another pre-table pass –
sometimes two or three. I’ve seen up to eight. These are notes removing
Valuable Lessons
21
any scenes that are similar to scenes in other shows they’re doing, removing
references that would upset present or potential sponsors, adding scenes that
use sets they already have on hand; “clarifying” things.
It’s read by the actors at the table on Monday, after which you begin
to benefit from the conflicting advice of up to thirty people. Your script is
re-written by the staff another four times, with studio and network (and actor
and director and legal and Standards And Practices) notes on every draft and
after each of the two on-set run-throughs. The director, actors and line
producer tell you what they can’t do or won’t do, and everyone else tells you
how to improve the story, scenes and dialogue. The script degrades in
originality and freshness draft by draft until a manageable workmanlike
shooting script incorporating each note and every minor executive’s
suggestion arrives Thursday night, frequently more like 5:00 a.m. Friday
morning. There is now nothing left in the script that everyone involved in
the process hasn’t approved.
To survive this with any humor left intact, the spec has to be stellar.
A lot of talented people have to have laughed at it and thought it was worth
trying to usher through The Process and somehow save. Every old whore
began as a cute virgin.
WRITERS AS STARS
People are interested in writing for the entertainment media, more so since
the early 1990s, when film-student types began suddenly taking an interest
in the screenwriters of the seventies (Waldo Salt, Robert Towne, William
Goldman), an interest spurred in no small part by Goldman’s book
“Adventures In The Screen Trade.” Writer-directors like the Coen Brothers
developed cult followings in the eighties and nineties; among the
cognoscenti and coffee-shop workers, directors were no longer the only stars
behind the camera. Pressure from the WGA got writers invited to screenings
of their own movies, even welcomed to the sets when the movies they wrote
were being filmed. Writers began to get Respect.
It was odd for me to see the WGA Journal, long a slim
monochromatic dispatch for Guild members, become the glossy WRITTEN
BY, available on newsstands here and abroad at five bucks a whack, with
full-page teleplay excerpts from the work of its featured writers – almost all
of them, by the way, mediocre. I know a good script’s quality comes from
the overall impression and story it manages to convey over 110 minutes, not
Valuable Lessons
22
from any particular show-offy stuff packed into a sample page, but most of
these excerpts are cringe-making. If you only have one page to showcase
your proudest work, why pick stuff like this?
JOHN
I came as soon as I heard.
JANET
I’m so glad you did.
JOHN
Is he – okay?
JANET
They say it’s a stroke. We won’t
know more until we see the tests.
Who picks these scenes? Is it any wonder everyone in the world with a
laptop moves to Hollywood to become a screenwriter? They’re being told
this is all they have to do to be successful. Print some Paddy Chayefsky and
scare more of them away, would you? (If I had the money I’d start the Ted
Zeigler Homecoming Fund in memory of my late manager, to give bus fare
to despairing screenwriters who want to quit L.A. and go back to
Shreveport.)
The magazine Canadian Screenwriter also profiles writers, but it
covers unknowns. It has to; they’re Canadian. Unfortunately, it too has
begun the slide towards Glossy. Its cover-featured writers frequently happen
also to be Well-Known Attractive Actors Who Also Write! This is the
equivalent of publishing Coal-Hauler Union magazine and putting Natalie
Portman on the cover because she owns a fireplace.
But inside it has lists of Cheques Being Held for writers they can’t
locate, lists of Unfair Engagers, and of New Members and their home towns.
There’s a regular page describing ludicrous recent attempts producers and
networks have made to avoid paying writers what they owe, and detailing
what the Guild is doing to try to recover the unfairly withheld money. It
admits that writers don’t always have a great life.
The WGA journal, before it was glossy, had all of these things.
Currently, unless you have considerable clout, if you write a letter
complaining about hellishly bad treatment, by employers or by the Guild
itself, you have to mail it to Member News, a folded one-sheet sent out
separately, to keep the public from finding out there’s trouble in toytown.
Written By markets the glamor and success of writers to newsstand
Valuable Lessons
23
shoppers. It’s nice to be noticed, but it has begun to smack of a factory
worker’s broadsheet that has stopped listing grievance procedures and job
injuries, and started running upbeat features about how clean the
workbenches are.
I offered my services for a few years on a website called AllExperts. I
answered 250 queries from NonExperts, 90% of which were essentially
“How do I sell my idea?” Note: idea, not script. Only about ten of the
people I counseled had actually written anything, or even intended to. In
three separate instances I had someone ask, “How do I sell an idea I had for
a screenplay based on a popular video game?” These guys had played a
video game, thought it’d make a cool movie, and wanted to be paid to be the
go-between connecting the video game company to a movie studio. As if
the video game people or the studio hadn’t perhaps thought of that. None
would tell me the video title that had inspired them – all three almost-writers
were paranoid that someone would steal their marketing insight.
I also had a lot of people writing to ask how to protect their idea.
Again: not their script, their idea. I never found out what most of these
ideas were, because they were afraid I – or someone I knew – would steal
their notion and they’d get nothing. They didn’t know this truth: Nobody
Thinks Your Ideas Are Worth Stealing. Read Producer Art Linson’s short
peppy book, “What Just Happened?” David Mamet, if not the most
respected living American playwright one of the contenders, walks into a
studio meeting and pitches an idea, and the executive behind the desk – a
guy whose first job this is – has changes he wants to suggest. Not later; right
away, there in the room. Stuff this guy just thought of, on the fly, he is
convinced is better than whatever David Mamet has come up with after
considering all the angles for a week.
Words are like babies; everyone unreasonably overestimates the
merits of their own. TV writer Chris Thompson, who worked for Garry
Shandling, delicately said, “If you put a plate of the finest fettuccine in front
of Garry... and a plate of his own shit, he’d eat the shit, because it came from
him.” I wrote for Garry when he guest-hosted the Tonight Show in 1986-87,
and no matter how big a laugh a line got in the dressing room, Garry
wouldn’t add it to his monologue unless he could change it. Personalize it.
The best comment Garry would give on a killer joke, whether it was written
by us or his pal Dennis Miller, or SNL’s Alan Zweibel, or Simpsons
Executive Producer/writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss: “Good area.” In other
words, That joke you just wrote that cracked up everyone in the room? The
subject matter is interesting to me, let me think about it and maybe I can
make it work. Everyone else’s babies are a little weird-looking.
Valuable Lessons
24
So people are interested in writing. But there has been little critical
insider reporting on writing for television; what it’s like Doing It. What
little has been written is of the cheery “Here’s How To Prepare Your
Resume” variety or, in one of those Skills Exchange Seminars: “Sharpen
Your Writing Skills Using The Twelve-Fold Way!” The only way to
sharpen your writing skills is to screw your behind to a chair and write from
9:00 to 5:00 with a break for lunch for fifteen years. That doesn’t mean
getting together with some friends over beer and bullshitting ideas for a cool
action movie you could shoot at the dump with your uncle’s camera, it
means sitting down at a computer or with a yellow legal pad, writing FADE
IN, then writing the words that come next and not stopping. That’s the
secret method.
I got an email from an old friend last week saying that a friend of his
wanted advice on how to break into screenwriting. What makes people
think it can be broken into? Nobody asks for advice on how to break into
flying jumbo jets. You live and breathe airplanes starting when you’re a
toddler, and forty years later, provided you’re not color blind or a woman,
you’re an airline Captain.
There’s a Sam Gross cartoon that shows two guys on a street corner as
money rains from the skies. One guy has his hat held out, and is begging
from the other, who says, “Pick up your own damned money!” There are
millions of dollars to be made in writing for TV – far more than in almost
any other profession; the money is almost raining from the skies – and a lot
of people don’t even want to bend over to pick it up. They want a shortcut.
In 1984 I worked on a Disney Channel series called Danger Bay that
accepted story submissions from viewers, a rare practice among shows then,
and rarer, maybe nonexistent, today. One day a story came in from a man
who was teaching school for a living in British Columbia, a guy making
maybe $22,000 a year. The Story Editor, “Sweet” John Dugan, liked the
story and gave the teacher a chance – he commissioned a script, for the thengoing-rate of just over $10,000. The teacher wrote his script in a week –
increasing his annual income by nearly 50% for seven days of work – and
submitted it. Sweet John called the writer back and said it was good, he only
had a few small line changes and then it could be shot. Could the author
maybe take a few notes over the phone, rewrite it and mail it back?
The first-time writer’s reply: “Don’t you have secretaries for that?”
I’VE BEEN SUCH A FOOL
Valuable Lessons
25
By the time he or she is sixteen the average American child has witnessed
over 18,000 heartwarming advice scenes. This book takes its title from the
standard requirement of nearly all American half-hour comedy: that no
matter what spritely hijinks fill twenty-one of its twenty-two minutes, it
should in concluding teach a lesson, traditionally in the we-love-you-but
style of an admonishing parent or best friend, which the recipient of said
lesson must humbly ponder then accept.
This moment is referred to by writers as the M.O.S., or Moment Of
Shit. During the extrusion of this love log, many choose to leave the room.
Others have an uncanny talent at cooking up the stuff. Some in fact
find it hard to shake the habit of thinking of jokes as the sugar on the spoon
that disguises the medicine. I superintended a young team in the writing of a
half-hour animated action episode into which they seemed intent on
inserting a wrap-up “lesson” for each of the five main characters. I emailed
them: “this is not the kind of show that needs lessons; free your minds...”
etc., and still got the outline back with two major lessons and the sentence
“She says she has certainly learned that...”
Perhaps they Word-Searched for “lesson” and forgot to do “learned.”
More likely they were just spitting back the same stuff they’ve imbibed from
the glass aureole since they were old enough to sit up and watch Growing
Pains. The M.O.S. has now become a part of the Third Act, instinctive and,
in its absence, missed by some hack writers like freebase. After I’d pointed
out all of the above, another “lesson” turned up in these kids’ (otherwise
pretty good) first draft. It’s as if you’d let them out of prison after ten years,
given them each a new suit and a thousand bucks and told them good luck,
only to return the next day and find them still standing at the prison gate.
They had no idea what to do with their freedom. Most working sitcom
writers today couldn’t write an entirely funny episode, free of third act
hokum, to save their lives. Without a Lesson, they wouldn’t know where to
backtrack from to begin typing.
OH WHAT FUN IT IS TO WRITE
But don’t blame writers for the subject matter, settings and themes of
television comedy. The shows on TV aren’t there because writers thought of
them and brought them to the networks. Nineteen times out of twenty,
Valuable Lessons
26
studio or network executives had ideas or “properties” which writers were
summoned and told to flesh out.
I’ve been told to write a script based on an idea the exec had that
morning on her way to work. On an idea her child had. Friends of mine
wrote a show based on the “concept” of cereal flakes. I’ve written, or been
approached to write, shows about existing toys, about toys that had been
designed and not made, and for toys that had been made and sold in Japan
and which could be sold in the U.S. too if there were a TV series on the air
here to plug them. (The writers of a 1990s Superman cartoon series were
told to give Superman – who you may recall can fly – a super-car, to add
another toy that could be sold in conjunction with the series.)
I was approached to write an outline based on the fact that the
producer owned the rights to a 1970s Swedish live-action series that only ran
four episodes.
I was asked to write a script for a comic book character whose sole
recognizable characteristic was that he never spoke. Five years earlier I’d
been asked to write a pilot by the owner of the The Marx Brothers
trademark, in which Harpo would speak.
I was invited to a rat-trappy downtown Hollywood office to listen to
an idea from football player Bubba Smith’s brother Tiny, who was then
served with a subpoena that prevented him from showing me to the elevator.
I’ve been asked to write scripts and outlines based on executives’ life
stories, their ex-wives’ life stories, their pool man’s previous job, a dream
they had, a funny thing that happened growing up with their four sisters in
Montreal. The “concept” of snot. Ten-year-old books, twenty-year-old
books, thirty-year-old books. Some puppets they already had, some sets
they already had. Trained animals. Awful one-off comic books.
Twenty times I’ve been put to work on “Go” projects where there was
an existing script which everyone hated.
Somewhere right now, there is a team taking a meeting and, with
fixed grins, listening to their potential employer tell them he’s bought the
rights to the concept of picnic baskets. Or fridge magnets. Or he’s optioned
the idea of leather car seats from the great-grandson of the first guy to put
them in an automobile. I’ve taken those meetings. Every writer I know has
taken those meetings. Nobody I know has ever punched any of the people
who called them to those meetings, which I consider something just short of
miraculous.
I took two meetings about writing Love Connection: The Movie.
(“We don’t want to mock the Love Connection franchise in any way.”)
Valuable Lessons
27
I was given the concept, “A boy goes into another world and meets
aliens.” Had I written it, it would have been Created By the network
executive who concocted that one-liner.
I’ve been given comics’ acts, celebrities’ life stories, cartoons, pop-up
books, musical acts, a fitness guru from Iceland. They’ve sent me tapes
from Japan, a 1970s rock band from Sweden, a transparently faked “reality”
show from Italy, a record producer’s life story. I was handed one of the
seven or eight early drafts of The Flintstones, which eventually accumulated
so many writers (twenty-three) some of them had to be paid-off to remove
their names from the credits.
I was invited to pitch ideas for Beethoven Three and Dude, Where’s
My Car Two. For Beverly Hills Ninja, and for sitcoms to star Mimi Rogers,
Jon Cryer, Steve Harvey, Corbin Bernson, Valerie Bertinelli, Marla Gibbs,
Jake Steinfeld, Mercedes Ruehl, Raeven-Simone, Peter O’Toole, Dyan
Cannon, Liza Minelli, Bill Maher, Elizabeth Montgomery. For a cartoon
series based on Girls Gone Wild.
I’ve been asked to create “a modern Archie Bunker,” and
Americanized versions of Britcoms Are You Being Served and Three Up,
Two Down. Even Hancock’s Half Hour from 1956.
I developed shows based on the fact that the network knew three guys
who were good at zombie makeup; on a series of dolls for two-year-olds; on
a collection of skateboarding thumbs called Tech Deck Dudes; on a
collection of dolls to help girls realize they didn’t have to be beautiful and
slim, every one of which was beautiful and slim; on a movie based on an
actor’s at-home epiphany that he could make realistic burn makeup from
bacon stuck to his face. I was asked to make a show that would popularize
soccer among Americans.
I worked on adapting misspelled one-off comic books about kids with
pet aliens, Mayan kids without aliens, cowboy kids with monsters, alien kids
with monsters, and one about a kid with a rocket which didn’t go into space.
They all had bullies. The bullies got beat up by the cowboys/aliens/Mayan
jaguar/monsters/rocket. The outline for each promised, “Anything can and
will happen!”
I interviewed for a job to make a funny series about Roseanne
shooting a cooking show (the prodco had 600 hours of backstage footage);
about kids working in a theme park (they’d bought the world’s largest
wildlife library); about a rat with no discernable characteristics or behavior
(they’d acquired the 3-D property, which had no sound); about the sky
raining meatballs (they’d bought a children’s book).
Valuable Lessons
28
Darrell and/or I have been to meetings about turning Dilbert into a
weekly series. About turning MAD Magazine into a weekly series. (Yes, I
know, those two got on the air.) About turning a sixteen-year-old Southern
girl who could sing into a series. About creating a “teen Saturday Night
Live.”
We met with a guy who copyrighted a symbol for “I Don’t Love…”
and who wanted a TV series based on it. With a guy who wanted to get a
ripoff Toy Story into theatres before Pixar could finish theirs. With a guy
who wanted to get a ripoff Raiders Of The Lost Ark into theatres.
I did an outline for someone on the concept of “popularizing tilapia.”
Tilapia the fish. An outline for a show based on “Health,” for someone
developing an All-Health Network. And literally hundreds more products,
one-off comic books and foodstuffs that I can’t even remember...
... but I don’t recall ever being seriously asked, “Say, you’re a writer, do you
have any ideas? Is there something you’d like to write?”
Doesn’t that seem like a natural question?
They do often say in the courtship stages, “We want you to do work
you’re passionate about.” Later you find you’re being asked to focus that
infatuation on three talking lawn decorations or a family of skunks.
But it doesn’t really matter. Because the one thing TV executives
never want to hear about, cannot be pitched, and in most cases will not read,
is an original idea written by an actual writer who thought of something
amusing, worked it through, typed it up and brought it to them. Unless that
original idea has already been a success elsewhere, in print or on the stage or
on store shelves, you gain nothing by putting those pages on their desks.
When Darrell and I have written a spec script that excited a studio or
production company or an actor, on ninety-five percent of those occasions
we’ve been warned on the way to the network pitch, “Don’t mention there’s
a script.”
This is the same script that attracted all the “elements” involved up to
this point to imagine that this can be a show. All of the characters are in
there, there’s a funny story, there are, presumably, jokes, intriguing
situations, promising relationships.
But the worst thing that can happen is for someone in the meeting to
blurt out that this script exists. Because if a script already exists, four bad
things suddenly occur to the network executive:
1) He/she has to read it.
2) He/she can’t pitch just any old thing that’s in his/her head and semireasonably insist it be incorporated.
Valuable Lessons
29
3) Should it be successful, he/she can’t claim that it was all his/her idea,
or that he/she “saved it” with twenty brilliant last-minute suggestions.
4) When he/she gets booted and goes to another company, the squib in
the trade papers mentioning the move can’t say “in previous position,
was instrumental in developing the hit series Just The Nine Of Us.”
And, knowing this, the studio/production company knows that the network
will be disinclined to look favorably upon your project.
Which results in contortions like this: you’ve spent a year researching
the confectionary business and another four months writing a killer script set
in the factories, stores and homes of a Candy Dynasty. You, the writer, go
in to the network pitch with three studio executives and two agents and you
describe your finished script (without ever mentioning that it is a script) as
best you can.
The network duo hears your pitch, then tosses across the table a
magazine they were reading last night with a funny story about the casket
business. They quote a cute anecdote from it and say, “Make it caskets and
we might be interested.” *
* (Don Reo has a great pitching story. He and his writing partner had worked for weeks
on a sitcom proposal. By the time they went in to pitch it they had their patter down cold.
Don started it off – “Okay, we’ve got a husband and a wife...”
The exec interrupted: “There’s no wife.”
Don blinked. “Pardon me?”
“There’s no wife. Continue.”)
Here’s what happens next: the studio execs and your agents practically
arm-wrestle each other to see who gets to proclaim this casket thing the idea
of the century in the loudest voice.
And keep in mind the pitch-ees are usually two networkites who a
year from now will be gone, never to be heard from again. A writer I know
walked into a Rite Aid to find a formerly snooty executive with whom he’d
grappled ringing up the Revlon and Tic-Tacs. These people have no skills
so there’s nowhere for them to go after failing miserably but down to Rite
Aid or up to Vice President In Charge Of Entertainment.
The “input” does not of course end at the show’s subject matter. On
every premise, outline, first draft, second draft, nth draft... every moment in
a TV script is subjected to this close supervision. They tell you what to
write and then they tell you how to write it. They tell you what plot turns
seem illogical to them, what character names don’t ring true, what scene
endings don’t “work,” what changes will save the day:
Valuable Lessons
30
“The scene in the car wash isn’t working for us and we know the
series is about a car wash but we think nobody really knows how a car
wash works. Can we re-think? Maybe play in a dentist’s office?”
“Re: armadillo scene, we don’t think people associate armadillos
with a zoo. To sell that it’s a zoo, let’s change this to an animal that
makes people think ‘zoo,’ like an elephant or a monkey.”
Executives may not do the actual typing but there is often nothing in a
prime-time script that they haven’t all but dictated. Those stupid story
twists, that lame dialogue, that clichéd ending you could see a mile off? We
hate it as much as you do but are given literally no say in the matter. There
are usually only two writers on a script, but there are up to twelve executives
and every one of them has something he or she fancies is an idea.
GLAMOR
I have this theory about jealousy; it’s a feeling ascribed to others. “You’re
just jealous.” “Everyone who hates me? Jealousy.” It’s an explanation we
give, when we’re comparatively happy, for why others wish we’d drop dead.
We can’t believe anyone would dislike us for the reasons they’re giving;
because we shot at their dog and screwed their wife. Because we’re so
likeable. It must be something else. It must be jealousy. They really think
we’re great and they can’t stand not being great themselves; that’s it. Do we
experience jealousy? No way.
All right, when a friend wins a trip to Hawaii we do say, jokingly,
“I’m so jealous!” But that’s short for, “That’s gonna be great – I’m stuck
here, I wish I was coming with you.” It doesn’t mean we want their plane to
fall out of the sky. At least, not unless you know some of the people I know.
But if an unpleasant co-worker is particularly nasty to you that week,
you say “she’s jealous.” And the feeling you imagine she’s having is: “I
hope you get sick on salted almonds and your plane falls out of the sky.”
Likewise, my theory of glamor is that it’s like the end of the rainbow;
you can see it, but if you go to where you’re looking it’s not there. This is
not the common opinion. People believe the feeling they get watching the
glamorous on TV or in the National Enquirer is being experienced by the
glamorous themselves, only ten times brighter and more satisfying.
Valuable Lessons
31
But having been close to those people, having spent my time on the
red carpet and in the homes and offices of the famous, I have to say I’ve
seldom seen anyone experiencing glamor. It’s an illusion. The tuxedos and
flowing gowns are hot and uncomfortable, the talk show appearances are a
goddamn pain. And if you think you’re unhappy with your lot... celebrities
are the most dissatisfied people in the world. They fought to get where they
are because they didn’t like where they were. They don’t like their bottled
water, there are too many croutons on their salad, their photos make them
look fat. There’s no pleasing them, except maybe when another celebrity is
hit with illness, ruin or a tram.
One exception that comes to mind is Kirstie Allie, who in a 2001 TV
Guide interview, reflecting on the fact that she and her boyfriend had just
joined their huge adjacent hillside houses with a glass bridge, said she’d
recently stood on that bridge surveying her domain and thought, “God must
really love me!”
If you can feel that, you can probably feel glamorous.
LYING TO IDIOTS
I wish I’d kept a diary of the pitches I’ve done. As it is I prefer to walk out
of the room and clear the whole thing out of my head. Darrell says ten
seconds after he’s out of the building he usually can’t remember what
project he was trying to sell. It’s self preservation; if you’d done it a
thousand times you’d feel the same.
Because pitching television is basically lying to idiots. As often as
not, one is called upon to describe to persons of uncluttered intellect how
one would, if hired, expand upon the idea they had this morning in the bath,
create new characters for their sub-stick-figure cartoon show, adapt their
kitchen product into a sitcom, or put their unfunny series into the top ten.
In 2005, some friends of ours got this note on an outline, regarding the
main character: “Why does he want to regain his health?” Faced with a
query like this (the only honest reply to which is, “What kind of stupid
fucking question is that?”) what can one do but tapdance; temporize; lie?
On two occasions when for some reason or another we didn’t want the
gig and didn’t think it likely that the same outfit would ever offer us other
employment, we’ve gone in and told them flat out why their idea did not
work. The anti-pitch. If I didn’t need employment (after this book, an
unlikely circumstance) I’d enjoy listening to people’s descriptions of the
Valuable Lessons
32
awful show ideas they just had and telling them in detail the size and scope
of the makeover that would really be required to make them entertaining.
Still, they have a way of asking how enthusiastic you are about
helping to bring their idea to life. Darrell once monotoned, after hanging up
the phone, “Tell me how much it pays and I’ll tell you to the nickel how
enthusiastic I am.”
Friends Andy Guerdat and Steve Sullivan got put through the
torments of the damned by some dickhead running a Disney cartoon show
about a family of flies. During their pitch he dictated the story to them,
complete with his own gags, adding at the conclusion with a satisfied
chuckle, “By the way, guys... feel free not to try to top any of my jokes.”
After they submitted their draft, using his story, using his lines, he told them
it didn’t work. They protested... but we used your story, we used your gags.
He said, yes, I thought that was rather passive-aggressive of you. Besides...
you didn’t capture my sensibility. Andy says, “What sensibility? It’s twelve
pages of fly jokes!”
At Columbia we pitched Lynn Loring on how we would revitalize
The Pink Panther franchise, as she pedaled an exercise bike while chainsmoking cigarettes.
At NBC we pitched to Jamie Tarses and Leslie Lurie while they shot
Nerf hoops. These two were known within the building as the Comedy
Speedbumps, or the Comedy Hostesses. A Tonight Show writer heard them
chatting as they exited the NBC elevator and one told the other, “It was
funny... but it wasn’t me funny.” A few years later Tarses was the
Entertainment President of ABC Television. Her father, writer Jay Tarses,
once famously said he wished all the NBC executives would hold hands and
jump off the roof into the parking lot, except for his daughter, who could
land in a bush. To Jamie’s credit, when our pilot Death And Taxes was
dumped by NBC, she called to tell me. Only two other executives have ever
done this: Tim Flack at CBS after Have Mercy, and Kim Keith at Disney
TVA after Super Cooper went into the super crapper.
At New Line, as we pitched to Eric Tannenbaum one Friday at 5:30,
he fell asleep. His secretary, taking notes, had to awkwardly wake him.
Writers have been asked to continue pitching to an executive’s dog
when he had to leave the room. I read of a writer who said when the suit had
to step out for a moment he’d been asked to keep pitching to no one, “to
keep the rhythm going.”
And all because they won’t read. As a result, more projects are sold
every year by writers who talk a great game but who cannot write.
Valuable Lessons
33
Which is why Darrell and I get called in two months later to “punch
up” those projects. To give them a once-over. To amp the comedy.
Straighten out the story. Basically, to write them the way they would have
been written from the beginning if they’d been sold by writers instead of by
professional bullshitters.
AMP THE STAKES
The psychiatrist Irving Janis coined the word Groupthink in 1972 to describe
a process in which a bunch of people collectively makes foolish choices.
Each member of the group tailors his or her opinion to fit the consensus of
the group, ignoring expert opinion, making selective use of advice, and
developing a feeling of omnipotence unshaken by the evidence.
In 2004 the word “clunky” was going the rounds of executives. For
three or four months, any joke, line, or word they didn’t like was “clunky.”
Two- and three-word punchlines were clunky, character descriptions were
clunky, sluglines (EXT. SUSAN AND BILL’S HOUSE BEFORE THE
RECONSTRUCTION – DAY) were clunky. It was like phylloxera had hit
the industry.
When I sold my first U.S. sitcom and was attending the initial “notes”
meeting, the Fox executive, Paul Stupin (I can still hear him saying this),
pronounced, “The first thing we have to do with Drexell is straighten out the
arc of his beats.” I laughed. I thought he was kidding. Everyone else in the
room was nodding. That was the summer of “the arc of the beats.”
Shortly after this came “amp the stakes.” This one has actually never
really gone away. It means, in case you hadn’t guessed, increase the
jeopardy for the main character. If he’s only drowning... could he be
drowning and having an asthma attack?
“Ramp it up better” was mid-nineties. This expanded from an
arguably useful application to scenes and sequences to jokes themselves.
Never mind that a joke is funnier if it’s unexpected. “Let’s see it coming.
Ramp it up better.”
“Character-based.” That one can be a killer. From the nineties pretty
well through today, every episode, every line, had to be “character-based.”
Character driven. Coming more from character. Keeping in mind that these
are sitcoms we’re talking about; situation comedies, not character comedies.
This one even crossed the species barrier into animation: “Can we make this
gag come more out of character?” We all collectively bite our tongues, not
Valuable Lessons
34
pointing out that something a character does, of course comes from
character, but something that happens to them comes from situation, and the
way they react to it defines or develops their character. I found myself
bringing this up in a test meeting with twenty executives in 2004. They just
stared. They didn’t even hear it. It was one weak axe-blow to the thick
gnarled base of the jargon tree – it didn’t shake the upper branches. You can
cite Bob Newhart and Paul Reiser and Jerry Seinfeld, passive witnesses all
to the madness surrounding them, they will keep insisting that “the plot
doesn’t come enough from (our main character).” The stories on I Love
Lucy came from character. Spongebob Squarepants’ dumb ideas often drive
his stories. But many if not most sitcoms follow the form of the Hapless
Character beset by Fate. I’ve tried Lucy-type shows – The Trouble With
Larry being a prime example – and when they see it they don’t like it. The
things the lead actor has to do to provoke crises big enough for comedy
make him or her “unlikeable.”
I had a spirited argument once with an exec after suggesting that
Roger O. Thornhill’s predicament in Ernest Lehman’s and Alfred
Hitchcock’s North By Northwest didn’t “come from character.” Rather, his
handling of the predicament into which he was thrown by chance limned his
character, revealing him as more resourceful and more serious than the tenminute prologue had indicated. I said, “Put Buster Keaton in the lead –
certainly no Cary Grant – or Gretchen Moll, or Colin Farrell. The film still
works. How can you say character and not plot is the main thing here?” He
did.
If every plot detail in a movie comes from character, how come a
movie that gets offered to Nicholas Cage and then to Ralph Fiennes, and
then to Julia Stiles and then Adam Sandler still works when it’s released
starring Tom Hanks? These people do not project the same character. At
every stage of development there were people saying “Sean Connery? Of
course!” “Queen Latifah? Perfect!”
“More singles” was the byword for a while in editing. A single is a
shot of one character speaking or performing, even though he or she may be
with someone else or in a room full of people. A single emphasizes that
character and his or her lines and reactions, to the exclusion of the others in
the room/car/boat/tornado. I once got this note from the WB: “Let’s add
more singles in this sequence to emphasize the relationships between the
characters.” Which of course is the one thing it doesn’t do; it de-emphasizes
relationships because we don’t see the expressions on both faces during a
conversation. For a whole year, when you watched a show on the WB,
unless you came in at the top of a scene you had no idea who was on the set.
Valuable Lessons
35
More singles, more singles, can we insert a single there? Can we replace
that raking Master with five singles? Drake and Connie and I are all feeling
a serious lack of singles.
From the late ‘80s until now, selling a pilot has been all about
characters “popping.” This is a term borrowed from the visual side of the
medium; a yellow shirt on a blue couch “pops.” It was appropriated to
describe characters who stand out from the background and make us forget
the rest of the group, which was assumed to be a good thing, even when it
was requested in an ensemble show, in which case they ask to have all the
characters pop. In testing, standard questions put to the sample audience are
“Who’s your favorite character?” and “Who’s your least favorite character?”
Of course someone is always the least favorite character, and this person
they try to eliminate from the series. (Who’s your least favorite Stooge?
Lose him. Which of Ebeneezer’s ghosts did you like the least – cos, I
dunno, I just never felt the Present Ghost popped.)
In animation for a year in the late ‘90s, it was “put an awning on it.” I
don’t remember exactly what this meant. I think it indicated the executive
had almost got the thing where he wanted it; “we’ve got the building up,
now let’s put an awning on it.”
After the Iraq War, even before W’s victory swagger in front of the
Mission Accomplished sign, the military phrase “going forward” found its
way into studio parlance in lieu of “from now on.” I even heard it used
adjectivally; “We can handle that in the going-forward draft.” I just saw an
ad blurb describing the Washington Post reviewer’s fascination with a TV
reality series thusly: “I was utterly embedded.” The other army term thick
in the air these days is “on the ground,” (with or without boots) but
somehow showbiz has failed to come up with a suitable civilian use for that
one.
“Behind” gets used a lot in lieu of “after.” Let’s put a wrap-up scene
behind that. I get the feeling he’s a changed man behind the confession.
This line, can we have a joke behind it?
All of this is because people who don’t know what they’re doing love
the sound of themselves delivering insider-seeming phrases. So “clunky” is
the current favorite. We once got it five times in a two-page set of notes.
Would you use an unusual word – any word – five times in a two-page
document without feeling self-conscious?
Darrell tried to start a piece of jargon by himself; “bevel the edges.”
He started telling people in conference calls and meetings, “Don’t worry,
this’ll work a little better when we bevel the edges,” or – “We just need to
bevel the edges and we think this character will pop.”
Valuable Lessons
36
It hasn’t caught on. But on the other hand, no one ever said “What the
hell does that mean?” either.
I reserve special contempt for the writers who adopt these phrases –
the trustees among the haftling in the Nazi lager.
PEOPLE WON’T KNOW THAT
As I type these words I’m involved in a series the target audience for which
is children about ten. On this series we’ve been told that kids won’t
understand:
The Mona Lisa (“Can we have an image that is more recognizable to
the audience? Remember, Irma ain’t the smart one.”)
A passing reference in a joke to folic acid. Or a kazoo. Or
Madagascar. Or Rasputin.
A joke reference to the flooding of the Yangtze River. (“No kid will
understand Taranee’s line about sandbagging the Yangtzee River. We want
her to be smart, but we can't have lines that totally go over kids’ heads.
Make it something they know, like the Mississippi.”)
On Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (which should be called Jimmy
Neutron: Boy Inventor) we had occasion to put a short mathematical
formula into a joke. The showrunner asked that the (brief, real) formula be
removed and replaced with “E = mc2,” regardless of the fact that it isn’t a
math formula, it’s a physics formula. Children can’t be exposed to
something that a genius would know, because they might not have heard of
it.
On W.I.T.C.H. we had the smartest girl, Taranee, coaching a friend for
a Science test, explain the xylum and phloem inside a plant stem. The note:
“Please replace this with something kids will know.”
But if every kid knows it and it’s the best our character can do... isn’t
she by definition not so bright? Besides which, we pleaded, we were
explaining to kids what it was, right in the script.
“Please make the substitution.”
A friend, Andy Guerdat, who occasionally writes educational kids’
shows, says that even on those, any time he puts in anything – a quote, a
word, an image – that some children might not already know, he’s told to
remove it. And, note: this is anything that some children might not already
know. That’s a very broad mandate for dumbing-down a piece of writing.
Valuable Lessons
37
Andy points out, quite correctly, that children, hearing something with
which they’re unfamiliar, seeing characters in a novel situation, or waiting
for the outcome of an unusual event, will lean forward in sympathetic
anticipation for the characters. What comes next? What’s gonna happen?
What does it mean?
He and I have pleaded this observation dozens of times to executives
in children’s television, but never successfully.
- “All we’re saying is that light goes over 186,000 miles a second.”
- “Kids won’t know that.”
- “But we’re TELLING them that!”
We wrote a pilot for an animated series, The Dumb Bunnies, which was to
be sold with an educational mandate. We used the theme of Water. So:
condensation, freezing, Oceans, the Water Cycle. We were told it was “too
intellectual.” And, mind you, this is The Dumb Bunnies. A bunny is asked
to get rid of a puddle on the driveway. He puts a metal handle in it... waits
until Winter... then carries the frozen puddle away. I was told, “This is
confusing – kids can’t think that far ahead.”
We were urged, on a Disney Channel / CBC show, Danger Bay, to
research the behavior of orang-utans so that the orang in our episode would
do things real orang-utans do. One of the things they do is imitate human
actions. We put some human-imitating in the script. A human put on a hat;
the orang put on a hat. The CBC found this “insulting to the dignity of the
animal,” and replaced it with several things that orang-utans in fact never do.
As I was writing this, a friend on an animated WB series called to say
he’d just been ordered to replace the word “though” with “but,” to “avoid
confusing our audience.” On that same series, which was being dubbed
from Japanese to English, a character who had just discovered something
he’d been looking for and whose mouth movements left room for only two
syllables, was given the line “Bingo!” The writer was told this expression
“plays too unhip for our network,” but it could stay in, “so long as the actor
is instructed to say it with wit and style.” Everybody try that at home.
I always figured that about ten percent of beginning writers, when first
confronted with notes this idiotic, rebel and point out the obvious. Or say,
“You’re kidding. Right? Because nobody I have met in the real world is
that stupid.” These writers are fired, and it’s the remaining 90% of us who,
as the line beyond which we cannot be pushed drifts further away with each
TV season, soldier on like a cadre of dedicated doctors quixotically
committed to saving human life while their every patient dies.
Valuable Lessons
38
If my son God forbid grows up to be a writer, those kids who were
solicitously spared from having to struggle through the word “though” will
be the TV executives superintending his work.
Of course it doesn’t help that most sitcom writers don’t have much
general knowledge either. They can recite the plots of every episode of the
Brady Bunch but they don’t know who Arthur Miller is, or the dates of the
Civil War, or the currency used in France. The average age of a table staff is
about twenty-five and they’ve been encouraged since childhood by the
increasing visibility of writers in the culture to believe they have a shot at
stardom of a sort, in which case, many think, they’re better off reading Syd
Field, William Goldman or Robert McKee than Steven Jay Gould or
Nicholson Baker.
Nor can they spell. In one staffing season I read 800 scripts – fifteen a
night for two months – searching for writers. A sample script is your calling
card. You want somebody to read it and be inspired to give you about
$40,000 (including one repeat and studio Xmas gift basket) to write another
to their specifications. It isn’t art, it isn’t science; the broad broad category
it belongs in is literature. You would think you’d go back over it and clean
it up before saying, “This is the best I can do.” In those 800 forty-page
scripts I found two without multiple spelling or grammatical errors.
One had ten on the first page. I called the agent whose glossy logoembossed card stock was wrapped around this piece of shit and asked him,
“Did you read this? Did it not occur to you that it isn’t in your client’s best
interest to send out a Married With Children in which ‘Children’ is spelled
wrong? In which Al is spelled All over sixty times?”
But the agents are less literate than the writers. Hey dude what’s the
problem?
When you’re a stickler for accuracy and you only find two carefullywritten scripts in a pile that takes two months to read, what can you do but
despair? Because language is how we give shape to thought. I now hear
grammatical errors daily from the reporters and hosts of NPR and PRI radio
shows. “The numbers are equal to a par with last year’s budget.” “Having
never seen a helicopter before, I was surprised the villagers weren’t more
curious.” “The numbers this year didn’t go as far than last year’s numbers.”
Reporters say “critical mass,” thinking they’re saying a lot of mass;
“penultimate,” thinking they’re saying really ultimate. The battle is lost.
Without love of, respect for and skill with language, we are not thinking –
we are, Descartes aside, just being.
Valuable Lessons
39
COULD ROMEO DIE EARLIER?
H.L. Mencken observed, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose
smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”
Anything that works in a half-hour episode, any character who gets laughs,
any peripheral bit of physical or verbal business that arouses an audience...
they want more of this in the episode and they want it earlier, particularly in
a Pilot, where the execs have the opportunity to redefine the series before it
gets on the air.
This means that if you have a perfectly serviceable gag where the
punchline is a gas pump attendant delivering one line – let’s say, the single
word, “Yup” – to end a scene, if it gets a big laugh, you’ll be asked to make
the guy a regular character. And to expand his role in the pilot: “Can he
come in at the end of the second act and say Yup there too?” If a
precariously-balanced stack of CDs falling over slays the audience at the end
of the scene, you’ll be asked if other stuff can fall over somewhere else.
If When Harry Met Sally had been a sitcom pilot, Rob Reiner’s
mother (“I’ll have what she’s having”) would have been worked-in as a
regular. Because her line got a laugh, and to them this is some kind of
sorcery.
Pearl, a late ‘90s show starring Rhea Perlman, Carol Kane and
Malcolm McDowell, was created by Don Reo. I came in one day to week to
add funny lines and business. The show started with a two or three minute
Cold Opening, then a commercial, then the First Act, middle commercial,
Second Act, commercial, Tag.
The biggest, usually the funniest dilemma facing the characters of a
conventional sitcom is engineered to arrive at the end of the First Act. This
is the problem, often self-created, that will take all of the star’s friends and
resources to a) make worse, and then b) solve somehow in the Second Act.
You want Act One to go out with a big laugh, a large situation.
A major source of frustration for Don and the writers was that after
two or three episodes were in the can – and remember, the show isn’t on the
air yet, only the execs have seen it – they were asked with increasing
frequency to move the first Act Break moment “earlier.”
Since it’s a large moment, a “turn,” a cliffhanger of sorts, usually well
thought-out, the only earlier place an Act Break Moment can be moved to is
the end of the Cold Opening. So what took eleven minutes of screen time to
set up and convolute into our star’s dilemma, Don and the gang were being
asked to do in ninety seconds. If the first Act was spent, say, getting Pearl
Valuable Lessons
40
onto a plane to visit her sister in Florida during an incredibly hectic week at
home and in school, and giving her everyone else’s problems to handle so
that she neglects her own... so that she realizes as she’s rolling down the
runway that she’s gotten on a flight to Lima, so that we can end the Act on
Pearl banging on the window and yelling in bad Spanish, “Stop el plane! No
mas arribe!” as it headed for Peru – the request would inevitably be, “Start
the show on the plane.”
This kind of thing was ordered, time after time, not only on this show
but on dozens of others I’ve worked, because the suits have no clue how a
show is put together. They haven’t done it over and over. They’re resultsoriented, they’re anti-shilly-shally. If we’re paying to put Pearl on a plane
goddam it, we want to see her on the plane at the beginning. And they
couldn’t see why having the dessert before the steak created a problem for
the story.
Michael Atiyah said in a 1984 article in The Mathematical
Intelligencer:
“It’s hard to communicate understanding because that is
something you get by living with a problem for a long time. You
study it, perhaps for years, you get the feel of it and it is in your
bones. You can’t convey that to anyone else. Having studied the
problem for five years you may be able to present it in such a way
that it would take somebody else less time to get to that point than
it took you. But if they haven’t struggled with the problem and
seen all the pitfalls, then they haven’t really understood it.”
Not to say that the executives haven’t been on a thousand sets, seen 10,000
run-throughs. But, as Brendan Behan said of critics, they’re like eunuchs in
a harem, they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're
unable to do it themselves.
You can stand over an architect you’ve hired and order him to change
the site angle, make the patio wider, lengthen the hallway, add a bedroom,
no, two bedrooms… can the pool go this way instead of that way? What if
the windows were, you know, those tall ones instead of these little ordinary
ones? And a year later you can beam at the impressive results and think this
house is here, the way it is, largely because of me...
But the house doesn’t hold up, the pieces weren’t made to fit, the
shade plan doesn’t work because of you. It came together as a coherent
piece of construction; the wiring plan was made to work within your
miniscule budget; the load-bearing beams hold up the silly roof you wanted;
Valuable Lessons
41
the plumbing stayed inside the walls instead of crossing the living room at
waist height, all in spite of you. Hundreds of mostly invisible
accommodations and ingenious compromises had to be made to give you
approximately what you think you asked for.
And you haven’t learned anything about what doesn’t work, you’ve
only learned how to push around an architect.
Anyone can pick a script apart; any script. There is no such thing as a
piece of fiction writing that doesn’t contain something that could be
logically objected to:
Why would Jack Nicholson’s family go to this spooky hotel in the
middle of nowhere with him when they know he has psychological
problems? I don’t buy it.
Seems unbelievable to me that Butch and Sundance couldn’t avoid a
bunch of guys on horses several miles behind them. Why don’t you
have them go through a river or something and the posse loses their
trail?
Because THAT’S THE PREMISE YOU MORON. If you change the
premise you blow up the story. Any moment in a movie could be twisted in
another direction. That doesn’t mean you have to. We got notes on
W.I.T.C.H. like, “We can’t buy this... why don’t the girls just avoid (the bad
guys) here by flying away?”
How about... because we need a story?
And when they say, “Jason Bourne seems like a real smart guy... why
doesn’t we just have him remember at the beginning who he is?” – when
they Pull The Pin that holds the story together – they really think they’re
being helpful by spotting a logical mistake that somehow slipped past you.
Many times on series I’ve been asked to make the bully in an episode
“nicer” because, “written this way, no one will like him.”
On a recent pilot, I was party to this conversation with the twentyish
business major in charge of making sure I didn’t run the show off the road:
- “Kyle, (a fourth or fifth lead in the show)... could he come in
earlier?”
- “He’s on page five. It’s the first scene. You want him in earlier than
the first scene?”
- “Yeah, because the way it’s reading, when he shows up we don’t
know who he is. It’s like, Who Is This Guy?”
Valuable Lessons
42
- “But Cooper addresses him by name. And he’s been described as
her love interest starting on page two. And we saw a picture of him
covered with kisses in her bedroom in the very first shot.”
- “Yeah but when he arrives, I just think the audience gets confused,
you know?”
- “So... you want to see him in the show somewhere before the first
time we see him in the first scene, so people won’t wonder who he
is?”
- “Yes, exactly.”
In another scene in the same pilot, the lead character sits at the
breakfast table with her parents and younger brother. We received the note,
“audiences will be confused by the sudden appearance of a younger brother.
Can we see him somewhere earlier?” Because seeing a younger boy eating
cereal at the breakfast table in scene two, who knows to what conclusions
the pre-teen mind might have leaped?
So we added a scene before the family scene, in which the younger
brother was in the front yard. The lead character walks past and says Hi, and
in the very next scene, the little brother is identified by the mother as “your
little brother.”
The note came: when we see the little brother in the yard for the first
time, we don’t know who he is.
Honest to God.
We had to add the line for Cooper, as she passed the brother outside:
“Hi, Darth.” Anticipating a daisy-chain of these notes, we seriously
considered making it “Hi, younger brother of mine Darth,” but we thought
they might have caught a whiff of attitude. In a 1990 Writers Digest
interview we were asked, “What’s the most important thing for a comedy
writer to do, to survive? Darrell’s reply, as true then as now, was, “Cultivate
the ability to conceal contempt.”
Alan Ball, Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty and
creator of Six Feet Under, noted in a May 2001 New Yorker profile by Tad
Friend that a friend of his had written a pilot, the first line of which was, “In
the beginning of the world, God and the Devil fought for the soul of man.”
The writer got the note: “Can we raise the stakes and get into the story
quicker?”
THE QUEST FOR HIP, THE QUEST FOR PC
Valuable Lessons
43
Everything on TV (and from my very brief forays into movies I’d say this applies
there in Armani-suited spades) aspires to hipness. God forbid you should put last
year’s word-of-the-moment into the mouth of a favorite character. Then, when the
show goes into syndication, the word will be five years out of date instead of four.
Even pointedly un-hip characters – characters whose whole point is
that they aren’t hip – have to have their dialogue peppered with “more
current phrases, please.” Because as we know if people hear a grandfather
on TV say “Great!” instead of “Stylin!” they change channels. This may be
why the characters in kids’ animation have such mad props and be alla time
specifyin’ they skillz up in this piece.
Never mind that hip ages like potatoes. An audience, to hear a movie
or TV exec describe it, is a block of people united in their abhorrence of
anything remotely passé.
I was never hip. No writer I know was hip. Hip people don’t become
writers, they become fashion consultants or drug smugglers. Briefly,
probably, Joe Eszterhas was hip. A writer friend, Lisa Rosenthal, has a
theory: no real comedy writer went to his or her prom. There’s a sly
tautology in there: if you went to your prom does that mean you can’t write?
But you get the sense of it, and I’d say it’s pretty close. The hippest people
on a sitcom staff are the standup comics and they’re the ones who can’t to
save their lives sit down and type out a joke. They’re not writers, they’re
rememberers.
On W.I.T.C.H. the character Blunk, a four-foot-tall green
ungrammatical smuggler from another world whom we’d created for the
series, was not allowed to use any un-hip phrases, the idea being that
children would be more interested in him if he said stuff like “Blunk be da
bomb!”
The opposite of hip or cool is caring; concerned; interested. A
character who is interested in anything, who cares about anything, is not
cool, and therefore not hip. So the only characters who know anything in
TV, who ever have a fact at their fingertips, are dweebs or nerds. Which is
becoming especially problematic at the singular Disney Channel, since the
behavior and dialogue of nerddom are ubiquitous in children’s TV for
humor, but Standards And Practices forbids the use of the N-word. “If you
are going to use this sequence, please also show a maladapted and intelligent
child in a socially positive context.” In other words, show a nerd who,
because he’s accepted by his peers and never laughed at... isn’t a nerd.
The Quest For Hip rides behind the Quest For PC on a very uneasy
horse. The same studio that let us develop two shows, Pelswick and Quads!,
Valuable Lessons
44
around the art of handicapped cartoonist John Callahan, wouldn’t let us use
the words “crippled” or “disabled.” Check out John’s cartoons to see where
he stands on PC. It was with some queasiness that Canada’s CBC even let
the character refer to himself as “permanently-seated.” You want the
hipness of Callahan’s caustic and edgy humor but you don’t want to joke
about being handicapped. We had a car cut Pelswick off and pull into a
Handicapped Only space. When the able-bodied driver jumped out to use
the ATM, Pelswick said, “Hey, buddy, mentally handicapped doesn’t
count.” We had to cut it. The physically handicapped can’t mention the
mentally handicapped. Even in their euphemized form they don’t exist.
But only ten years ago, “disabled” was the euphemism for crippled.
And fifteen years before that there was a Crippled Civilians down the street
from my house.
We can’t say retarded in kids’ TV today, but not so long ago retarded
(from the French, for Belgian) was the euphemism for stupid. Retarded was
replaced by mentally disabled, and that got pushed out by developmentally
disabled. I think we should go back to stupid. “Who’s in this classroom?”
“Oh, this is the stupid kids.” “All of them?” “No, just the stupid ones in
sixth grade. The real morons are up front.”
I love a line that I heard the late Al Waxman deliver on a telethon in
the 1980s: “Remember... the middle syllable of disability is Able.” Four
howlers in only eight words: Able isn’t a syllable... it isn’t in the middle...
those four letters aren’t actually even in the word... and even if they were, so
what? The last syllable of uncool is Cool. The first two syllables of
talentless are Talent. The last syllable of Fuck You is You. This quote came
to mind because it’s the sort of bullshit that drives John Callahan up the wall
(if John could actually drive up the wall. I don’t think he can even lean on
the wall), but it’s the thinking that prevails at the networks to which his two
series were sold.
WHERE ARE THEY?
Those who develop programs for television, who account for all the new
shows’ existence at the annual TCA (Television Critics Association)
meetings in L.A. or New York, often say they’re open to any new thing they
feel the public might be turned on by. Innovation. Stuff we haven’t seen on
TV until now. Push that envelope. We’re the network that takes chances.
We’re always looking for talent. (No, they’re always looking for latent).
Valuable Lessons
45
We wanted to give it a twist, do it from a new angle. We told everyone this
year to think outside the box. Mix things up. Take a few wild swings, see
what happens.
So where are the high-IQ characters on TV who aren’t also socially
inept?
Where are the single people with poor or no relationships?
Where are the characters who have three or four, or even two major
interests in their lives? Where for that matter is the person who is
consistently interested in anything other than sports, beer, sex and money?
Where are the poor people who slowly work their way to wealth
instead of inheriting it or winning it in a lottery like Malcolm and Eddie or
Roseanne?
Where are the socialists?
Where are the highly-admired bullies? A 2004 UCLA study revealed
that schoolyard bullies are actually popular with their peers and, contrary to
everything you see on TV, they have the lowest rate of emotional problems.
(We had a highly-admired bully on Ned’s Newt, but you haven’t seen that.)
Where are the men who offer to help a woman build or assemble
something and who succeed? Or the women (Ellen being the exception)
who do so and fail?
Where are the mentally ill Chinese guys?
Where are the families engaged in ongoing frustrating disputes with
insurance companies, HMOs, Boards Of Education, local government?
Where are the unattractive middle-aged people trying to figure out
why or where their lives turned out so horribly wrong?
Where are the men or women involved in ongoing labor disputes?
When has a boys’ sports team ever beaten a girls’ team?
Where are the Jewish families, orthodox or non? With only 5.8
million citizens, who’s more of a minority in the U.S. than the Jews? There
are more Mormons in America, for Moroni’s sake. And where are the
Mormons for that matter, God bless their underage-niece-marrying souls?
Where are the white characters who continually get the better of a
minority character? This is the kind of argument right-wingers make, no?
But what does it say of the idées recues of a society that a network will only
air an episode of a comedy in which the woman shows her husband how to
start a fire, or how to jack up a car or erect a camping tent?
It says they think it’s funnier that the woman can do it.
Think about that. They wouldn’t air a show in which the punchline
was that an athlete can outrun a couch potato. Or that a Harvard grad outSATS a self-educated guy who grew up on a farm. (The Simpsons is a
Valuable Lessons
46
whole separate case... and it’s close to miraculous, considering how much
money it’s made Fox, and how much the other networks like money too, that
it hasn’t been more widely imitated in half-hour comedy. Their secret: no
network notes. Ever. Do you know what Fox did to help the show in its
first two years? Nothing. They hated it.)
In other words, they think having the woman fix the tire is so
obviously unlikely that to show it will provoke laughter. They are saying,
“We all know women are incompetent at this, let’s turn things on their head
in this one instance for a big wacky guffaw!”
Except, over the years, that one instance has become every instance,
and the comedy has worn off like the outside of a Tic Tac.
A friend in Berlin emailed me one day to ask, “Why are all the judges
in American shows black women?” I told him they aren’t, but I could see
what he meant. It kills two birds with one casting decision to make the
symbol of probity and wisdom a black female. Two subjugated groups in
one; she doesn’t have many lines and she barely has to be able to act.
When I studied journalism, besides my regular classes I had a weekly
quota of three news stories. If I fell behind, which was weekly, I used to go
to Toronto’s Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, or to Coroner’s Court,
a Deportation Hearing, or to the regular Criminal Courts building, and watch
a trial. My only familiarity with trials, criminals, lawyers and judges had
been through television and the movies. When you think about it, by the
time you’re old enough to serve on a jury you’ve watched – what? – a
thousand hours of drama set in courtrooms? A Civil Action alone felt like
ten hours. And another 3,000 hours watching police officers, perps, arrests
and bookings, interrogations, confessions. Unless you’re a former child star
the chances are that’s been your sole exposure to the criminal justice system.
All of what you think of as your instincts about how guilty people look and
behave, about the persuasiveness of the innocent and the veracity of experts
and witnesses, has come from stories concocted and edited to fit the
programming and story requirements of Hollywood: the telegraphing of
clues to provide suspense; the close-up of the accused to emphasize his or
her culpability or righteousness, the elimination of redundancy, conflicting
evidence and overcomplication in order to streamline stories.
But when I got into those courtrooms with real defendants, in nearly
every case I had absolutely no idea what was going on. The prosecuting
attorney would speak and I’d think, hang the guy. But when the defense
attorney rose I could always see his client was innocent – at least until the
prosecutor stood again. Real trials demand a simultaneous participation and
suspension of judgment that no TV show or movie demands of its
Valuable Lessons
47
audience... with the consequence that at no time in her life does the first-time
juror undertake any new enterprise with so confident yet so mistaken an idea
of what’s about to be demanded of her.
I consider it highly likely that much injustice results from the public’s
exposure to Story in the Robert McKee sense, because it irons out
complexity.
- The Manhattan Beach Preschool trial – the longest and most
expensive in America’s history, and arguably the most ruinous to a
group of wholly innocent people – wouldn’t even have reached the
pee-pee photographing stage if, among the thousands of hours of
fictional criminal proceedings they’d seen, everyone involved had
been exposed to the unsexy concepts of veridical and implanted
memory, particularly with regards to malleable children’s minds. *
But these details uncut the linear drama of Story.
* (Nor would the tragedies described in Capturing The Friedmans and Moira
Johnston’s book “Spectral Evidence.”)
- There might not be a quarter of a million Americans whose lives
and dinner conversation have been ruined by alien abductions if
they’d heard of hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. But
those clinical terms explain common sleep delusions and don’t
serve the necessary Story elements of science fiction. (Texas
multiple murderer Charlie Starkweather believed an angel was
ordering him to kill people. His account of those visions is a
classic clinical description of a hypnopompic state with sleep
paralysis.)
- There’s a frightening and sad web site, mindcontrolforums, whose
thousands of suffering contributors might be seeking professional
help instead of trying to find who implanted the governmentcontrolled microchips in their brains if they’d learned one or two
facts about the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia for every
twenty times they’ve watched a movie like The Manchurian
Candidate or a show like The X Files.
If television were to tell all our stories – and God knows there are enough
channels to fit them all in – without so much modification to suit the
dramatic whims of three or four dozen Dartmouth MBAs who’ve taken a
UCLA night course on Story Structure, we’d all be better prepared for
Valuable Lessons
48
tackling life, instead of being bubble-wrapped against its sometimes jolting
incongruities.
TV COMEDY IS SO LIBERAL...
Traditionally, comedy has arisen from, or alongside, liberal instincts. Swift,
Chaucer, Dickens, Voltaire, Twain. George Ade, Stephen Leacock, Dorothy
Parker, George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley. Shaw, Heller, Roth, Thurber.
Monty Python, George Saunders, Randy Newman, The Onion. Can you
think of an outstanding humorist of the last 2,000 years who didn’t mock
tradition, the stuffy, the inflexible, the uncharitable?
Okay P.J. O’Rourke. Dennis Miller. Arguably, curmudgeon par
excellence Ambrose Bierce and Nazi-admirer H.L. Mencken. O’Rourke and
Joe Queenan are the only widely-read contemporary conservative humorists
who are laugh-out-loud funny. I can’t judge Harry Shearer’s Le Show
because even though I come across it every now and then I vowed ten years
ago to turn it off every time Harry said “Yessir ladiesandgentlemen...” so
I’ve never heard more than twenty seconds of it.
Dennis is at root a very smart hipster who flipped to Republicanism so
he could tell fag jokes in public. (Garry Shandling told me, “Dennis will go
anywhere he thinks is ‘cool.’”) O’Rourke and Queenan are, often as not,
mocking the petulant trendy “open-mindedness” of the Received Opinion.
America is nowhere near as liberal today as it was in the 1920s, but modernday conservative humorists and people like (the horse-faced and thus
appropriately-named) Anne Coulter for some reason feel as though foolish
liberal pieties dominate the nation’s thinking and require constant
remediative counterstatement.
But they don’t. I’ve spent twenty-seven years living in other
countries. America is a damned conservative place. Any of the four
countries in the modern world that still executes children (Iran, Nigeria, the
Congo, the U.S.) is not a place on the verge of going all touchy-feely. Joe
and Dennis and P.J. have spent so long among the intelligentsia they think
(or pretend to think) that reading Jacques Derrida is the country. It’s not; it’s
just their former friends. Most modern “hip” conservative humorists are still
in their hearts potshotting 1960s hippies. Guys, unless you live in Vermont
the hippies are gone. Pretending they run things and require close watching
is like calling Microsoft a communist enterprise because they give away free
software updates. Attacking easy targets like Red Lobster and North Korea
Valuable Lessons
49
is to conservativism what Up With People was to pro-Vietnam patriotism, or
what a “free personality test” is to Dianetics. Get them in the tent with stuff
nobody can argue, then sell them the horse liniment.
Mallard Fillmore’s balding college professors; network anchormen;
actors – this isn’t the country. Those people, wisely or not, are commenting
or reporting on the country, and the neo-cons are commenting on them –
they’re the third derivative in the political calculus, excoriating people who
are themselves merely pointing out that a whole bunch of stuff is seriously
effed up.
Liberalism is the little guy fighting the big guy. It’s the little guy
wanting a raise, wanting his grandchildren to have clean air and water,
forests to hike in and dinner chicken without too much thallium in it. (Isn’t
it weird that the only thing Conservatives don’t want to conserve is what
Conservationists want to conserve? How much more Traditional can you
get than forests, clean water and air, a wider species pool and untouched
wilderness? These things predate The Family by millenia.)
Liberalism is the little guy wanting all those things... but sitcoms is
him bizarrely getting them. Incrementally, perhaps, one day at a time, but
the little guy comes out on top. And that’s a whole different thing, leading
me to another sweeping generalization:
AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT IS A LIE
A thing is entertaining to an American audience in inverse proportion to its
truth. This flies in the face of common opinion, including I presume that of
comedian Rick Reynolds who had a CBS pilot in 1992 based on his stage
play Only The Truth Is Funny. The play was about death and suicide. I
knew the line producer; the pilot made people in a test screening cry. Yeah
that’s what you want in a comedy. There’s America’s contribution to
humor, right there.
The phrase “to an American audience” is a crucial part of my
sweeping generalization. Australian, British and Canadian audiences will
enjoy a movie, play or TV show that amusingly articulates their pessimism.
Only in America will a show be felt incomplete if strength isn’t ultimately
drawn from illness, wisdom from error, love from antipathy, freedom from
oppression, insight from cancer.
Imagine a shelf of The Great Books. Two thousand volumes, their
titles familiar to everyone who doesn’t work in TV. Now, how many of
Valuable Lessons
50
those volumes have the ultimate message Everything Works Out? Those
that do are probably of a religious or other ideological bent. A few of the
classics – “Candide,” “Erewhon” – were written expressly to ridicule blithe
cheerfulness.
Novelists are driven to write by the need to sort out an internal
warring of discordant feelings and ideas about matters not easily
summarized, particularly not summarized with bouncy endings. The
conservative has always said, “This is how it is and that’s final,” while the
liberal, the novelist, the journalist, was saying, “No, no, look – there’s more
to it than that.” (The late comedian Bill Hicks said in a 1993 interview,
“The comic is the guy who says ‘wait a minute...’ as the consensus forms.”)
Can you imagine a novel written by Deepak Chopra? It’d read like a
smugger Dianetics.
But that’s the way sitcoms, and many movies, are written. The
“lesson” concluding every run-of-the-mill half-hour is that Cheaters never
prosper, Liars are always found out, Good ultimately triumphs.
But this is what we were fed in school and in church and, broadly
speaking, It’s Not True. All of our experience tells us it’s a comforting lie.
Sometimes it’s there not to comfort but to control us. We all in our hearts,
except for maybe John Ashcroft, know this. But American entertainment is
largely based on a group-conspiratorial agreement to pretend otherwise.
Nowhere is The Lie more blatantly on display than at Disney. Hang
around Disney long enough, in the animation department, in live action, in
features or at The Channel, and you slowly get the feeling that this isn’t so
much an entertainment company as a religion. Not in the sense that its
founder is worshipped, at least not any more. More like one of those 1970s
West Coast cults which sucked in troubled teens and lost adults and
encouraged them to give up their possessions, change their names, sign over
their cars and surrender their will to the Collective. If you disagreed with
the Collective, it was like telling Stalin that people outside were hungry.
Eventually all you had left Inside were the true acolytes and the day workers
necessary to keep the furnaces running.
Look at the unique set of network-imposed criteria that constitute the
Disney Outlook. Most humor that isn’t juvenile in the pejorative sense
(because I love a lot of juvenile humor) is based on the observation of
another’s, or even our own, momentary discomfort or displacement. Twain
wrote, “The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow.” Audiences
laugh because they recognize the truth of comments or depictions that say,
“They want us to believe the world’s a happy perfect place in the following
respect… but don’t we all know in our hearts it’s really not?”
Valuable Lessons
51
But the Disney Corporate Outlook is that the world is a perfect, happy
place. Where does that leave you? What is there left to comment on?
Taken to an extreme this can be insidious, because it not only is less funny –
my selfish concern when writing – but it’s also a big old fib, and, except in
the obvious cases when obscenity or the revolting and disturbing are kept off
the screen, or if you own stock in the company, it’s not even a helpful fib.
The young audience isn’t invited in to share what the adults know, to be
shown that their own feelings, discoveries and fears about life are valid.
Instead they’re told repeatedly that whatever misery or incongruity they
observe around them every day not only isn’t unfair, it’s simply not the case.
This lie batters developing minds. It tells children that what they see isn’t
happening, that what they hear isn’t said; that the unusual and painful things
they feel are unique to them. This is why you have so many fat unhappy
thirty-year-old women who are only comfortable when they’re at
Disneyland. They’re back in the Womb Of Lies.
Even one-year-olds laugh when a cartoon puppy slips and falls down,
because things are not supposed to fall down, but they already know things
and people do. Eight-year-olds laugh at farts, peeing your pants, hitting
stuff, rudeness, noticing the imperfections of parents, laughing at the
misfortunes of others. In short, all the things that Disney doesn’t allow to be
mentioned, which Disney implies by omission (and kids are more perceptive
than us) in show after show are invalid, incorrect, even shameful feelings.
Why else would children’s own experiences never be mirrored in their
entertainment?
The audience seeking this kind of show for themselves or their kids
wants two things: reassurance and comfort. But true comedy only provides
either of these to the cynic, in echoing his or her feelings about the way
things really are. If the audience is (or is presumed to be) uncynical, then
the only way comfort and reassurance can be conveyed about the common
things we all experience and endure is through artful mendacity. At Disney:
Gender differences don’t exist. The fact that we have sexual desires
that embarrass us, that make us act foolishly and contrary to our best
interests; the major driving force of our lives, is nowhere to be found. Even
the most obvious gender differences are eliminated or, more commonly,
reversed. If you have a tough brave fireman in a script? Gotta be a woman.
We wrote a live-action Disney pilot where one teenage boy tells another he’s
sorry he’s going to miss a class pool party, because a lot of the girls have
“grown in interesting ways” over the summer. The note from Disney:
“Boys this age don’t notice those sorts of things.” Are they out of their
rectum-inserted minds?
Valuable Lessons
52
Human frailty is downplayed. As someone once said, “We are made
to be immortal yet we die. It’s a joke; it can’t be taken seriously.” But there
is no death or permanent weakness on Disney. And handicapped characters
(that word will be gone in fifteen years, replaced by yet another euphemism.
The mobility-impinged. Les moins-verticales) are not less capable than their
friends, they’re uniformly more so. (The same with bestial frailty: you
cannot say in a Disney show that the meat we eat comes from animals.)
The dumb crude bullies on W.I.T.C.H. couldn’t peel gum off a seat
and eat it. They couldn’t be cruel to other characters in most ways that real
and recognizable bullies are; in the ways every child recognizes.
Differences in other people are funny and fascinating, especially to
children. The fat, the blind, the stuttering, the halt and the lame; ethnic
minorities; the congenitally stupid; foreigners and their odd clothes, food
and customs. This is fully half of what Standards And Practices exists to
eliminate. *
* (The habit has spread to affiliated industries. The Microsoft Word software on which
I'm writing this has a handy thesaurus, offering up synonyms for the word-stuck typist.
But if you Shift-F7 “dumbass”... or even “ass” or “dumb” separately... or “idiot,”
“moron,” “fool,” “simpleton” or “imbecile,” you’re told Not Found. They must not be
looking where I’m looking.)
This isn’t just Disney. In one episode of Ned’s Newt, Ned went to the
Peruvian jungle. (This episode had one of my favorite gags: Ned’s pet
newt, dangerously piloting an antiquated single-engine plane, holds up a
map back-to-front, points at the word PERU, visible backwards through the
paper, and says, “Look, we’re in Europe already!”) Anyway, this being
Peru, we had dark-skinned natives, who addressed Ned as “Señor.” Not
according to Fox. “Please remove the racially sensitive Señor.” Honest to
Christ. And they paid the animation company extra to re-do the episode’s
color scheme to lighten the natives’ skin. Because, you see, it’s shameful to
be Peruvian. Had they been Austrian, parchment-white, worn lederhosen
and said “Mein Herr” no change would have been requested. In one episode
of W.I.T.C.H, we had to remove the phrase “Chinese girl,” when used to
describe... a Chinese girl. Four episodes later we had a Swiss girl who was
identified as such half a dozen times. No objection. Because it’s not
shameful to be Swiss but it’s shameful to be Chinese. The nationalities they
object to you mentioning form a Rorschach test of the PC attitudes towards
minorities (or, in the case of the Chinese, majorities): Canadian, English,
Valuable Lessons
53
Australian: fine. Japanese, Indian, Jewish, African: please step away from
the vehicle.
LESSON: Tread carefully when writing minority and female
characters, who are always seen as representing a constituency, and in
whom flaws or frivolity are seldom tolerated.
After the animated pilot of The Wayneheads was delivered to the WB,
a lot of money was laid out to send it back and have the characters’ lip size
reduced. Now, caricature involves the exaggeration of prominent
characteristics, no? A big forehead, a large nose, pointy ears… none of
these are offensive, but large lips were a no-no. Were the network folks
saying black folk don’t have larger lips than whites? No. They were just
saying it was offensive to point that out. But it’s not offensive to point out
that Eskimos have almond-shaped eyes, that the French have aquiline noses,
that the English have bad teeth? No. Why not? We’ll get back to you on
that.
Likewise animation S+P departments cut references to body shape
only if they personally think it would be shameful to be that shape. So you
can say tall but you can’t say overweight. You can say “the girl with the
small nose” but you can’t say “the girl with the large nose.” You can point
out the skinny boy. You see where I’m going. The censors are making a
judgment about what it would be unpleasant to be. Chinese and fat with a
massive honker. (Just try saying the word fat at Disney. If you even
whisper it in the halls I think someone pulls you into a supplies cupboard
from behind.)
And in the cases quoted above we weren’t even playing with the idea
of race. Take this example from Nickelodeon’s Pelswick: Pelswick
Eggert’s town is experiencing power shortages and consequent electrical
shut-downs, and his très-PC university teacher father mentions the looming
possibility of brown-outs, correcting himself – “I’m sorry, I mean Outs Of
Color.”
Verboten. So we sighed and removed the joke, leaving only his fear
of brown-outs, which was necessary for plot reasons (the town’s budget has
been plundered by a charlatan and they lose their electricity). Again, it came
back, “Racially sensitive phrase, please remove.” We tried blackouts. They
claimed never to have heard of them. We protested this was a real term, it
was in the papers every day – this was the pre-Enron-scandal summer of
California power outages. No go. The color brown, the color black, were
shameful.
Valuable Lessons
54
But when Pelswick corrected his homework we had no trouble saying
“Wite-Out.”
In 2004, two friends of mine wrote an episode of Nick’s Little Miss
Spider in which the bark goes missing from some trees. The characters go in
search of the culprit. The first bugs they question are, logically, the bark
beetles. Nickelodeon’s educational consultant said this had to go because it
demonstrated “unacceptable racial profiling.” But back to Disney:
Incongruity makes us laugh because our sense of order has been
assaulted. But it’s semi-sophisticated and requires a prior agreement on
what the “ordered” situation might be. And sophistication of any kind is
“not kid-accessible.”
Wit, a la Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Groucho Marx, is also
considered too sophisticated for an American audience. It’s usually
dependent on clever wording, and American TV execs are terrified of words.
They don’t, however, seem to have a problem with teeth-grindingly awful
wording if it serves the agenda. In one episode we had a tween talking about
some volunteer work, saying “We’re gonna go to the retirement home and
fix old ladies’ hair.” We had to change this to “fix female senior citizens’
hair.” That’s catching the way kids speak, huh?
Whimsy is a cultural thing that just doesn’t play here. Americans are
like Germans or Swedes in this respect: “Please now explain to me what
this sentence means and why a person would say it.” So instead of Monty
Python we have Jay Leno: de-politicized “satire,” which is to real satire
what Reddi-Wip is to cream.
Age, infirmity: no way. The elderly wake up in the morning (when
they do wake up) only to show they’re just as agile and trend-wise as
everyone else.
We’re left with mild violence, puns and wordplay, the stuff Henri
Bergson in 1900 said aroused laughter because it shows free men acting like
machines; copying instructions instead of thinking; seeking patterns in
syllables and syntax instead of in reality.
But this is something nobody encounters in real life unless they work
with the mentally ill. I mean, the cognitively remarkable.
Which is why it’s tough writing for Disney. And probably why a lot
of the hardworking men in animation seem to have an extra x chromosome.
The pay isn’t great; the hours are long, the thanks few and far between. In a
job like that you need people who believe in the magic. You want guys who
get out of their cars in the morning singing “When You Wish Upon A Star.”
You need priests of the religion, not ordinary workers – people who believe
Valuable Lessons
55
that if they click their heels magic will rain down and save their
straightforward and unremarkable days.
ADVICE TO ASPIRING TV WRITERS
The difficulty people have with writing, as with diets, isn’t finding good
advice that works, it’s sticking to it. To lose weight: eat less and exercise
more. To write: write.
Be active, be alert, be awake, read the paper, read everything. Read
books of quotations. They may not tell you what people think but they will
tell you what people repeat.
Check out Hemingway’s quote about the bullshit detector. If you
believe in crystal healing, neurolinguistic programming, astrology,
homeopathic medicine, dowsing, telekinesis, ancient astronauts, creationism,
channeling... please don’t try to be a writer. You’re not capable of the
analytical thought required. Get a job in one of those places that sells
scented candles and tiny skeleton triptychs from Sinaloa.
Early on, take every writing job no matter how small or non-paying.
There are few things sadder than a thirty-year-old with one thing on her
resume, unless it’s Queen.
Save your money, save your money, save your money.
Don’t plaster your script pages or covers with paranoid possessory
exclamations. Nobody in Hollywood is looking to rip off “The Summer I
Became A Woman” by Jill Hunklestern, copyright Jill Hunklestern,
registered with the Writers Guild Of America and the U.S. Patent Office.
Mere ideas are even less needful of protection. Even if you had come up
with the idea for American Idol, complete with detailed sketches of the set, a
full production rundown and sample catty Simon Cowell put-downs, nobody
would have bought the idea off you because networks don’t buy ideas, they
buy the package that includes you and your experience, and the production
entity and all of its failures.
The purpose of a spec script isn’t the same as the purpose of a script
for a show when you’re on staff. Those get contorted into their final on-air
contours by a hundred forces, only one or two of which have to do with
making a better program. This actor wants more lines, that one’s never
heard of burlap, this one had an aunt who died in a plane crash and doesn’t
like the airline joke, and on and on.
Valuable Lessons
56
The spec exists for one purpose, to make the person reading it, who’ll
probably read three or four before it and another three or four after, think “If
I’d had this guy on staff last week he could have saved my ass.” Period.
There’s no other reason to read a spec, there’s no other reason to write one.
You want to blow the competition out of the water – prove to a (usually
talented, overworked) individual that it’s worth their time to call your agent,
argue over your billing and your second-season salary bump, find you an
office and buy or bootleg a copy of whatever software you’re currently
cursing at. They have to be actively worried that some other showrunner is
reading your script right now and calling your agent right now and will get
you first if they don’t act fast enough. That’s what you should be thinking
with every scene, with every line, with every bit of description.
Don’t write lots of cutesy “nothing” dialogue (“You’re kidding.”
“Why would I kid?” “I’m saying you’re kidding.” “You’re calling me a
kidder?” “I’m not calling you a kidder, I’m just saying you’re kidding.”)
Ever since Mad About You and Seinfeld, shows are full of this stuff, but
writers don’t write it. The actors ad-lib it during rehearsal so they can feel
“creatively involved,” and the Script Co-ordinator dutifully pencils it in and
hands the Stage Changes to the showrunners after rehearsal and tells them
the new wording makes the actors happy, and they sigh and type it in and
you see it on air. But it doesn’t need a writer to write it, and the ability to
write it won’t get you a job.
BEING PROFESSIONAL
In 1982, Mark Schekter, then running TV Variety at CBC-TV in Toronto,
took a meeting with us. Mark was a produced writer (the stage revue
Toronto, Toronto) who talked for the first half hour of his own work, both in
Canada and L.A., then asked what we wanted from our careers. I began,
“Well, mostly to do good, professional work.”
“Uh-huh. So tell me, what’s your definition of professional?”
Darrell and I looked at each other. “I guess, I don’t know, having
high standards of quality within our field...”
Mark shook his head, “Uh-uh. The number one definition of
Professional is making money. If you don’t make money, you’re not a
professional.”
Mark’s revue was then in its umpteenth month on stage and I guess he
was making money but I wasn’t sure what his point was. “Okay, we want to
Valuable Lessons
57
make money too, of course, but a lot of writers who aren’t all that good seem
to be making money, and what I’m saying is, it’s more important to us to do
a good job, to achieve a professional level...”
“Stop!” Mark stood, hoisted a heavy dictionary and threw it into in
my lap. “Professional: look it up!”
A few years later I would have clouted him with it – there are few
things I hate more than assholes who have to humiliate someone to feel big –
but we needed work and in Canada in 1982 that meant the CBC, CTV, or
selling fake Gilles Villeneuve relics on Montreal sidewalks. I opened the
dictionary and thumbed through it: “It’s basically what I said – adjective,
meaning having a high standard of...”
“Skip down. Under that.”
Definition Two was along the same lines: maintaining a level or
standard approved by the experts in a particular...
“Keep going!”
I got to “making a living, earning money from...” down around
definition four.
“There!” he trumpeted.
I pointed out, “But mine was definition number one. Yours was
fourth.” Mark took his dictionary back and that was the end of the meeting.
We never worked at CBC Variety.
AGENCIES + PACKAGING
Most young writers think the way into the business is through an agent.
There may be writers who’ve done it this way but I suppose there are also
people who got into air traffic control via prostitution. Agents want proven
properties and if you need them to get work, as a rule they don’t want you.
So the business transaction that will, you hope, end with a big agency
conning employers that they really need you, begins with you conning the
agency likewise.
I landed in Los Angeles in 1983 with only Canadian credits. Darrell
and I had sheafs of written material, but it was tough getting anyone to read
it. People hate reading; it’s the Pilates of thinking. We hooked up with a
comic-turned-manager named Jackie Kahane. (Years later, when radical
Zionist Meir Kahane was killed by extremists, or counter-extremists
depending on your political philosophy, I showed the headline to Darrell and
said, “They shot the wrong Kahane.”)
Valuable Lessons
58
Jackie took us on because he needed stuff done around the office. He
either had forgotten or we out of pride didn’t tell him we had no car. He
used to call us for a meeting and we’d get dressed up – not having yet
noticed that the L.A. dress code is whatever you woke up in – and walk the
five miles to his office. One time he called us in because he didn’t know
how to change the ribbon in his typewriter. Who better to call than a pair of
writers? We changed it and walked the five miles back. Another time, he
needed his wife’s car driven to Casa de Cadillac in Sherman Oaks for a
tuneup and wanted us to follow him in his car and bring him back. (“Can
you drive an Automatic? Ba-doom!”) On a third occasion Jackie promised
to hand our resume to a friend of his, writer Harry Crane, domiciled in
Beverly Hills. He swept us into his vehicle and cruised over Sepulveda into
the 90210. We toured up and down Sunset and Crescent Heights and Santa
Monica and twisty little hilly roads for the better part of an hour before
Jackie admitted goddamit he had no idea in hell how to find his friend’s
house and dropped our resume in a mailbox.
In his office Jackie had three photos of himself with Elvis. He’d
opened for The King in the 1970s. It wasn’t until we’d visited three or four
times and done everything but wax his desk that we realized they were all
the same picture, one flopped backwards, one printed in black and white,
and one cropped from Jackie’s neck up. On another occasion I noticed that
in the wall of books behind Jackie’s head there was one volume pulled out
about an inch as if for ready reference – “Here’s To The Friars!” by Joey
Adams. I knew that book, and many of the others; it was the only one I’d
read that mentioned Jackie by name.
I don’t know why Jackie took us on. He as much as told us he didn’t
like our material. Tom Finnigan, a funny writer who also briefly fell into
Jackie’s web, says Jackie used to hold Tom’s pages up to his ear and
dolefully wheeze, “I don’t hear... the laugh.”
Considering that Jackie had appeared as a standup on The Tonight
Show, we thought he might have an in with Carson. We wrote some
Carnacs and other Carsonesque material but Jackie didn’t care for it and told
us that besides, everyone in town knew the money on Carson was no good.
A year or so later, with an extra push from new friend and manager
Ted Zeigler, we found two receptive agents at Writers And Artists who said
they thought they could work with us. We asked again about The Tonight
Show. They said it was a tough nut to crack; nobody got hired just based on
written material. But they’d see what they could do.
For several weeks Ted would call them and leave messages – “Hi!
Just seeing if you tried The Tonight Show yet.” “Hey! It’s Ted Z! Anything
Valuable Lessons
59
from The Tonight Show? Just checking.” We weren’t signed to the agency,
we were “pocket clients,” probationary until something clicked, so we didn’t
push the relationship. Plus we’d never had an agent; we didn’t know the
protocol.
In May of 1986 Ted heard from a friend, Shelley Cohen, the Second
Assistant Bandleader for the NBC orchestra, that Johnny had let a couple of
writers go. Ted gave our jokes – the same ones we’d handed to Jackie
Kahane and to W+A – to Shelley, saying, “Hey, anything you can do…”
Three weeks later we’d been read and hired. On the day of our
interviews with Fred de Cordova and Johnny we saw the stack of material
representing the writers we’d beaten for the gig. It was two feet high. We
didn’t bother calling Jackie to tell him. Years later, he’d phone us, trying to
place clients. We read the material. We didn’t hear the laugh.
But Ted did keep calling Writers And Artists to let them know we’d
gotten the job and to begin commissioning it: “Hey, this is Ted, I got some
news, call me back!” “Hey guys! Teddy Z here! It’s about The Tonight
Show, can ya give me a ring? Bye!” (Ted, a lovable liberal paranoid,
recorded and saved not only all his messages, he taped and often transcribed
all his phone calls, incoming and outgoing.)
We’d been working at NBC for ten days when Ted called W+A and
actually got through. “Hey! Been trying to reach you!”
The agent cut him off. “I know what this is about, and I’ve gotta tell
you, we don’t appreciate you calling us every day of the week to bug us on
this, okay? Now we’re working for your clients, we’re doing what we do,
okay? But this constant hammering about The Tonight Show... we told you,
you’re not gonna take two kids right off the boat or the plane or whatever
from Canada and stick them on the Carson show. It ain’t gonna happen,
Ted. And frankly, the material you gave me, I looked at it – it’s not ready. I
wouldn’t submit it. So, sorry, but – now, apart from all that is there anything
I can do for you right now?”
Ted took a breath. “Sure. Call our lawyer.”
We got out of the Writers And Artists deal and wrote for six years on
one of the highest-paying shows on TV without paying a penny of
commission.
We still fished around half-heartedly for an agent, but it wasn’t until
1989 that we managed to sign with one. The Shapiro-Lichtman Agency on
Melrose Blvd was then right next door to Writers Guild of America
headquarters (which has since moved to 3rd Street). Agent Mitch Stein was
gregarious and energetic and sent us on a lot of meetings.
Valuable Lessons
60
After Johnny announced in 1991 that he’d be leaving in May of ’92,
Darrell and I began looking for an overall deal at a studio. At this point,
agency co-owner Mark Lichtman got interested. Mark was, quoting Stephen
Leacock, a tall cool devil. He was very smart and very motivated, because
we’d been at his agency for several years with an “exclusion” in our deal for
the most lucrative gig we had; we paid no commission for the work we did
at NBC.
Offers came in: Columbia, Spelling, Fox, Paramount, Lorimar,
Universal, New World, Warner Brothers. We took the meetings and kept
track of the dollar offers, taking to heart Glen Larson’s advice (see Defective
Detectives) that everything else in the deal would be approximately a wash.
The top two bidders to be our new best buddies were Lorimar and Fox. We
had a sitcom on Fox, Drexell’s Class, and they were interested in having us
there to work on it, rather than creating shows somewhere else to compete
with it. Fox TV Production President Harris Katleman told us that whatever
any other studio offered for an overall deal, he’d top it. We passed this info
on to Shapiro-Lichtman.
The dollar amounts inched up as Johnny’s departure date loomed.
Finally, one Friday, Mark called us in our office and said, “You’re going
with Lorimar!”
Really? Yep, fait accompli – the Warner Brothers subsidiary had
made the highest offer and if it was okay with us he’d have the deal faxed
over to NBC right away for our signatures. We were a bit surprised that Fox
hadn’t topped Les Moonves’s offer but we said okay, signed the papers and
faxed them back.
That weekend we were working at my house on a pilot when a call
came from Stu Sheslow at Fox: “So where are we on the deal? We haven’t
heard anything.” I put Stu on the speakerphone and we told him we’d
signed with Lorimar the day before, surely he’d been informed?
No, he hadn’t. Surprised, we went back to work on our script. A few
moments later Harris Katleman called. What did that cocksucker Mark
Lichtman think he was pulling? Nobody’d told Harris what Lorimar’s
Friday offer was. How much were they offering? We told him the annual
amount. I’ll match it, said Harris. I’ll top it.
Mark Lichtman had just left for a European vacation and was
“unreachable.” We got no work done that Saturday, but we did get an earful
from Fox Business Affairs. They’d made an offer on Wednesday and were
still waiting to hear a counter. How dare our agency sign us to a two-year
deal somewhere else without calling them back to let them match it? How
could we think this was in our best interests, how could we let it happen?
Valuable Lessons
61
What was Lorimar pulling? Had they by any chance offered to pay ShapiroLichtman a package fee?
Packaging. This Saturday in 1991 was the first time I’d ever heard the term
used this way. What was packaging?
In the nineteen-eighties, talent agencies, now performing many of the
services that the studios took care of in their Day Of The Locust primes –
finding stars, matching them with scripts, approaching and signing directors,
getting everyone drunk – began demanding a percentage of the shows’
budgets above and beyond the commissions from their clients. A typical
package fee might be “3, 3 and 10”: three percent of the show’s budget,
three percent of the adjusted gross, and, down the line, in the event of
phenomenal success, ten percent of the net. This was recompense for the
time and money they saved the studios by doing the legwork (really,
phonework) to provide all the elements necessary to get something made.
Large agencies that handled writers, directors and performers naturally
benefited most.
But by the late eighties some agencies were demanding and receiving
a package fee for providing one client and nothing else. You want this
client, pay us a fee. In this sense, Darrell and I, a team since forever, were
one client.
Yes, this is a form of extortion and, yes, as it turned out, Fox had
refused to pay Shapiro-Lichtman a package fee for us. Harris told Mark,
“I’m insulted that you’re trying to hammer us with a package.” He later told
our manager, “I find that really amoral, because what they’re trying to do is
ride the guys’ coattails. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Diane English,
the lady who created Murphy Brown. She discharged the Morris office
[William Morris] over this because it came out that the Morris office was
making more in commission with their package than she was getting for
producing the show...”
Lorimar however had said whatever, okay, fine.
Earlier that week, Fox had told our agency in a fit of typical studio
bravado, “This is our highest offer”... but with the understanding that if
anyone else made a higher highest offer, they wanted to hear it. Mark,
standing to make millions more by signing with a studio that was willing to
pay him an extra $35,000 a week package fee every time we got a show on
the air, didn’t tell us that he’d neglected to pass Lorimar’s offer on to Fox.
Fox Business Affairs went ballistic. They called us all weekend, they
called Les Moonves, they tried to reach Mark in France. They ordered us to
cancel the Lorimar deal and offered to pay our legal fees to get out of it. For
Valuable Lessons
62
a while, Harris Katleman refused to allow any S-L clients on the Fox lot. He
refused to sit down with Mark Lichtman: “... because he has a real hard-on
against Twentieth Television.”
But in Hollywood everyone eventually needs everyone else and,
except for the fact that we switched agencies, it all blew over. C.A.A.
charges package fees too; they just had to split them during our
Lorimar/Warners deal with Shapiro-Lichtman.
As a result of the package fee for us on The Parent ‘Hood, our agency
– both our agencies – made more money than we did. Three percent times
$800,000 per average episode budget, times ninety episodes. When a show
they package gets on the air, the agency is supposed to automatically
reimburse the client the fees that they withheld from their paychecks.
Shapiro-Lichtman co-packaged The Parent ‘Hood beginning in 1994 and we
still don’t have our commission money back. *
* (This isn’t even considering the matter of the Float. At any given moment there are
multiple millions in L.A. talent agencies’ bank accounts that they technically owe their
clients. The Network doesn’t pay the writer – by contract, it renders all monies owed to
his agency. The writer must wait for his agent to tell him said money has arrived and to
cut him a check. So banks lobby the agencies to let them carry their floats at
advantageous interest rates. And where there’s interest to be made there are laws to be, if
not broken, then massaged. L.A. agent Marcie Wright was sentenced in 2003 to a year in
jail for holding a quarter million dollars of her clients’ money for, let’s say, an
unreasonably long time. Wright repped Marc Cherry, creator of Desperate Housewives,
and was holding $79,000 of Marc’s money while she pondered the best way to use it on
his behalf.)
The biggest mistakes you can make in Hollywood involve underestimating
how people will act when there’s a lot of cash at stake. The Paul Schrader
quote at the top of this book is from an 8/13/04 L.A. Weekly story by Scott
Foundas about the making of Exorcist: The Beginning. From that same
piece, screenwriter Caleb Carr:
“You know, I had a very interesting upbringing on the Lower East
Side of New York City and I often marvel at the fact that anything can
still shock me. I have seen most of the horrible shit that people can do
to each other at very close range. Yet I am still stunned by Hollywood
people’s capacity to be dishonest. It’s just amazing.”
Nowadays I fear we also paradoxically suffer from the fact that our agency
represents so many production companies. Ned’s Newt, Pelswick, The Cube,
Valuable Lessons
63
The Temps, Ravi’s Big Life, Kevin’s Castle... on all of these recent projects
the agency negotiating our fees also represented our employer and arguably
stood to make more from those deals by persuading us to accept less –
decreasing the prodco’s costs and hastening its break-even – than if they’d
fought hard for us and notched the budgets up a bit.
This too is a tradeoff since without our hard-working agents and their
celebrity clients we wouldn’t have landed some of these jobs.
But how does any writer know his scripts are being given to actors or
directors who aren’t signed to his agency? If Lester Perfect-For-Your-Film
is repped by Mel Fogel’s Talent Barn, which means no package fee for your
guy, when you’re told that Lester passed, or refuses to read without a cash
offer, or “isn’t hot right now,” or couldn’t be reached, how do you know the
truth?
There’s a fallacy among beginning writers that signing with an agency
gives you clout. Not so; the clients give the agency whatever clout it enjoys.
These days when our agent calls us – typically, regarding a job that we
landed ourselves, often after they’d had the project for a year or more and
refused to send it out because they didn’t “respond to it” – it’s to relate the
buyer’s nonnegotiable offer.
THE CHEAPNESS OF THE RICH
L.A.’s Daily News carried a story on June 9, 2004 that said Regency
Distribution was trying to lower the money paid to Mel Gibson for his share
of The Passion Of The Christ. The film at that time had grossed $369.9
million in domestic distribution alone. Regency was trying to cut Mel down
from an agreed-upon 55% to only 34%.
Why, when there’s enormous money around, do people suddenly turn
into unreasonable skiving bastards? If the film had grossed a thousand
bucks they would have met Mel at a Starbucks and handed him his $550 in a
bag. But it earns a freaking fortune – and remember Mel’s personal
investment is what got it made – and all of a sudden 55% is too much.
Steven Brill wrote the screenplay for Disney’s The Mighty Ducks. In
fact he wrote all three outings of the successful franchise. His contract
promised him five percent of the "absolute gross that the studio receives
from exploiting unique objects and things" sold by the studio based on the
film he created.
Valuable Lessons
64
You may recall that Disney later started an NHL hockey team named
after his movie, promoted by his movie, given recognizability, hipness and a
logo by his movie... even launched by Michael Eisner with a “team quack”
taken from said movie... but which Disney, upon Brill’s filing of a State suit
for compensation in 1995 and then a Federal suit in 1999, said was unrelated
to his movie. Anaheim’s Mighty Ducks? Complete coincidence. Did we
have a movie with that name? We can’t remember. Anyhow, Disney
claims, a hockey team isn’t a “thing.”
The Mighty Ducks have grossed North of a billion dollars. Their
merchandise outsells the merch of all other NHL teams.
But if Brill’s movie had stiffed and sold only a grand’s worth of
pennants and fake-autographed pucks you think they would have begrudged
him his fifty bucks?
Basically it’s the third act of Fargo. Kidnapper Steve Buscemi,
expecting a payday of $80,000 and a car that he’ll have to split with Peter
Stormare, shoots Harve Presnell and scores an unexpected million in cash
instead. He takes Peter his $40,000... and then gets shot and woodchipped
because even with over $900,000 sitting under a snowdrift waiting for him
he just can’t bring himself to fork out twenty grand to buy the other half of a
Cutlass Sierra covered in cop blood.
A friend of ours had a job in the 1980s working for Joan Rivers. Joan,
(for whom we’ve written jokes at $7 each: “I caught Melissa in her room
playing with herself. I said if you don’t stop that you’ll go blind. She said,
‘I’m over here, Ma.’”) was headlining a Las Vegas casino, making let’s say
$100,000 a week. We wrote for Jim Stafford when he was opening for Joan,
and even the opening act was making good money, so that’s not a wild
overestimate.
When you’re headlining the hotel, you’re comped. Everything – your
massages, meals, even your gambling up to a limit – is free.
Joan used to empty the mini-bar each night and put the tiny bottles in
the closet. The next morning they’d refill it – she’d empty it again. At the
end of her engagement she called our friend, whose job it was to drive up
Interstate 15 to Vegas in a van, collect all the miniature gins and rums and
Grand Marniers and drive them back to L.A. where she and others soaked
off the labels so Joan and Edgar could give them out as holiday gifts.
Maybe when you’re making $100,000 a week, you don’t want to look
at your deposit slip the next Monday and see $98,910 written on there
because you had to eat lunch every day and pay for your own flight and a
bottle of shampoo. Maybe it kills you not to see the whole, rounded-off,
nice even hundred thou. I don’t know. But for you and me, isn’t that when
Valuable Lessons
65
you’re most generous, when you come into some money? Isn’t that when
you splash it around, treat your friends, live it up?
During her guest-hosting weeks on Tonight, Joan was provided with a
stationery closet containing paper, pens and pencils, a paper punch, rulers,
yellow pads and Glue Sticks. She did the same thing every week with this
closet. I don’t know who got the Glue Sticks for Hannukah.
Parsimony while afloat with riches isn’t limited to showbiz.
Remember when over forty States sued the big tobacco companies? The
lawyers they hired did it on a contingency of about 5%. The States won
$206 billion, otherwise known as a shitload of money, and promptly decided
that ten billion was too much to give to the lawyers who’d won it for them.
I wrote a Frank & Ernest comic strip where Frank says, “The judge
awarded my ex-wife fifty percent of everything I earn. Where am I gonna
get that kind of money?” Same logic.
Winnie the Pooh earns $1 billion a year for Disney in merchandising
and they owe the rights-holders a percentage. Perhaps you read in March of
2004 that they had a lawsuit against them dismissed because the plaintiffs
went dumpster-diving for information, but the lawsuit was over such things
as Disney announcing that for royalty purposes they don’t consider DVDs,
VHS tapes or computer software to be “merchandise.” Apparently, they’re
“broadcasting.”
There’s a principle here worthy of more detailed economic analysis:
people only get astoundingly, litigiously cheap when there’s plenty for
everyone.
ACTORS
Is one more drop of actor-bashing even going to make a plink when it hits
the already-brimming bucket? Writers love putting performers down for
their egos. Don Reo told us writer Jim Vallely was asked by John
Larroquette on the set of the latter’s eponymous show, “Jim, do you know
the difference between you and me?” Jim guessed, “I know I’m over-rated?”
They also take knocks for misbehavior: I was on a show whose star,
Alan Thicke, admired the baseball glove of a staff writer during a weekend
game and asked for it. Because he was the star. When the writer declined,
he and the other staff writers were ordered to write a baseball sketch for the
show so Alan could specify that particular glove be used in the sketch and
keep it after the taping.
Valuable Lessons
66
Bronson Pinchot ate two mutually exclusive types of food; one in the
morning and one in the afternoon. So for every “camera food day” – let’s
say for a scene in which his character grabbed a few potato chips – two
different sets of chips had to be constructed: one for the morning rehearsal
out of dried vegetable paste and a visually identical one for the afternoon
made from baked and painted tofu strips.
I had a star who insisted the receptionist fronting the office be fired
because he didn’t like to look at overweight women.
All of this can’t help but have an effect on what’s written for these
guys. How hard are you going to work to make someone look good if he
demands a parking spot for his personal trainer, forcing your car off the
studio lot and onto the street where it gets broken into by foraging epoxy
huffers?
But one of the biggest surprises I’ve had since entering Big Time
Showbiz was the discovery that Actors Can’t Act.
Out of 1,000 card-carrying actors, 800 can’t cold-read a scene, or for
that matter a restaurant menu. Some of them just plain can’t read; they skim
over, misunderstand or ignore instructions for inflection (“willingly,”
“hopefully,” “mournfully”). They can’t do accents. They cannot make you
believe the words they say are familiar to them, much less that they’re
occurring to them as they speak. All those classes they take teach them how
to break into tears or pretend to be a tree but they don’t tell them how to
pronounce “perpetual.” I just (10/04) spent ten minutes in a studio with a
director, five other performers, three other writers and two technicians,
trying to get an actor to say the word “infinite.” Ten takes, and despite
patient prodding he said “infinint” each time. There was nothing more we
could do; we had to let it go and move on. This is what the guy did for a
living.
Oddly, many actors seem not to have got the news that when they
audition for a part the people in the room judging them are the people who
wrote the words they’re reading. The writers struggled over those words and
do not appreciate someone who only got them last night changing them to fit
their idea of “what the character should say instead.” (I once auditioned Bill
Maher for a sitcom lead. The very first word out of the character’s mouth
was “Bartender!” Bill left the room to get into character, then burst back in
and yelled, “Tarbender!” To be fair, Bill did introduce himself by saying,
“You’ve probably heard around town that I’m an asshole.” Bill didn’t
recognize us – only the week before we’d cut a pre-recorded piece of his
taped for a Carson sketch called The Burbank Triangle, because he wouldn’t
read the lines on the cards and the lines he did deliver didn’t match the rest
Valuable Lessons
67
of the sketch. Bill Cosby also extemporized. Johnny said, cut both of them –
if Barry Levinson can sit there taking direction from you guys so can Bill
Maher.)
Most of this, though not in Bill’s case, is because a lot of actors are
just flat-out dumb. I once attended the rehearsal of a stage revue called
Censored Censored in which a buff twenty-ish male thespian
enthusiastically related how the wispy director had made him lie naked on
the floor while he felt his muscles – a necessary “desensitizing process,” he
burbled, for the emotionally difficult material they’d be dealing with later
on. Is this sheep-head stupid or just gullible?
Inflection. Accent. Cadence. I can sit in a room with six gag writers
and show them a line, and every single one of them, every time, will agree
on how it should be delivered. Then the seven of us can sit together and
watch half of the actors we see emphasize the wrong word. It’s frigging
uncanny. On one memorable day I watched a director spend fifteen minutes
and eight takes trying to get a guy, on entering a kitchen set, to say, “What’s
the problem in here?”
“What’s up in here?”
“No, you can’t say that because the next line is, ‘The problem is her
soup,’ It picks up from your wording, you’ve got to set that up. So it’s
‘problem.’ Okay?”
Take Two:
“What’s going on in here?”
Eight takes. After the fifth take he suggested it’d be easier to just
change the other actor’s line. He wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t stoned, he wasn’t
exhausted. He just couldn’t act.
On one series we did a standard he-forgets-her-anniversary episode,
with the very minor twist that the husband has in fact planned an
extraordinarily elaborate rooftop dinner beginning with a helicopter ride
around the city. For it to come off perfectly he has to make it across town
with the fuming wife to the helipad in let’s say twenty minutes – an easy
drive, even though he’s running a minute or two late because wifey’s so
upset. He’s standing at the bedroom window, cocky as all get-out as she
puts on her makeup... he turns his back to the audience, opens the curtains,
and there’s a BLIZZARD outside his window. The stage directions read,
He turns back to the room, sheer horror on his face. Twenty
minutes under normal circumstances is possible. Twenty minutes
in a blizzard is not.
Valuable Lessons
68
We’re pre-taping before the audience show to get a clean pass of every
scene. Our star opens the curtains – cue the blizzard – he turns back around
for the big laugh... and his face...
... is blank.
Nothing. No expression. The director stops tape. He explains we
need a look of unbridled panic, reflecting the realization that his carefullyplanned anniversary dinner is going to go down the toilet unless he can get
across town in a foot of snow with snarled-up traffic.
Take two. He opens the curtains, he turns back to the room... and he’s
smiling. A goofy little smile like he’s been hit too hard with a boxing glove,
which is probably being considered by more than one of those present.
The next time he looks like he’s trying to remember where he put his
car keys.
He couldn’t manage it. In acting terms, this isn’t even an arpeggio,
this is finding middle C. We ended up shooting the scene wide, then
cutting-in a panicked C.U. later, laboriously extracted by our director with
extensive off-screen coaching.
What kind of business is this? If you owned an upscale restaurant and
you found out your Patisserie Chef couldn’t operate the icing bag – or even
recognize it – wouldn’t you bounce him out onto the sidewalk?
THE COMEDY WALL OF SHAME
This was the title of a collage I stuck to the door of my office at NBC. It
was mostly clippings from TV Guides and the newspapers:
DIFF’RENT STOKES: In an episode
about pedophilia, Arnold and
Dudley are asked to join Horton in
his back room – drinking wine,
playing games and watching “adult
programs” on TV.
Taping of “Who’s The Boss” had to
be halted while a sobbing Tony
Danza pulled himself together...
A wrenching Designing Women
episode confronts AIDS when a
fellow decorator who’s dying asks
Valuable Lessons
69
them to design his funeral.
GOLDEN-AGE WEEPER: The Golden
Girls Sept 19 season opener is, by
all accounts, the most poignant
episode yet for the hit sitcom.
It deals with Alzheimer’s disease.
Apparently there wasn’t a dry eye
in the house at the recent taping.
In a dramatic departure for
“Growing Pains,” Alan Thicke
tackles the problem of teen
suicide.
I have a full-page ABC ad from Variety: “Tracey Gold as Carol Seaver in a very
important episode of Growing Pains.” In the full-bleed photo, Tracey is clinging to
the hand of some guy in a hospital bed with tubes up his nose.
I don’t mean to offend the hard-working people who wrote and produced
these things, but there was no very important episode of Growing Pains, okay?
And you know what? Nobody backstage, not the writers, not the producer or the
network people, was taking any of this seriously for more than a few moments at a
time. (Okay, maybe the actors.)
The Very Special Episode phenomenon is so familiar to today’s viewers,
mithridated in cheap pathos, they barely notice it.
I have nothing against messages, facts, warnings, the timely examination of
important issues. When I’m at home I read serious stuff almost exclusively, and if
I rent a DVD, chances are it’s going to be a documentary. But when did writers
start feeling that encephalitis lethargica belonged in half-hour comedies? And
what right do a bunch of twentysomething sitcom writers have to preach to
America, anyway? Or to take the one talent they have and dilute it with great
drippy gobs of something that frankly anyone can do? If I’m reading a script to
find out if I should hire someone, I want to know if they can write funny, not if
they can pen a heart-wrenching screed about conquering retinitis pigmentosa.
Because chances are they’ll research it as sloppily as they do everything else and
thereby disserve both comedy and cause.
Twenty, thirty years of this Norman Learism and it inevitably started
metastasizing into the funnies. Where you once had light observations and
funny pictures in newspaper comics, you now get stuff like:
FUNKY WINKERBEAN: WIFE TO HUSBAND: “I know how much you want
us to settle down here in Westview… have lots of kids…”
“But I’m not ready for that!”
Valuable Lessons
70
“We’re all going to die someday… but I don’t want to be
buried while I’m still alive!”
BALDO: “When I moved here after your mother passed...”
“The first thing I did was make this altar… so I could pray
for her.”
“But your father said, ‘Just no photos.’” “I think… things
have changed.” (CLUTCHES PHOTO OF DEAD WIFE)
[HOO BOY! HA HA HA! YEAH!]
LUANN: A FIRST-AID CLASS: “How many of you could deal with
broken bones, deep wounds and bleeding?” “No prob.”
“Who could clear mouth secretions and give deep rescue
breathing?”
“How about treating severe burn victims or injured
children?”
“What about death? Sometimes, despite your best efforts,
patients die.”
Death, broken bones, deep wounds and bleeding. Cue the band. And why?
Because it’s easier to write than jokes. And because of television
hammering home the message nightly that comedy is not an end in itself, it’s
only a means of sugar-coating a heart-rending message pill. Cartoon strips
are now having Very Special Episodes.
Chaplin had his pathos moments. But Chaplin was funny, goddamn
it, he’d earned the right to slack off for five minutes out of a hundred.
Where does Funky Winkerbean get off souring my breakfast? If Laurel and
Hardy needed an ending to a bit where they progressively destroyed each
other’s cars they didn’t punk out and say that Stan’s sister had Parkinson’s.
They thought of a JOKE.
NEW PROBLEMS ON THE HORIZON
In TV these days any celebrity who puts his or her name on a production
gets it made. Mel Gibson. P. Diddy. They don’t have to write it, they
don’t have to direct it, they don’t have to star in or appear in it, all they have
to do is put their name on it, and boom, like so many Hilfiger shirts, the
branded episodes start falling off the end of the conveyor belt. I read today
that Julia Roberts is going to produce a Made-For-TV Movie for the WB.
Why?
Valuable Lessons
71
In 1996, John Ratzenberger, Cliff from Cheers, directed an episode of
Pearl and according to the technical people on the show he didn’t know
what the hell he was doing: “Why’d they hire an actor? Why didn’t they
hire a director?”
In 2001 Michael Richards, Geena Davis, Bette Midler, Gabriel Byrne
and John Goodman all had sitcoms that tanked. What did this teach the
networks about putting shows on the air just because they contained a star?
It taught them not to hire Michael Richards, Geena Davis, Bette Midler,
Gabriel Byrne or John Goodman. That’s literally what they learned; they’re
incapable of generalizing from the specific, nor are they able to see that with
the right scripts any one of these actors, all talented, all funny, could have
had a hit.
The same goes with animated films. I have friends who do animation
voices for a living and whose work is drying up because now every movie
about six shrimp living in an old boot in Puget Sound has to star John
Travolta, Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Colin Farell. The thing
nobody at Disney or Dreamworks seems to realize is that no eight-year old
knows who these people are. Even adults can seldom identify them by their
voices. Lenny in Shark Tale: “That was Jack Black? You’re kidding!”
Someone in animation told me the other day about working with
Viveca A. Fox. She was either distant or unpleasant to the professional V/O
actors in the cast, and she couldn’t manage any of the nuances necessary for
voicing animation. A total drain on the show, a lot of forced politeness
because you can’t ask Miss Mucky-Muck to do nineteen takes, and you
know who got the biggest check, the heaviest studio gift basket and the
largest credit.
And now they’re all writing children’s books: John Travolta, Jamie
Lee Curtis, LeAnn Rimes, Billy Crystal, Madonna, Bette Midler, Will
Smith, Maria Shriver. Hey, how about these names: Laura Cornell, Loren
Long, Elizabeth Sayles, Kadir Nelson, Sandra Spiedel, Richard Bernal.
Ring any bells? Of course not. These are, except in the case of Travolta,
who illustrated his own story, the talented professional artists who gave
these books ninety-five percent of their shelf appeal and charm.
The acceptance rate for children’s fiction according to one publisher’s
estimate is one book in every 100,000 manuscripts submitted. Jamie Lee
Curtis’s efforts seem pretty sharp to me, but it must make 600,000 rejected
authors feel pretty punky to look at the unsold manuscript they’ve spent a
year on and know Madonna/Esther just signed a six-book contract.
Valuable Lessons
72
THEY LOVE US IN BANGALORE
The economic argument for free trade is based on something called
comparative advantage – a country should only manufacture for export and
domestic consumption those goods which it is able to make more profitably
than other nations. So if Automobistan makes hubcaps at a 400% markup
and you can only make them at a 200% markup you should lay off and
retrain your hubcap workers, import your hubcaps, and find a product or
service for which your labor force will enjoy a greater return.
By this standard the most lucrative American export is entertainment.
Nobody can make what America makes and entertain the world with it at so
small a cost relative to the profit.
But a huge percentage of the profit from hubcabs goes to hubcap
makers, hubcap foremen, factory managers, steel mill workers, factory
owners and their wives and their children and their mooching brothers-inlaw. These people fritter it away on American durable goods and the other
wide-end-of-the-spending-tree stuff that pumps the economy from the
bottom up, as water feeds the myriad microscopic root fibrules that bunch to
feed the stem.
The profits from exported movies and TV shows, however, go to five
or six multinational companies whose Chairmen and CEOs make $50million-a-year salaries, 95% of which will be socked away for whatever they
define as a rainy day. The rest goes to prestigious (= non-American) autos,
gas ranges, clothes, power boats, cheeses, wines, furniture, vacations and
mistresses. Half of it probably goes to France for Perrier, which incidentally
could be why L.A.’s air is so bad – it’s all those CO2 bubbles shipped over
from Vergèze depleting the ozone over Sherman Oaks.
The entertainment workers who are meant to participate in these
windfalls have agreed, unlike the employees in most other industries, to
delay income to which they’re entitled until that foreign money arrives. But
the labor practices and accounting methods the companies have adopted
deny that participation to all but the most conspicuous or powerful. This
sector of the American economy is growing faster than any other, it’s
recession-proof, outsourcing-proof, obsolescence-proof... and it’s doing the
core workers less absolute good per dollar earned than any other.
Even domestically, as I mention elsewhere, writers are cheated of
their fair share of the income from those DVDs on your living room shelf. I
was there when the Guild’s members made the fateful mistake that ensured
this would happen.
Valuable Lessons
73
After a 1973 strike, writers earned the right to receive extra payments
when their TV or film work was repackaged onto home video. Videotape
income for writers that year was zero. In 1973 I was in the Audio Visual
Club at school – the tape was one-inch wide and had to be wound by hand
around six capstans onto an eighty-pound machine with an exposed helical
scan head that came up to speed with the sound of a vacuum cleaner sucking
up porridge. In 1975, some friends and I rented Monty Python And The Holy
Grail on videotape. It came on a reel the size of Elizabeth The First’s neck
ruff. There was a $200 cash deposit for the machine and it took four of us
half an hour to get it hooked up to the television.
By 1974 writers realized their first income from shows released on
videotape: $15,029 in total.
In 1983 videotape revenue to writers was $4,408,510. That’s when
the Guild noticed a little fast-shuffling had been going on. The 1973
contract with the producers had clearly and specifically stated the writers’
1.2% would be based on “the worldwide total gross receipts derived by the
distributor...” of the tapes. The producers had been paying 1.2% of their
gross, one-fifth of the correct amount.
The dispute went to court. It was a slam-dunk; all we had to do was
wait for a judge who could read.
Then, in 1985, the writers’ Minimum Basic Agreement expired and
the producers in essence said, “Look... we’ll bend on a lot of this stuff and
dump some extra cash in your health fund if you drop the lawsuit over
videotapes.”
Like every proffer from the bosses, this was put to the membership for
discussion and a vote. In heated meetings at the Hollywood Palladium a
right-wing faction within the Guild who called themselves the Union Blues
militated to take the offer. The majority of the WGA’s writers, then as now,
worked in television, not in film. The Blues, whose twenty-one core
members were writer-producers earning a nice living that the strike had
interrupted, loudly argued that television shows would never sell on VHS
tapes or these “other as-yet uninvented media.” People were never going to
pay good money for copies of something they’d already seen for free on TV.
Distributor’s gross, producer’s gross, it was moot: it wasn’t worth another
week’s lost income to hold out for.
The Guild’s financial analysts and a handful of Board members and
regular members on the Palladium floor pleaded for the membership’s
forbearance – secondary-market distribution of TV programs was going to
be big, and we had the AMPTP in a contractual headlock. They spoke of
digital recording and cable delivery-on-demand; of the massive foreign
Valuable Lessons
74
market for American entertainment and the scary generality of “other
media.”
But the Blue bozos bullied and yelled and private-partied their
mistaken opinion into a Republican-style Big Lie. The producers’ offer was
accepted and we lost videocassettes and DVDs. Today when you buy a
copy of your favorite film, the writer of that film, who may have labored to
get it made for five or ten years; who described every scene, every setting,
ever actor’s nose-scratch in his or her screenplay, plus wrote all the
dialogue, gets three and a half cents.
Ironically, when videotape was first introduced in the early 1970s the
Motion Picture Association of America spent millions arguing to Congress
that the availability of programs on portable, home-playable media would
turn Hollywood into a ghost town. Instead, the technical revolution has
pumped billions into the industry and changed the way films and shows are
sold and financed. So both sides made mistakes. But only we got boned.
AND SO... THE VALUABLE LESSONS
The sheer volume of the entries that follow may create the impression that I
didn’t care much about any of them – but in fact when you write from 9:00
to 5:00 every day for this many years (with breaks for lunch and despairing)
you accumulate a lot of material. Darrell and I have always endeavored to
put the very best gag or line or piece of business we could contrive in every
empty space. Okay, on W.I.T.C.H., our only non-comedy, that was difficult.
You can’t spend an extra hour deciding how to say “Look out! Behind
you!” You just motor on through and try not to be formulaic, illogical or
lazy. Which admittedly is hard when every attempt at even the smallest
originality is met with “Kids won’t get this,” “This is confusing,” or “Please
substitute a better-known height of tree.”
A lot of these projects I cared about deeply. And even though there’s
over 130 of them they’re spread over decades and some were only a week’s
work. That leaves a lot of projects (Fungus The Bogeyman for instance, and
Super Cooper and scores not named here) with many months of tangy grief
invested.
The amounts under Earned are the grosses. I’ve used the full amounts
to give an idea of what networks or studios are in the habit of paying,
whether to an individual or a team. For my share divide by two, then
subtract 10% for the agent, 5% for a business manager and 1.5% for Writers
Valuable Lessons
75
Guild dues, unless it’s a cartoon or a reality show, which genres the Guild is
as of this writing having difficulty persuading the Association of Motion
Picture and Television Producers require writers.
When the numbers in an entry are large they’ve been puffed-up by
Executive Producing (“Showrunning”) or Consulting fees. But it’s all
writing, really, I just did some of it standing up and yelling.
THE BEGINNING: CANADA, 1978-83
We’re Only Joking was my first TV series. A brave attempt at local
programming from an independent station known more for news and
hockey, it was so low budget (my total earnings = $2,600) Darrell and I
wrote sketches around the props and costumes left over from other shows. It
was so let’s-get-this-over-with that rather than re-take it, a Sherlock Holmes
sketch once aired with the three malapropisms from the first take left intact:
“How very wod, Otson,” “Holmes, you fail to miss the obvious,” and
“They’re mardered poor Murmaduke!”
The other comedy show on the station in 1978 was Smith And Smith,
produced and owned by a gentleman who also ran the station. Smith And
Smith stayed on (Steve Smith is still playing a character from the show, Red
Green, today) and we were cancelled after Season Two. I put myself
through two years of college journalism with the proceeds – tuition was only
$400 a term – so this odd little program was a net plus.
LESSON: Unless you don’t improve, all of your early work should
embarrass you.
In late 1978 Darrell’s dad sold CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario the
idea of a series of one-hour comedy plays called the Golden Horseshoe
Theater. The Golden Horseshoe is the hydro-electric-powered densely
populated industrial crescent semi-circling the West end of Lake Ontario,
including Toronto, Niagara Falls and my home town of Oshawa. CHCH had
a mobile truck for shooting local hockey games on Saturdays but it wasn’t
doing anything the other six nights of the week. The (in restrospect, naïve)
suggestion was that there were many talented Little Theater groups in the
hundreds of small communities within a day’s drive of the studio. A onehour show was only forty-five minutes of program time, about the length of
Valuable Lessons
76
a one-act comedy. They could rehearse on their own time, and they
wouldn’t want much for doing it because they were getting free promo.
The only problem was with the type of thing you got if you hunted
around for forty-five-minute stage comedies: abridged versions of As You
Like It and Lady Windermere’s Fan. Not exactly prime-time working-man
family fare. So Darrell and I wrote a Clouseau-like farce called High Noon
For Strudels and Darwin included it with the first batch of plays sent to
Simcoe Little Theater. They picked ours and we got cracking on another
script, A History Of Near-Fatal Crashes.
Over the next two or three years we wrote twenty plays and threw
them in the pot. We had twelve chosen for production, by Little Theaters
from Whitby to Stoney Creek. They weren’t Tom Stoppard, but small-town
audiences don’t like Stoppard.
For the first show Darrell and I came along, met the cast and director,
made suggestions, clarified line readings and for some reason made
everybody very nervous. Thereafter we pretended we were on the stage
crew and hauled ladders and lights around while things got underway,
overhearing comments like, “I think the playwrights got drunk, wrote this in
one weekend and didn’t bother to rewrite it.” Point taken. (That actor was
John Sessions, later to forge a TV and film career in England.)
We went to Florida for six months to write and escape the Canadian
weather. I came back early and snuck into the audience of one of our plays,
which we’d written as a three-hander. I took a program at the door and
found it now had twelve characters. The director had taken a few liberties. I
sat there in the dark, fuming, thinking I couldn’t wait to get into real
showbiz where this sort of thing couldn’t possibly happen.
The last program in the series was an awards show pitting us against
Anton Chekhov. The View From The 64th Floor was a play about a meek
company President who’d been distanced from the day-to-day operations of
the firm bearing his name by a manipulative Vice-President, to the point
where he no longer actually knows what his company manufactures:
ELWOOD FATHER
I started twenty years ago,
pulling cars out of snowdrifts.
Before I knew it I had twelve
trucks and I didn’t know half the
drivers’ names. One morning I saw
my name on the razor I was shaving
with...
Valuable Lessons
77
Figuring his lofty position is what keeps him from knowing what his
company does or manufactures, he invites a lowly secretary from the first
floor up to his office and begins round-aboutly grilling her while pretending
to dictate memos, but she’s so low in the hierarchy she has no more of an
idea than he does.
The Cherry Orchard won for Best Director, and 64th Floor, credited to
Terence Page, won Best Play. A friend of ours, David Easden, walked up to
accept for Terrence. The moment the spotlight hit him, David began talking
about how proud “Terry” would be if only he could have been there. All it
takes is a camera and a light. (Total earnings: $10,000.)
In 1978 we sold our first sitcom spec, Screech. ($800) We wrote two
episodes set in a wacky Newfoundland newspaper office. One got produced.
Screech – in the show the name of the newspaper – is actually a brainnumbing Demerara rum whose sobriquet derives from the sound it provokes
from first-time drinkers. We were writing in Florida when it was shot,
trying to escape a Canadian winter, so I have no humiliating stories about it.
The next year we began selling cartoons; great gag training. Former
industrial psychologist Bob Thaves draws Frank & Ernest, one of the best
gag strips around. His characters don’t get cancer and they didn’t anguish
over 9/11. Frank & Ernest pop up Zeliglike in different guises and
circumstances – as bums, politicians, municipal workers, loan applicants,
park bench kibitzers and astronauts.
Frank & Ernest was also our first American sale. We’d been mailing
stuff from Oshawa all over the world for years but one day I got a check for
$105 from Manhattan Beach, California – $30 for a daily strip gag and $75
for a weekend page – with a note saying, “Nice to get good material for a
change. Further submissions would be appreciated.” I think we sent him
500 more gags the next week.
We wrote for Bob on and off for the next eight years. ($2,400 total)
The checks were rarely larger than that first one, but we kept the cartoon
writing going on the side because it was so cool to see our stuff in the paper.
We went into a pizza place one time looking for our drummer before a band
rehearsal and saw a pizza-related Frank & Ernest of ours stuck to the cash
register. I told the girl, “Hey, we wrote that!” She stared at me as if I’d said
we built the cash register. It’s hard to realize if you haven’t grown up
somewhere like Oshawa how far away Hollywood / showbiz is. It’s not just
the miles; it’s as if it’s in another dimension that human beings simply can’t
get to.
We’d been helping Darrell’s dad with local programming and he’d
recently said, “How did I know you guys are any good? The only person
Valuable Lessons
78
who’s ever bought your stuff is me.” Bob Thaves bought a lot of our stuff.
In some sense Frank & Ernest was where we got the confidence to think
writing could be a career; that we had a chance of breaking through into that
other dimension.
After cartoons: radio. The Alleged Report was a four-minute daily
news-parody, the end result of this ad in the Toronto Star classifieds in 1980:
COMEDY WRITERS NEEDED
The Comedy Bank needs experienced, talented writers for
syndicated radio show. Please call Graham Haley after 6 p.m.
or answering service 929-0516 between 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Darrell and I were twenty-two and living – barely – off joke sales to half a
dozen cartoonists and standups, and money from nightclubs and bars that
barely covered our gas to get there and play, so we badly needed another
revenue stream.
We met Graham, an energetic South African ex-pat go-getter and
actor who set up this show, arranged to pay writers $4 a gag (soon
generously upped to $6) and secured sponsorship from Carling O’Keefe
beer. We wrote the Alleged Report for six months, submitting 6,800 gags
and selling about 800. Our rents were low, but even so at six bucks a joke
we had to pound out a lot of material and beat a lot of other writers into the
scripts to keep ourselves in frozen French fries.
We began meeting every morning at 9:00 a.m. at Darrell’s to write, a
habit we’ve continued. When our brains were particularly crushed we
played backgammon-for-jokes; you had to write a gag deemed worthy of the
number you rolled before you could take your turn. A three could be a bad
pun but a double-six had to be a sure-fire six bucks. Neither of us has
played backgammon since. (Total Earnings = $4,694)
Graham’s now out of the comedy business, having become the bestselling author of the Haley’s Handy Hints books, and the only friend of mine
who maintains it’s a good idea to paint the little arrows on pill bottles with
bright red nail polish to make them easier to line up. (1995 ed., p. 182)
The Alleged Report was the first series we got sued on. We wrote a
gag about a recent humungous marijuana bust on a ship in Halifax harbor.
The punchline was something to the effect that police had been tipped-off to
the presence of the pot when rats leaving the ship asked for directions to Mr.
Burger. A small munchies joke. There was no Mr. Burger chain so far as
we knew; it was a generic name for any local meatery. But the execs in
charge of this production got talking and decided when you’re stoned you
Valuable Lessons
79
want something sweet... so they changed it to Mr. Donut, a large, wellknown national Canadian chain. Mr. Donut misunderstood the gag,
claiming we’d said their stores were infested with rats.
There was a popular one hour Saturday-afternoon kids’ radio show
called Anybody Home on the CBC at the time, great low-risk training for
beginning gag writers. We were writing individual sketches for it ($600)
when we met ventriloquist Bill Colwell and his dummy Eddie in the winter
of 1980 as he competed in a weekly talent contest at the Oshawa Holiday
Inn. Bill was a young guy, handsome, a little shy, and a little too close to his
puppet. We sold him ($160) heckler lines (“Don’t quit your day job!”
BILL: “Thanks... hey, you neither, cos we really appreciate those nice clean
toilets.”) and short thematic skits – stories about incidents that he and the
wood had supposedly experienced together. Bill also, wisely, didn’t want to
perform the same routine for the judges week after week.
A hundred and sixty bucks for material may not look like much but
it’s a brave investment for a beginning performer and one that few are gutsy
enough to make. Around this time we’d put an ad in the Toronto papers
offering comedy writing services for DJs, MCs, comics and cartoonists.
One guy called Darrell’s apartment and asked, “How much for a five-minute
routine?”
Five minutes of solid standup is not an easy thing to write. We’ve
worked with club comics who have their forty-five minutes and never
change it, they just keep retreading it year after year, changing “Alanis” to
“Avril” and “Oriental” to “Asian” as custom dictates. We decided to
lowball the guy to see if we could hook him as a regular customer. Darrell
said, a hundred bucks. The guy sucked in his breath through his teeth and
said, still inhaling, “I’llcallyouback.”
So bully for Bill. He won the next face-off, and the next, and paid us
half up front, $25, for a new bit for the grand finale, which he and Eddie
won. The prize was a trip for two to the Bahamas. Bill took the dummy.
He and Eddie still owe us the other twenty-five bucks.
LESSON: If you work for anyone who talks to wood, get your money
up front.
In 1981 we contrived to write twenty-one episodes of a Pythoninspired radio series called The Continuing Adventures Of... Adventureman!
($3,780) There have been many twists on the superhero genre – the
reluctant superhero, the teen and blind and self-doubting superhero. Our
twist: Robert Adventureman was unaware that he was a superhero; he
Valuable Lessons
80
thought he was a librarian. His assistant Addersley Ruckinson had the job of
maneuvering his adenoidal pedantic boss into place at whatever hotspot in
the world required his prodigious memory and superhuman erudition.
The first series was called Bhutan Up Your Overcoat. The second
was I Went To Killarney, But He Hid Down The Well, a.k.a. No Man Is In
Ireland. The series aired on the CBC Saturday afternoon kids’ block. The
pay was low and somehow producer John Disney contrived to get it lower
by paying us for only eight episodes of the ten-script second series.
We kept our hand in cartoon writing with a daily panel called Head
Lines ($350), generic “observational” gags for syndication, some written by
us and all drawn by Tony Jenkins: MEMBER, HOUSE OF COMMONS:
“When all is said and done, there’ll be a lot more said than done.”
NEWSWOMAN: “Neither a borrower nor a Linda Ellerbee.”
It’s interesting to watch one-liners suffuse through the culture. I still
occasionally see lines from this strip attributed to comedians and authors on
those FWD: Hey, You’ve Gotta Read This! email compendia. Darrell
wrote a line once, “The least-uttered phrase in the English language is,
That’s the Banjo-Player’s Porsche.” Ten years later he heard Richard
Thompson use it (changed to “accordionist’s Porsche”) while introducing his
band in concert. We type it in here, it comes out there…
-----------------Where It Went
THE TAXMAN: Figure a third of the earnings actually taken
as salary.
$1,666,666
When we’d been freelancing gags for a year or two to American cartoonists,
Darrell and I approached Canadian artist/writer/personality Ben Wicks, who
was a celebrity in Canada, had hosted TV series, had his own restaurant,
drew a daily panel cartoon for the front page of the Toronto Star, and was
starting a new syndicated political strip, The Outcasts. Pierre Trudeau was
just out of the Prime Minister’s seat, his ex-wife Margaret was flitting
around the world giving ex-First-Lady-rock-groupies a bad name, and Peter
Lougheed, Premier of oil-rich Alberta, was threatening, as Calgary bumperstickers said at the time, to “Let The Eastern Bastards Freeze In The Dark.”
It was a rich time for satire North of the 49th.
Valuable Lessons
81
Ben needed Outcasts gags and asked how much we charged. We said
the standing rate in America seemed to be 25% of what the cartoonist made.
Sitting in the Celebrity Club on Jarvis St. in Toronto, Ben, an enormously
good-humored pixie of a man, laughed out loud and chuckled in his thick
Cockney accent, “Twenty-five percent of what I make! You really would be
makin’ a good living!”
Ben called us the next day. Apparently he’d been unaware that his
syndicator was not paying him the same for The Outcasts as for his popular
daily panel. He was getting only $25. Ben eventually paid us a whopping
$10 per joke and we sold him nineteen strips.
We continued working for the Comedy Bank: roasts, banquets,
sample chapters for proposed books, speeches, audition scripts, demo reels,
radio sketches, posters, bumper stickers. Every sale, no matter how small or
undignified, was more krill for the whale. Regret-O-Grams was us
formalizing the hoary old “these-folks-couldn’t-be-here-tonight” wedding
reception gag, and re-rigging it to serve corporate occasions. For a certain
amount a company could get impressionists in person or on video
performing the zingers, mostly generic, but with a few cleverly tailored to
their corporate slogans, policies or recent embezzling arrests. For a reduced
fee we’d mail them the material and their own MC could read it. Darrell and
I received $150 per event; a nice chunk towards the rent on our small
apartments, but not enough to go to Toronto General Hospital’s Intern
Graduation Night and see how the defibrillation gags went over. ($1,200)
We did our first “reality” show in 1981. The Honeymoon City Game
Show was a pilot shot in a circular restaurant atop a tower overlooking
Niagara Falls. There are few sights more dispiriting than Niagara Falls in
the winter. All the stores are either shut or suffering and the falls were
frozen-over – the view out the tower window looked like that can of Minute
Maid you take out of the freezer just before you move. We were
“demonstrating the principle” of the series, so the newlywed couples, some
of whom were wed but not newly, and some of whom were neither, gave
prepared answers to our prepared questions and looked cute, in which
particulars we anticipated today’s reality show ethos (and writing salaries)
by about twenty years. We should have thrown the happy couples off the
tower when they got the answers wrong and sold it to Fox. ($150)
A goodly amount of our time was spent in Emergency with a pain-inthe-ass friend of the producer, whose (appropriate, I thought) reaction to
Niagara Falls in the winter was to have an ischemic attack. Marlow was a
millionaire real estate speculator and pathological miser. He pocketed
restaurant jams and never tipped. We went to dinner one night near the Falls
Valuable Lessons
82
with the understanding that everyone was paying their own way and
Marlow, then in his sixties, tried to order the Three Teddy Weddy Bears
Special off the children’s menu to save two bucks. This will end up in a
script some day; what you remember most clearly from a show doesn’t
always happen on the stage.
My diary tells me we also contributed to a series called The Wayne
Thomas Show. I can’t remember what this was and Google’s no help. I
recall a meeting, and some writing, and getting a check. ($200) The singing
star had a hard time remembering lines so the sketches we wrote were
outlined in broad beats much like a small-town Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Our first proper sitcom sale ($14,016) was 1981’s Flappers, a show
set in 1927 Montreal. It starred the delectable Susan Roman and the not
delectable but very funny Derek McGrath. We met with Executive Producer
Jack Humphrey, who asked what we thought of the show. I said, “We love
the character of Andy; Derek’s exactly the kind of actor we like to write
for.” Jack said, “Derek’s gone.”
We met Susan Roman, still cute today but in 1980 to hang yourself
over. In fact we know someone whose brother upon breaking up with her
reportedly tried to do just that.
Jack told us about an episode of his other series, Hangin’ In, that he’d
just shot. He half-whispered as if confiding a showbiz secret best not
disseminated too widely: “The script doesn’t have a single joke in it... but
the direction is hysterical!”
We’d been going to the Flappers production offices in Toronto’s
Yorkville district for months, dropping off a new resume each time we
added some tiny piece of work, using that as an excuse to push another sheet
of paper past the secretary behind the bulletproof glass and the locked door.
One day we decided to append a small fabrication to the top of our latest
curriculum vitae: “Sitcom punch-up a specialty.” They called us before we
got home.
LESSON: Outrageous confidence isn’t really lying, sort of.
We were put onto a re-write of an existing draft by a Canadian writer
living in L.A. who either didn’t have time to do his own second draft and
polish, or whose services in those regards had been graciously declined. The
episode guest-starred a young Martin Short as con artist Mickey Ritz. We
were hired to write two more and to punch-up the remaining eight episodes
in the order. Each of the writers we punched-up that season was a Canadian
living in Los Angeles.
Valuable Lessons
83
(It was a period piece and we adapted unhappily to this
circumscription of our references. Picture us sitting scribbling jokes in
silence. Darrell looks up: “When was penicillin invented?” Andrew:
“1928?” Darrell: “Shit. Assholes couldn’t have been one year smarter.”)
Then NABET, the National Association of Broadcast Equipment
Technicians, went on strike for six months. Our second and third episodes
didn’t shoot, therefore: no final payments, no residuals. (This was back
when Canadian writers got residuals.) Production shut down across Canada.
By the time the strike ended there was no reviving Flappers and Jack
switched over to Hangin’ In full-time. That series was set in a youth
counseling center and starred actress Lally Cadeau. We began writing story
ideas and mailing them to his office. First a batch of fifteen, then another
batch of fifteen, then a month later a batch of thirty.
After we’d submitted 106 story ideas we were called in for a meeting.
We sat on a comfy couch at the far end of Jack’s office under the window
looking out over Cumberland Avenue while he paced near the door in his
white pants, white shoes, white leather belt and yellow sweater, sucking on a
Cuban cigar.
The gist of the meeting was; he wanted us to stop sending him stories.
“Because sooner or later you guys are gonna send me every story there is,
and no matter what episodes I produce you’re gonna say I stole them off
you.” We said, fair enough. So did he like any of the ones we’d written?
No he didn’t. We may have been good for Flappers but we were the
wrong type of writers for this show, which Jack wanted to have social
significance and be about humorous moments underscored by strong human
emotion. I said I thought that some of our stories...
“No. You’re not right for this show. All your stories are wrong, they
don’t work.” We pressed for more specifics. Jack annoyedly picked up
some of our sheets and read a few lines. “That’s all wrong. To do a story
like this... ” He was waving the pages at us – “... you’re saying the lead
character has a flaw. Characters in a sitcom, a sitcom that works, can’t have
any flaws.”
I thought for a second, then ventured, “But how about M*A*S*H - ?”
Jack exploded. “I don’t give a fuck about M*A*S*H, I don’t give a
fuck about you, and I don’t give a fuck about this conversation!” And we
were thrown out of his office.
And that was it for writing half-hour comedy in Canada. In L.A. you
can piss off a different person every day of the year and still work through
your retirement. In 1981 Jack ran the only sitcom in our home and native
land, and when that ended the Politburo within the CBC would hand him the
Valuable Lessons
84
next one. We were through. A year or so later we moved to L.A. where,
based on our Flappers experience, all the successful Canadian writers
seemed to be living anyway.
In 1985 we went back up to story-edit Check It Out! and spent some
time with frequent guest-star Barbara Hamilton, whose opinion based on
encounters similar to ours was that Jack was hypoglycemic and if your
meeting ran over into lunch he completely lost it. Another writer, Bill
Murtagh, who eventually wrote twenty Hangin’ Ins, later told us he’d done
nineteen of them by himself. The first time Bill partnered with another
writer, the guy made an innocent remark to Jack one day in a meeting and
the two of them were fired on the spot. Hangin’ In ran for 113 episodes.
A few years later Jack Humphrey came South to run Silver Spoons, he
was just that good. In April, 1987 I danced on his obit in Variety in my
office at The Tonight Show. Because that – and writing the occasional book
– is the only revenge a writer gets.
LESSON: Sometimes you have to shut up for what you believe in.
-----------------Where It Went
“I’VE GOT THAT”: When you have money, or are perceived
to, very few people around you pick up the check for anything.
Meals, flights, hotel rooms, it’s hard to ask your cousins or your
in-laws or your parents or the actors or other writers you meet
to pay for their own meal when you know they’re making
$16,000 a year and using the insides of old Swiffer boxes for
telephone notepads. The exception is the agents: Agents
Always Pay, as they effing should.
$80,000
Before you’d heard of him, Alan Thicke was young and charming. He still
is pretty charming. His BCTV talker, The Alan Thicke Show, replaced The
Alan Hamel Show on weekday afternoons. Alan hosted a mix of U.S. and
Canadian celebrities and performed some of his own songs, in between
hosting beauty contests and taking the winners and their mothers home.
(While staying in Alan’s guest house, knowing no one in L.A., we were once
kicked out while Darrell had a 103-degree fever, because a mother-daughter
team Alan had met in B.C. the month before was moving in. But, as they
say, don’t get me started.)
Valuable Lessons
85
In 1981 Alan’s mother read a Toronto Star article about The Comedy
Bank which mentioned Darrell and me as gag writers for conventions,
industrial shows and films and public appearances. Joan mailed the
newspaper clipping to Alan, who invited us to contribute material to his act.
We sent in a couple of dozen gags; Alan picked five. On November
9, 1981, he sent us a check for $131.25 and a note: “This makes $26.25 per
gag.” We eagerly sent him more material. A few weeks later we received
another note, with no check. The note said “Taking these 5. Payment now =
$13.13 per gag.”
A highlight of this series was watching some jokes we’d sent to Alan,
and which he’d purportedly rejected, being performed one night by an
Australian female guest comedienne we’d never heard of. You have to jump
to K-KID TV and read a little between the lines for the round-about answer
to that puzzler.
Keen to do another radio show, we created something called The
Countless Travels Of Matthew Matics ($1,628.80) , a fantasy series with a
bit of math. A young boy goes “through the looking glass” and, on a tenpart series of Carrollian encounters with such characters as a Mechanically
Deboned Chicken, is faced with bizarre problems which require elementary
arithmetic to solve. Marilyn Peringer narrated. Prizes were offered to the
young listeners who solved the puzzle before the next week’s show.
I didn’t think the math problems were especially hard. At one point I
asked producer John Disney how many correct answers he’d received in the
previous week and he looked at me like I’d been drinking Swarfega. *
“None, of course. There are never any correct answers.” CBC Radio had
been giving the small awards to the closest wrong answer, which in some
cases was off by a degree of magnitude.
* (an industrial soap beloved of auto mechanics.)
I did manage to cram in some loopy poetry:
Who’s heard the nonsense brooks babble
About guide dogs for men the duck blinds?
Who parks the cars the moon waxes,
Where are the clocks the road winds?
Who placed the cups that dawn’s broken
On the table-for-two the sun sets?
Who prints the stories clouds cover?
What stream banks the money fish nets?
Valuable Lessons
86
Where are the cows that leaves rustle?
The voters that willow trees sway?
Ask me a question tomorrow,
I’ll give you an answer today.
Where are the sad men birds chirrup?
Where is the fruit thunder peals?
Of the soft teddy-bear the milk curdles?
Are these some of the things that time steals?
Who framed the sketch the cock doodled?
Who laughs at the jokes the ice cracks?
Who ate the popcorn summer solstice?
Who folded the clothes the wolf packs...
Okay, “popcorn summer solstice” is pretty dodgy. How about this one,
recited by a cow running a phone bank in the middle of a garbage dump:
In the Spring, a young man’s
Fancy meeting you here
I’m afraid you leave me no
Choice cuts of beef
It looks like he got his
Comeuppance see me any time
Young lady, you’ve got what
It takes a thief.
There’s more to this than
Meat’s gone up a dollar
The judge
Arose by any other name
It isn’t if you win or lose, it’s
Howdy Doody Time,
I’ll tell him you
Called on account of rain.
(In the story she’s trying to recall a palindromic phone number whose seven
digits add up to nine, and which is the largest number fitting that unusual
description. Oh go on, try it.)
It was one of the cheap thrills afforded to writers growing up in
Canada but unavailable to Americans – hear your words broadcast on the air
Valuable Lessons
87
nationally and make a couple of hundred bucks without doing too much
damage. It made for better writers, I think. It certainly made for more of us.
-----------------Where It Went
FOOD: I'm a coffee shop kind of guy. I eat out more often
than I should, but my average bill’s ten bucks plus tip. Add my
son and sometimes a couple of meals a day, maybe some pie,
the occasional beer. Plus some groceries to go bad in the fridge
while I’m dining out.
$100,000
Evening At The Improv intercut live comics doing their acts with actors
playing bartenders, waitresses, and wannabe comedians. The only record I
have that we wrote for it is a check ($272) from something called New
Form, which sounds like a line of brassieres. We contributed one-liners for
the actors playing staff at The Improv.
Four years later I got to know writer Gary Belkin, who, with several
others, including actor Harvey Korman (in the 1950s, our manager Ted
Zeigler’s partner, in the comedy team Marsh And Fields), had each poniedup a few grand in 1963 to get Budd Friedman’s Improv off the ground. To
hear Gary tell it, our very meager drain on its budget notwithstanding, the
club is still in the red and Gary has made less on his original investment than
we made writing a few jokes for this series inspired by it.
Meanwhile, CTV had tried out a new prime-time show at 7:00 p.m.
Fridays that was bombing so they asked Alan Thicke in 1982 to come up
with something quick to replace it. Alan hired us at $250 a week for three
weeks to work on a repackage show to be called Fast Company.
Alan picked twenty-two topics – Pets, Travel, Kids, Food – and cut
together celebrity discussions of those topics from a year’s worth of
interviews. There was a short monologue up top – that’s where the new
writing came in.
Alan wasn’t offering money up front and we were broke, so Darrell
and I rode The Dog to Los Angeles. Darrell got first degree burns from
lying next to a young Swedish girl who was sunbathing topless for two
hours next to Alan’s pool. We met fellow Canadian writer Gary David
Goldberg at his fabulous Broad Beach estate. Then we took the seventyseven-hour Greyhound ride home and returned, hallucinating, to Toronto. In
September, BCTV sent us the $750.
Valuable Lessons
88
While we were visiting Los Angeles, Alan asked if we’d written any
amusing songs. Sitting on a couch in his beach house with Alan and three
beach lovelies I played him a mock-oom-pah tune we performed in Toronto
clubs, “The Ocelot Song”:
A wonderful beast is the ocelot,
He don’t seem to care for my bossalot.
And surprise, a real small one don’t cossalot,
It’s great fun to have one around.
A TV connoisseur is the ocelot,
Watches Bonanza because he likes Hossalot
Has real shiny teeth cos he flossalot...
Alan asked for the lyrics and chords. A few months later on his show he
introduced it as “a song I wrote with two kids from Whitby, Ontario...” and
sang it, to a new (and inferior) tune, with Frank “Music Box” Mills at the
piano. This sounds slightly nefarious, but it’s de rigeur. If you write a lyric
or a piece of music for a Disney show, even if you have your own publishing
company as we do, Disney appropriates the publishing royalties. Want to
have some fun? Mention the name Haim Saban to an L.A.-area composer.
In California I realized how naïve I’d been about a lot of things. I
think I hadn’t even realized that Malibu was an actual place; I thought it was
a sort of showbiz composite of imaginary luxury living, like Gotham City
was a composite metropolis. That’s how far away Oshawa was from Los
Angeles, or how far I was, anyway.
We staggered out of the 5th Street bus station, grabbed a Rent-AWreck and drove straight to Alan’s house, showing up looking like The Big
Lebowski’s Dude after the nihilists pull his head out of the toilet. (I had in
fact washed my hair in a sink in the Phoenix bus station men’s room.)
Alan’s maid wouldn’t let us in. While we waited at the closed and re-locked
door I noticed a building a hundred yards down the hill and said, “Wow, the
neighbors are pretty close.” Darrell aimed his bloodshot face to where I was
pointing: “You idiot, that’s more of this house.”
I guess I didn’t watch a lot of Robin Leach or whatever shows should
prepare you for how the other half lives. I actually had no idea how much
luxury a great deal of money could buy. 1982 was eye-opening and I
wanted more.
I don’t remember whose lunatic idea it was to put puppet skits in the
prestigious Canadian news show The Journal but late in 1982 we were the
Valuable Lessons
89
unlikely beneficiaries ($467) of their momentary and woefully misplaced
eclecticism. The idea was to have sketches based on events of the day acted
out by characters created by award-winning Ottawa puppeteer Noreen
Young. Anyway, they paid us, we wrote a few sketches, and the idea was
scrapped as infra dignitatum. If the CBC ever decides to slot some musical
comedy into Question Period In The House Of Commons they know who to
call.
-----------------Where It Went
CLOTHING: Comedy writers don’t dress well. I bought a
bunch of clothes while on vacation in Carmel, CA in 1991 that
I'm still wearing. I spent about $2,500 – Burberry raincoat,
shoes, shirts, a camel hair jacket. That was my last big clothes
purchase. I spent $210 on a pair of shoes once. I bought a
$150 pair of black Florsheim boots in 1988 and liked them so
much I got another pair in 2002. Mostly I wear running shoes,
jeans and a polo shirt. Every six months I buy a few shirts and
underwear and another pair of running shoes. Pathetic. So, for
twenty years, say:
$8,000
Then there were the myriad industrial shows. Coppertone, Cadbury,
Clamato, C.I.L. Paints, the Canadian Department Of Employment And
Immigration...
We’d go to the headquarters of the place that wanted the roast or the
Christmas show or the training film and grill them for an hour about the
peculiarities of the business, what car the boss drove, who was dating who in
Advertising, then work those details into the show.
We wrote the 1980 Christmas program for the Toronto branch of the
Eatons department store chain. The top executives went to town on their
boss: “He’s Scottish and he’s really cheap, make fun of that.” “He’s been
known to take a nip in the elevator on the way to his car after work.” “He
really has an eye for the ladies, put that in!”
We wrote the show. The Comedy Bank turned it in for approval. It
came back: “This says the boss is a CHEAP PHILANDERING DRUNK!”
Shellzapoppin’ ($700), a United Way fundraiser for Shell Oil,
featured sketches, short films, music, and an impressionist playing
Valuable Lessons
90
celebrities who paradoxically appeared to explain why they couldn’t be
there.
Once we wrote a “humorous speech” for the president of a real estate
outfit called Costain Developments. Mr. Costain was opening a new
development on a golf course. His secretary told us the boss had a great
sense of humor and his delivery was “in the style of Bob Hope.” The gig
paid $350. We wrote the pages. I was in the Comedy Bank offices when
the secretary called and asked to speak to me.
“Mr. Costain doesn’t understand the jokes.”
Which jokes, I asked.
“Uhh, all of them.”
He’d instructed her to get an explanation of each gag, starting at the
beginning. The next half hour sounded like this...
ME: “... it’s a golf course. So when he says I see you already started
digging the basements... see, there’s holes on a golf course...”
HER: “Uh huh. How about the next one?”
They cut our $350 in half.
We occasionally worked with a live real-time-operable animated
character called Tiny created by the Toronto company Aniforms Audio
Visuals. Tiny appeared on a TV screen in the hall or conference center
looking like a goofy animated character stuck on PAUSE, but thanks to
sensors stuck to the hands, feet, forehead, lips and sundry other limbs of a
hidden operator with a microphone, when the conference began he’d come
to life and comment on the proceedings, usually by hectoring the host. The
most mind-bleeding industrial we wrote was for a Chateau Gai Wines annual
conference in Banff, Alberta. Within the scheduled presentation material
that needed enlivening by Tiny over the two-day meet was a statistical
summary of wine sales by brand and province, in hundreds of thousands of
bottles. It looked like this:
Brand
Brand
Brand
Brand
A
B
C
D
B.C
Man.
Alta.
3.1
5.4
1.1
2.6
4.7
3.1
3.8
0.3
2.2
2.8
3.8
4.0
Sask.
Ont.
Que.
2.0
1.7
0.9
2.0
11.1
12.7
9.1
7.7
9.8
8.2
8.5
3.9
N.S. ....
4.0
2.9
3.3
1.8
Valuable Lessons
91
And so on for two pages. The host, we were told, was going to go over the
stats one at a time, starting in the top left, and they wanted a joke from Tiny
for every one.
TINY
Three point one? Isn’t that the
beginning of Pi? And speaking of
beginning pie, when’s dessert,
fatso?
TINY
Four-point seven! You know what
that is; that’s a perfect “10”
after you meet her mother!
This one paid $400. I can put myself back in that chair writing those jokes,
looking up at Darrell’s shell-shocked face even today. Industrials were to us
what Hamburg was to the Beatles – that’s where we became a band.
This Day In History was fractionally different from Great Canadian
Characters – a ten-parter documenting, with interviews and “actualities,” the
momentous events that had supposedly occurred on that particular day
throughout history around the world: the invention of the number zero by
Arabic mathematicians, Julius Caesar trying to come up with a pithy slogan
after defeating Pharnaces at Zela, Balboa first smelling the Pacific, Captain
Cook’s tragic decision to bathe in drawn butter... essentially anything we
could lie about. ($1,800)
----------------Where It Went
AGENTS AND MANAGERS: You can’t do this much writing
and still handle all your own phone calls asking where the fuck
your money is. The standard agent’s rate is 10% and a manager
gets 15%. A business manager might make 5%. I had no agent
on The Tonight Show, and on certain shows where C.A.A.
repped me plus the producer, the commission payments were
reimbursed when the show hit the air. Still, their take comes to
about:
$700,000
Valuable Lessons
92
Our final radio series was Great Canadian Characters, spoofing the “greatman/woman” documentary style. Canadian heroes have a poignancy that I
attribute to them being unknown anywhere else in the world. Banting and
Best, Marshall McLuhan, that Bethune guy who went to China and a couple
of cast members of SNL. The country’s one-tenth of the size of her
Southern (and North-Western) neighbor and always seems a little bugged
that she has to sit and play Lite Brite in her room while Big Sister parties
down with boys in the rec room.
We wrote eight-to-ten minute profiles of the heroes Canada has never
had. Three or four were produced and they were slotted into the weekly
broadcasts of the omnibus series Anybody Home? ($439.34)
(A nationwide contest to pick the real Greatest Canadians from
150,000 nominees produced these results in October of 2004: Medicare
founder T. C. Douglas, Frederick Banting, Wayne Gretzky, Don Cherry,
John A. MacDonald, Terry Fox, Lester Pearson, Alexander Graham Bell,
David Suzuki and Pierre Trudeau. Among the forty runners-up: The
Unknown Soldier. I kid you not.)
In December of 1982, Todd Thicke, Alan’s charming and funny
brother, called us to say he’d committed to write a single-camera pilot for
Will Millar, the lead singer of folk group The Irish Rovers but, because of an
ocean cruise he’d booked he couldn’t deliver. Would we take over the gig?
The contract was with Calgary’s Olympic Films; he’d call them and say we
were taking over. It paid $1,500. Not great, but we said sure, why not. We
did two drafts, got paid in two checks of $750 each, and thought we might
have heard the end of it.
Several months later we were working on Thicke Of The Night in L.A.
when the producer of K-KID brought the pilot into the offices to screen it for
Todd. It wasn’t bad. The premise was that four or five musical pre-teens
happen upon a recording and TV broadcast studio in the garage of an
eccentric neighbor, and when he discovers they can play he puts them on the
air. We’d written lyrics, Will put them to music. It was cute and fairly
entertaining.
Several weeks later still we were poking around in the house on
Dickens St. in Sherman Oaks that Alan used as an office, and on the floor of
which we were sleeping. We found an open filing cabinet and nosed
through it. There was a file, “K-KID-TV,” containing Todd’s deal for the
script, including the nearly $4,000 for his writing services.
We also found the bulk of the joke material we’d mailed to Alan over
the previous year – about 100 pages – all of which we’d been led to believe
had been rejected as unusable. Except, many of the rejected jokes had been
Valuable Lessons
93
cut out, pasted to sheets under topic headings and re-photocopied, with
Alan’s marginalia indicating the public-speaking occasions on which they
were to be used. And some standup jokes we’d sent were just plain missing.
Hmm.
We pulled them out. I still have them. Is that stealing?
In 1983, the 60-Minutes-like series the fifth estate aired a segment
called The Joke Business. They had followed us – two struggling joke
writers – on our 1982 Greyhound trip to Hollywood for Fast Company.
First we were interviewed for a few days at work in Oshawa. Then, seventyseven hours later, hallucinating from not sleeping on the bus, we were
propped in front of the cameras again on Alan Thicke’s lawn and asked what
we thought. Darrell thought he was on a boat.
We petted Ali McGraw’s dog in her neighbor Gary David Goldberg’s
sumptuous home, during the search for which we nearly killed Jackie “Uncle
Fester” Coogan while making a U-turn in our Rent-A-Wreck on a Malibu
side road. A few weeks later, back in Oshawa, we had the nerve to write,
arrange and record a theme song for Gary’s then-in-production pilot, Family
Ties. In a blatant rip-off of our work, Tom Scott later stole our time
signature.
After three weeks of work, the CBC paid us our “performance fee”
($214.50), we took the bus back home, and early in 1983 we watched the
results. This was just slightly pre-VCR so I made an audio tape, sitting in
my two-room apartment with the vertical blinds I’d fabricated from the sides
of a cardboard moving box. If anyone has a video of the segment please
send it to me with an estimate of your copying and shipping costs. I’d love
to see what I looked like when I was idealistic.
There’s a fleeting glimpse of a porn magazine called Juggs/Leggs being held
up at a newsstand in the opening of Beverly Hills Cop 2. In 1983 we sold
them a cartoon. ($25) It involved the mail trays on a porn mag editor’s
desk stacked to read IN / OUT / IN / OUT / IN / OUT... I’d hoped that
maybe this rib-tickler (more likely, ribbed-tickler) would lead to other and
bigger porn humor sales but that’s where it ended.
We shot one more pilot in Canada before leaving. Up Your Street
($800) was a single-camera pilot/special produced by Megamedia
Entertainment, in which small-town life and tourism was spoofed in the
guise of a Charles Kuralt-type documentary series on “charming small
towns.” Picture Herman Blume, Bill Murray’s character in Rushmore,
crossing America in a Streamliner with a camera crew.
Valuable Lessons
94
The plan had been to rip a different town a new drainhole every week.
The town in the pilot was Niagara Falls, which permitted U.S. / Canada
ambiguity. I recall a sketch about a guy dressed up as a pantomime
telescope and something about the world’s least-successful hitchhiker. Our
remuneration was commensurate with the show’s rousing success.
LESSON: Do every job you’re offered, then get out of Canada.
THE BIG TIME: LOS ANGELES, 1983-1986
I moved to Los Angeles thanks to Alan Thicke, who sent some cash
advanced by Fred Silverman to develop material for a nighttime syndicated
talk-variety show, Thicke Of The Night. The idea was that Alan would give
Johnny Carson a run for his money.
Darrell and I flew down (no bus this time) on June 5, 1983 with
exactly $267 between us, and went straight to work, seven days a week,
often until one or two in the morning. We’d been promised $250 per week,
for “Research Services.” We were non-WGA so, we were told, we couldn’t
be writers and qualify for scale payments or benefits. In fact, as members in
good standing of ACTRA we not only qualified, the WGA would waive the
$1,500 membership fee, as they eventually did when we figured out we’d
been had.
Besides research, we did some monologue and material writing. The
show was on five days a week in the U.S. but Alan sold a re-cut version of
it, with highlights only, to a Canadian network for airing once a week. I’m
not even sure Fred Silverman et alia knew about this. We wrote a separate
Canadian monologue which Alan performed in front of an uncomprehending
audience held over from a regular show.
I did some of the art for the show. We didn’t have staff artists or
extensive clipping files like The Tonight Show. If a spot required a
dummied-up photo of, say, Henry Kissinger on the moon in scuba mask and
snorkel, I went through a stack of magazines with an X-Acto, found and
composited the photos and sketched-in the mask. I’d won the Thompson
Newspaper Graphic Arts Award in Journalism at Ryerson: here it was
paying off.
We didn’t get paid that first week, or the two weeks after that. At the
end of our third week we were reduced to gassing up our Rent-A-Wreck
Valuable Lessons
95
with handfuls of nickels and pennies. There was a young lady working for
Alan whom we saw crying one night at his house. She was very shy, very
quiet – she kept asking for her paycheck but Alan was stalling her. She was
living in fear that she’d run out of gas in a bad part of town driving home.
(Meanwhile: while staying in Alan’s guest house in 1982 I peeked in
the garage one day and saw stacks of boxes labeled SONY 20” TV. I asked
Todd Thicke what was in them and he said they were... Sony 20” TVs. Alan
invited so many people to stay at his house, and they arrived so
unpredictably he couldn’t risk locking the doors. The TVs in the garage
were to replace the ones regularly stolen from the house.)
We communicated our own situation to Alan who cut a check on
Thickovit Productions for $862.50 Canadian, or C$287.50 per week. In
other words, Alan was paying us at an exchange rate that implied the
Canuck buck was worth 87¢. It was not. A glance at the business section of
any paper confirmed that the effective rate we’d just received was not the
promised paltry $250 per week but the paltrier $215.60 per week. Plus no
bank in Los Angeles (we checked) would cash them without laying-on a
three-week hold, so we had to mail them to Darrell’s fiancée back in
Oshawa so she could cash them, then purchase and mail us $U.S. money
orders drawn on a New York bank, on which the L.A. banks only placed a
three-day hold. (My parents sent me a $50 U.S. Postal Order for my
birthday and the guy at the Hollywood Post Office made me leave my
passport for three days while it “cleared.” Los Angeles is evidently the
fraud and the bureaucratic asshole capital of America.)
Another Canadian, Rob McLellan, down from Vancouver, was in the
same boat. None of us had Green Cards. We all went to Alan and pointed
out the payroll discrepancy. Alan said he’d gladly make up the difference...
if we provided him with an affidavit from a Canadian bank verifying the true
exchange rate. This was finally procured on August 17 of that year,
whereafter a check was cut bringing us up to an actual, as opposed to a
make-believe, $250 U.S. per week.
Alan was a genius at getting people to work for him for free. I’ve
never seen anything like it before or since. Once, a couple of very pleasant
girls from Winnipeg whom he’d met at a charity benefit came down to stay
at the house. On their first day Alan put them in his car, promising to show
them the sights, and instead took them to his office, where they spent the rest
of the day collating copies of his resume. Other victims got the cars gassedup or washed, or babysat his kids.
The set for the show took up the width of a 25,000 square foot stage at
Metromedia Hollywood on Sunset. Risers gave way to other risers, flanked
Valuable Lessons
96
with rear-lit Vacu-form panels all surmounted by stairs ascending to heaven
and buffered with hi-tech lights on scaffolding that spanned the set again
forty feet up. It looked like a Space Shuttle launch gantry inside a disco.
We’d worked on three or four low-budget variety disasters but Thicke
Of The Night was my introduction to high-budget variety disasters. Episode
Two was so bad it never aired. The first sentence on Alan’s desk notes for
early guest Joan Collins was, “GETTING DIVORCED – DON’T
MENTION HER MARRIAGE.” Tom Canning’s One-Night Band played
Joan on with a witty selection of double-time Austrian drinking music that
made her jump mid-entrance as if physically goosed. The first thing Alan
said was, “So Joan… you’re a single woman...” She said, “I AM?”
Alan loved singing along with the musical guests. You and I enjoy
doing this too, but we do it at home. Alan sang with James Brown. Alan
sang with Spandau Ballet and with Fee Waybill and The Tubes. If the
Beatles had reunited for the show (something Alan at one point proposed in
a 2:00 a.m. pot-fueled brainstorming session at his house), Alan would have
been up front between Paul and John with a third microphone. He tried to
sing with Oingo Boingo but the band successfully rebuffed him.
We got our share of crazy letters working for Johnny Carson – show
correspondents Mike Huber and Barbara Bowen always stuck the oddest of
the week on their door – but this show was my introduction to crazed
fandom, of which Alan was not always the object. One woman had sent a
letter and tape importuning him to have Barry Manilow on as a guest and to
seat her in the front row. She spoke on the tape in calm, ultra-reasonable
tones and methodically spelled out the conditions she would accept if this
boon was granted: “I will not approach Mr. Manilow. I will not speak
above a whisper. And I will allow you to have two armed guards with M-16
rifles pointed at my head from offstage. If I should at any point disturb,
annoy, or even lunge for Mr. Manilow you have my permission to shoot me
dead...”
Todd was the victim of a few loonies himself. He needed a
secretary/odd jobs person to work in the Sherman Oaks office. One of the
applicants was Carrie Hamilton, daughter of Joe Hamilton and Carol
Burnett. Though she’d appeared in Fame in 1982 Carrie was not yet the
public figure that her acting career later made her, but her name was known.
Todd was delighted to hire her, and she spent six months doing office work,
taking cars to be washed, babysitting Alan’s kids and leaking gossip about
her famous mother, who had recently won a jury award off the Enquirer for
implying she’d been seen drunk and abusive in a restaurant. According to
Carrie, this was ironic because Mom was plastered every night of the week.
Valuable Lessons
97
Todd found himself on the phone one day discussing an unrelated
matter with Joe Hamilton and said oh by the way your daughter’s working
out great, we’re lucky to have her. Joe asked what Todd was talking about;
did he mean Carrie? Because she was out East, and had been for some time.
The Thickes’ employee was a disturbed woman who had run into
Carrie at a party some years before and later decided to do a Six Degrees Of
Separation. Maybe she thought she was Carrie Hamilton. While Alan was
still doing his Canadian talk show he and Gloria had a housecleaner climb
into their bed one night, convinced she was his wife.
Another time Todd told me the strangest thing had just happened.
Eddie Van Halen had called him at home – he said he got the number off a
friend – and told him how much he liked the show. Eddie called back
regularly for several months to chat with Todd about TV, music, women,
touring. You already know the ending of that story.
As the host of a soon-be-top-rated late night talk show, his picture on acres
of billboards, Alan felt the power early on, and he appeared to delight in
using it to torment Fred Silverman. Fred, a former president of all three
major broadcast networks, was born with ulcers, but I think it was the stress
of this series that shoved him those extra few yards into diabetes. Alan was
due on stage at 5:00 sharp for the first show. At 5:45, we used to watch Fred
pacing up and down in front of the restless audience, his stomach almost
audible through his immaculate suit.
Once, with all the writers taking notes in his office, Alan received a
call from Fred. “Mr. Silverman, Line One,” Eileen whispered, and
withdrew. Alan glanced at the flashing phone and picked up his train of
thought. It wasn’t until four or five minutes later, when every eye in the
room was fixed on that little blinking red light, that Alan paused to take the
call. Sheer mastery.
Fred wasn’t the only one who got sick. Location director Danny
Mann, who blew the entire season’s location budget in four weeks, exhorted
then-portly comedian Rick Ducommun to do faster and faster sit-ups in the
mid-day heat in an alley full of garbage cans for a spot called “Trashdance.”
Rick said he didn’t feel well but Danny told him to keep going. Rick’s
spleen exploded. He spent weeks in the hospital and almost died. And the
bit wasn’t very funny.
Chaos, panic. Those are the two things I think of when I consider this
show’s run-up to air. Nobody was in charge, new people were hired who
were supposed to be in charge nearly every other day. Director Terry Kyne
was replaced by director Ron DeMoraes. Producer Scott Sternberg was
Valuable Lessons
98
replaced by producer Ernie De Massa. No one even told Scott he’d been let
go – he came into the office one Wednesday, picked up Variety and read it
on the third page.
It was Scott who took the “distribution flow chart” I was asked to
draw and hand out, stared at it then back at me in total amazement and said,
“No, this isn’t acceptable!” I said, “But Scott, this isn’t a proposal... this is
how we’re doing it now.”
The first page of the chart looked something like this:
It was bigger than that, with more vertices, but my memory can’t retrieve its
full hellish complexity.
Meanwhile, every day people were missing meetings, missing the
twelfth draft of a sketch, claiming they’d never seen a revised rundown,
screaming that nothing that went wrong was their fault.
So another document was created to add to the basketful of paper that
everyone received every day. It was a C.Y.A. list: everybody’s name, a
Valuable Lessons
99
space for the date and time, and spaces for the name and draft # of the
document being distributed. As all the other documents were distributed, the
recipients now had to sign this – twenty times a day – to attest that they’d
seen the material.
Ten weeks were spent by ten writers writing sketches to order, at the
end of which period, as the show prepared to tape for real, comedy material
had only been written and assembled for the first three shows. The show
was heavily room-written. Darrell, standing outside the comedic free-for-all
in Arnie Kogen’s office one day, stuck a finger in the air and shouted, “I’ve
got a louder idea!”
The head writers got sick. Mark Reisman was eating antacid tables
like popcorn. I took him a sketch idea one day, put it in his hands, and Mark
just stared at it, his head vibrating. “How am I supposed to read this?
Where do I start?” I said, “At the top, Mark.” He put it on one of two stacks
of unread material and memos on his desk that were each literally two feet
high and walked out of the office. He didn’t come back that day.
Our stressed-out co-workers began to get Fantasized. Producer Ernie
DeMassa, empressed mid-stream, was coming from a dream-fulfillment
reality show called Fantasy which had been cancelled, putting a lot of
people out of work. Ernie decided to give them jobs; our jobs. For two
weeks, every time we came back to the offices from lunch someone we
knew had been Body Snatched and someone we didn’t know was sitting at
their desk wearing an embroidered Fantasy show jacket. And all of these
people were somehow making two grand a week. The regular office
workers were averaging about three-fifty. One woman who came on for
$1,800 a week just hung around every day watching us. She had no job title.
Ernie had brought her on, “just to see what’s what and be generally useful
where I can.”
Everyone was smoking. Everyone was vibrating. I’ve sat in hospital
Emergency waiting rooms probably six or seven times in my life, and in not
one of them was the morale as low as it was in those offices at Sunset and
Wiltern.
All writers have stories about rewriting material at the last minute.
Here’s mine. Actor Bruce Weitz (Hill St. Blues) was booked as a guest and,
scavenging his bio as requested for something to humiliate him with (also
see The Magic Hour) I’d hit upon the fact that he’d done a lot of
Shakespeare. I recalled that the Guinness Book world record for speedtalking was the 595 words of Hamlet’s soliloquy in something like fiftyeight seconds. I suggested to Alan that, keeping this a surprise from Bruce,
we might card Hamlet’s speech, play up Bruce’s classical cred but add some
Valuable Lessons
100
tongue-twisters to get him laughing and slow him down. Alan gave the go
and Darrell and I wrote up the piece.
The morning of the show, Alan had a meeting with all the writers in
which he held up a stack of seven-by-five cards with the show’s logo on the
back and emphasized that he wanted every single spot from now on to be put
on these hand-cards in fourteen-point type. No exceptions.
Later, Alan called us to his office. There was a copy of the three-page
Hamlet bit on his desk. He thought it wasn’t wacky enough; the tonguetwisters were too easy. He’d check-marked all the lines that needed
punching-up and told us to rewrite it. The show was taping in ninety
minutes and Bruce Weitz was the first guest.
We went to our typewriters, split the spot in half, banged out a new
version, put it on the hand cards, and one of the show’s young runners, Ben
Stiller, took the material to the stage. Phew.
With minutes to air co-head writer Jeremy Stevens grabbed us,
holding the spot. “This is on hard cards! Alan wants it on cue-cards!”
We said, “But the meeting this morning...”
“Cue cards!”
We ran to the stage. The band struck up the theme. I grabbed the
cue-card guy and said, “New spot, it’s the first thing up!” We showed him
the new pages, he swore, uncapped his Sharpie and started writing it out in
block letters on the large cards. Alan had begun the monologue. There were
extra Sharpies. Darrell’s handwriting, he can barely read. I grabbed a pen
and started doing the second card.
Bruce came out. We had four cards done. Alan launched right into
the bit:
“We dug up a little information on you...”
BRUCE: “Oh no.”
ALAN: “Oh yes, and we have a little surprise...”
We ran the first four cards out to the assistant cue card guy kneeling
under the cameras and kept writing.
“So in light of your classical theatrical training we’ve arranged to
have you try and beat that record here tonight. But we’ve made it a little
harder...”
BRUCE: (LAUGHING) “Oh jeez...”
We’re on cards six and seven, and now another guy has seen our panic
and grabbed a third pen and he’s starting from the end of the bit and working
backwards.
Bruce begins reading – and remember, this is as fast as he can:
“Tobeornottobe,thatisthequickquirkyquerulousquestion...” The three of us
Valuable Lessons
101
are dragging our alliteration-cramped hands across the big white cards.
Darrell is helping by saying, “He’s started, hurry up.”
The bit killed. Fred Silverman used it for the next month as an
example of the kind of thing we should be doing more of. And I can now
move my right hand again.
My favorite on-camera story from this show is the episode I call Drunken
Thieving Gumby. Talent bookers Sandy Zagaria and Patty Bourgeois
booked a guy whom they believed was the creator of Gumby. I don’t recall
if this was deliberate deception on his part or a simple misunderstanding but
all he was in the end was a guy who’d come into possession of a Gumby
costume. He didn’t have facts about the old show, no inside Pokey dope, he
just owned seventy pounds of green latex with a smile painted on it.
The goof was discovered before his appearance but Gumby was kept
on the rundown anyway, for a spot in which Alan strolled around in the
audience drawing laughs and warmth from common folk before
“encountering” a planted celebrity with something to plug. Gumby was
going to be discovered in the seats and funny banter would ensue. This idea
sprung from one of the three demonstrably false but nonetheless
indefatigable myths of variety show production: The Host Ad-Libbing Will
Be Funny. (The other two are: Actors Love To Be Surprised With Their
Old School Yearbooks And Stuff, and The Guys In The Band Are Wacky.)
We taped two ninety-minute shows a night, three days a week.
Gumby was booked for the second show of the night. But it was hot in the
Green Room and our greener guest had been told not to remove his costume
in case the first show ran short and he had to be re-slotted. Gumby kept
himself cool by drinking every beer in the fridge. By showtime he was
rubber-legged for real and he was hostile. Alan sidled up to him as the
audience caught on and applauded: “Who do we have here? Ladies and
Gentlemen, it’s Gumby!”
Alan’s first question: “We haven’t seen you in a while, Gumby.
Where have you been?” Gumby’s slurred response was, “Banished to
oblivion, Alan, and in a few weeks you’re gonna know exactly how it feels.”
The encounter slid downhill from there. He insulted Alan, he insulted the
show. He stole lines from Eddie Murphy’s “Scumby” SNL routine. For his
coup de theatre he toppled forward one row onto the lap of the wife of the
President of the Metromedia Network.
By the time he got offstage, Gumby had sobered up enough to realize
he wasn’t going to just lift one foot off the floor and slide gracefully out onto
Sunset. But it was pretty hard for the studio guards to miss a guy in a seven-
Valuable Lessons
102
foot green rectilinear costume. He couldn’t go back to his dressing room –
even Gumby knew that’s the first place they’d look. So he stole another
guest’s pants, the drummer’s shoes, and the shirt that show regular Charlie
Fleisher had been married in, and hotfooted it off the lot with his alter ego in
a trash bag.
When the ratings got low and stayed there (some nights in some cities
they were too low to register and showed up on the daily reports as a 0.0) the
budget dropped accordingly. Some of the lower-paid employees were asked
to take pay cuts. That’s not strictly true; they weren’t asked. Patrick Carlin,
a family man, our fellow researcher and the earliest employee the show had,
is the mellowest human being in the world except when he can’t get his
daily 420. With his pay cut Pat couldn’t afford it, and he lapsed into the sort
of pre-medicated behavior that had, in his Army days, gotten him courtmartialled twice, once for Inciting Federal Troops To Riot. Pat took to highkicking filing cabinets and promising to cut the balls off any fucker who got
in his way. Pat is a sweet, trusting soul who could see the blessings in
amoebic dysentery. If the glass is half-full, to Pat it’s overflowing. So this
was not a good sign.
Pat had been promised when he began working at Alan’s home for
free seven months earlier that he’d be “taken good care of” by the show. In
his unwillingly de-cannibolized and already jittery state he got a note one
day: his pay was being cut by another hundred bucks. Pat had a wife, two
kids and a dog to feed. He slammed his fist on the desk and marched out of
the office. “I’ll kill him!” I took off after him.
Outside, I followed Pat as he strode towards the parking garage,
asking what exactly he was thinking of doing. Nothing stupid, right? Pat,
almost beyond words with fury, pointed to the wall of glass fronting Alan’s
office beyond a token lawn and flower bed. “I’m gonna drive my truck
through that fucker’s office window, Andrew.”
Somehow I calmed him down and that didn’t happen. As I look back,
would it have been better if – ? Nah.
After five months Darrell and I went to the boss, who’d promised to
eventually sponsor us into the Writers Guild and asked when that might be
going to happen. We said the show was killing us, he had no idea what it
was like out there. We still had our WardAir plane tickets back to Toronto,
maybe it was time to use them. Alan said he couldn’t make any promises,
but seeing as we weren’t having a lot of fun what if we took the next two
weeks, worked at home, used that time to write some more material for him
and he’d see after that?
Valuable Lessons
103
We did the two weeks, handed in the stuff and bailed. The show
lasted a few months longer. We were saved in the nick of time from having
to use those plane tickets when we got a phone call one day from Janie
Mudrick, a story that picks up with Sugar Babies.
I can’t say I wish I hadn’t done this show. I learned volumes about
what not to do when starting up a series. After Thicke Of The Night, when
we got to the Tonight Show... apples and oranges is understating it. It was
apples and something that wasn’t a fruit – wasn’t even a noun.
The off-stage life behind the shows differed in that T.O.T.N. had one.
On Tonight we just did the work and went home. No being ordered to drive
sixty miles to pick up a bag of pot at the host’s house and deliver it to him
and three babes at his beach house before returning to work to finish a spot
that he wanted the next morning. No crazed boss’s maid cutting herself and
smearing blood all over his car and windows, swearing her brother’s gang
would come and waste him. No host picking a lowly staffer to go to his
house when the burglar alarm went off, in case aforementioned gang was in
fact laying in wait.
We had “Editors” on the show – celebrities and interesting civilians
who brought the latest news in their spheres of expertise. Charles Bragg did
Art, Jim Stafford covered Music. These guests put the jokes for their banter
on cue-cards:
ALAN: What have you been up to?
GUEST: (New hobby story) [JOKE]
ALAN: That sounds dangerous.
GUEST: (Hell’s Angels anecdote) [JOKE]
In lieu of [JOKE] there’d be a few words [GLAD IT WASN’T A
BANANA!] to remind the guest of his or her snappy ad-lib.
But more than one supposedly amusing guest walked off the cheap
carpet not having let fly a single bon mot, because Alan poached the ad-libs
off the cards. Fred Willard, after his first appearance, refused to card any
more of his lines. Alan even took lines written for his own brother when
Todd made a nervous appearance that was paid off with a short video clip.
“Guess you’re glad that wasn’t a banana, eh Todd?” “Uhhhhh I guess so
Alan.”
Our regulars were Richard Belzer, Gil Gottfried, Isabel Grandin,
Chloe Webb, Mike McManus and Charles Fleischer. Jim Carrey attended
two or three of the many casting sessions but nobody could decide on him
and he landed In Living Color while they prevaricated. Belzer co-hosted for
Valuable Lessons
104
a while, until he physically attacked the censor one day for bleeping one of
his gags, after which Arsenio Hall got the chair next to Alan, giving him
nightly exposure to 0.0 percent of American viewers and paving the way for
his successful Fox show. ($17,718)
---------------Where It Went
RENT WHEN I FIRST HIT DREAMTOWN: Half of a
furnished apartment from August 1983 until March, 1986, at
$580 a month. Darrell and I were used to sleeping on couches,
so when the manageress asked if we needed an extra bed for
this miniscule place I said no. When I moved out, I told her she
hadn’t seen Darrell around lately because he’d gotten married
the previous summer. She said, “That’s okay, honey, you’ll
find someone else.” I guess this explains two and a half years
of nasty looks from her ex-Marine husband.
$8,990
After Darrell and I quit Thicke Of The Night and were balefully eyeing our
WardAir tickets back to Toronto, a friend and former Alan Thicke
employee, the effervescent Janie Mudrick, called. Janie’s a talent manager
and was then toiling for agent/manager Ruth Webb, one of whose clients
was Mickey Rooney, touring in Sugar Babies. Mickey’s gag writer had died
and he needed fresh jokes for the show, which contained a nightly bit in
which Mickey came out in drag as “Francine” and did topical/local material.
These bits needed updating as either the show moved or celebrity diets,
scandals or deaths created the need for new references.
Janie said, “Mickey Rooney is going to call you in five minutes.” We
tossed a coin; Darrell took the call and noted all the requirements for a Sugar
Babies gag.
Over the following seven years ($5,250) we also gave Mickey jokes
for roasts and events like the annual Bob Hope Palm Springs Golf
Tournament (which went on forever; I said they should call it the Hope
Springs Eternal).
We continued supplying Sugar Babies gags during its five year run:
I asked my husband what he wanted for his birthday – he
said surprise me; I said okay they’re not your children.
Valuable Lessons
105
I came home and caught my husband in bed with three
sixteen-year-old girls. I said how do you explain this!? He
said, I paid them.
Mickey was fun to work for, generous and grateful. His staccato messages
came in once every three or four months: “It’s Mickey! We’re in
Philadelphia; brotherly love, cream cheese, Liberty Bell. Go!” He
frequently called us to write screenplays and stage plays for him, which his
accountant almost as frequently called immediately afterwards to stop.
The last time I saw Mickey was in the late nineties; I was driving
home, crawling up the twisty streets off Laurel Canyon, and slowed down
because of a string of production trailers blocking half the road. As I inched
past, I saw Mickey, in a priest’s cassock, being led by two P.A.s from his
trailer to the house in which his next scene, probably the ten-thousandth of
his career, was being shot. This town was built on those low shoulders.
What a trouper.
Out of work and out of money, we put together a proposal for the
CBC for a show in which we’d interview Canadians working in Los
Angeles. A 1983 L.A. Times story reported there were 800,000 of us in
L.A. County, making L.A. the fifth-largest Canadian city, and the most
heavily-armed.
So I bought a Sony TCD5M recorder and a stereo mike and we went
out to gather interviews and Streeters. Our host Ted Zeigler, later our
manager, stood on a street corner in Westwood and asked passers-by
questions like, “If twenty people were drowning, in what order would you
rescue the Canadian?” We averaged fifteenth.
Besides the Canucks we also for reasons that now escape me
interviewed seventeen-year-old Janet Jackson, whose interview we didn’t
use but which I still have. She talked emotionally about witnessing brother
Michael’s hair catch fire as he filmed that near-fatal Pepsi commercial, and
about the fact that, as a Jehovah’s Witness, she’d never had a birthday party
or gift. She was a tiny sad girl behind a big desk with a giggling girlfriend
for support. A few months later Janet eloped and married singer El
DeBarge. Good for her. It didn’t last; neither did this show. ($1,200)
In 1983, manager pro tem Jackie Kahane landed us a gig writing for
ABC’s The Funniest Joke I Ever Heard. For a hundred bucks we wrote out
jokes that performers pretended on camera were the funniest they’d ever
encountered. The gags were delivered by the likes of George Burns, Milton
Valuable Lessons
106
Berle, Dom DeLuise and Ricky Schroeder. The TV Guide ad proclaimed,
“A Laugh A Minute!” Which, when you think about it, isn’t very often.
Subsequent manager Ted Zeigler was friends with Jeanne Renick in
Daytime at CBS, where he set up a special called Dear Mom, Love Mom,
about Mothers around the world and through the ages. It started to stall
when we did a musical bit called Don’t Play With Your Food that involved
children dancing with large food to the classic mothers’ warning, and got the
note from CBS Standards And Practices that it was unacceptable in a world
with hunger to show people with food not eating it, even if it was six feet tall
and made of painted Styrofoam. ($3,637)
Then there was The New Liar’s Club. The original, in 1969, had been
a jaunty celebrity-driven game show (original host: Rod Serling!) in which
four notables, handed a mystifying object, took turns describing its freakybut-true function, a fact known to only one of them, as contestants tried to
divine who was telling the truth. (“So, Matt... is it a pushed-in-wine-cork
remover, forceps for delivering dwarf breech babies, or spatter-free barbecue
tongs for nudist weddings?”)
In 1983, Golden-West Broadcasting hired Frank Bluestein, a fellow
Canadian-in-Hollywood, to put together an update of the idea, and Frank in
turn hired us ($100, the cheap prick) to write a few “lies” based on some
odd-looking objects. The only rehearsal we attended took place in a room
above a ratty liquor store on Ventura Blvd in Sherman Oaks, and was hosted
by Fred Travalena. In the movies, things that start out that way go on to
resounding success. The New Liar’s Club went on to not existing. The
1988-89 version was, I believe, unrelated to our brief foray into scripted
deceitfulness.
In 1984, Pat Carlin passed George some material we’d written and
George liked it. He called us from a plane one weekend to ask if we’d meet
him on Monday to help pull some ideas of his into shape. He wanted to do a
special in a sitcom-like setting, co-starring half a dozen comedian friends
like Jeff Altman, Pat McCormick and Bob Goldthwaite (pre-Bobcat).
George had written his own material but it was one long rant. He wanted
help routining it and making it less obviously monologue-y.
We worked alone with George at a table in his Brentwood office
building for a few weekends, still a thrill to recall. The show was titled
Apartment 2-C, after an address George had once had in New York.
At the taping itself, a highlight was watching Jeff Altman knock
himself unconscious with a door. In the gag he was improvising, Jeff placed
his foot at a precise upstage spot and pulled hard on the door, which hit his
foot but appeared to conk him on the forehead. During rehearsal he put his
Valuable Lessons
107
foot too far back and the door actually brained him. Down he went. I don’t
remember if he had a concussion but Jeff was completely jerky to everyone
as they tried to help him, which made the conking that much more
enjoyable.
(This was one of two stage-brainings I’ve witnessed over the years.
The other was in 1981, at a revue we’d written in Toronto when, during
rehearsals, part of the set collapsed and a meddling female agent who
shouldn’t have been anywhere near the stage received a two-by-four
shampoo. This woman effected a breezy glib Hollywood North style that
had her referring to us as “Nic and Vic” within minutes of our first meeting.
At one point she actually said she could manage something but not until “Jan
or Feb.” So it was with undisguised glee that we watched paramedics carry
her from the Black Cat Theater on Gerrard Street to an ambulance, still
clutching a buffet table carrot.)
I can remember an HBO exec arguing with George in his dressing
room at the old Merv Griffin Theater on Vine that there was too much
profanity and too many upsetting themes in the show. You’re HBO, you
hire George “Seven Words” Carlin, and you’re surprised when he cusses.
Apartment 2-C aired as a special and has never shown up on tape or DVD.
($5,875)
Pat Carlin is the only person ever to offer to have someone killed for
me, or at least the only one I took seriously. The kill-ee was a scumbag
gold-chained Subaru dealer in Van Nuys who’d taken $1,800 of Darrell’s
and my money towards a new car but now claimed we had no credit history
and refused us the car and a refund. There aren’t many people who can have
you laughing until your spine hurts one minute and credibly offering to have
some guy named Shamir greased the next.
Pat doesn’t hold stuff in. We were sitting in the NBC commissary one
day in 1990, mere feet from the cast of Saved By The Bell (this was before
we drunkenly spotted Elizabeth Berkley being lapdanced at “21” one night
in preparation for her now legendary role in Showgirls) and sundry greysuited GE mucky-mucks, when Pat embarked on an enthusiastically loony
extemporaneous parable about the last corporate greedhead in America
scurrying out of town in a boxcar to avoid being gutted like a trout by the
folks whose pension plans he raided, and, now penniless, being handed a
bean on a plate by a fellow down-and-outer. The uncomprehending CEO
asks, “What’s this?” and is told – here Pat threw his head back and
announced in a feral shriek to everyone at NBC – “It’s DINNER,
MOTHERFUCKER!”
Valuable Lessons
108
In 1984 Patrick and wife Marlene wanted to get a screenplay going
based on their idea of a long-boarded-up VHF TV station on the fringes of
the Mojave Desert that mysteriously turns on and begins broadcasting. It
turned out the station was being powered and operated by a monster
marijuana plant in the basement, grown from a seed dropped behind an
amplifier in 1972. Pat and Marlene had several yellow legal pads of
scribbled sketch ideas for the broadcasts themselves. We took those,
Brother George kicked in some development money, and we wrote the
screenplay, with which Pat pronounced himself most excellently satisfied.
I remember a scene with a fired children’s TV host tearfully blindfolding his
sock puppet then putting a bullet through its head.
Patrick called us as late as the summer of 2004 to say he had recent
interest in The Stoneingtons, so who knows. ($4,000)
Re-enter Mickey Rooney, who called us to his Westlake office to
make a film proposition. Mickey stood in front of a cardboard cutout of
himself that was taller than him and in which he was plugging some sort of
barbecue implements. On the walls behind him were promos for Mickey
Rooney’s Tabash Hotel in the Poconos, and a grapefruit beverage called
Mickey Melon.
We sat on the couch and I took out a pad. One hundred and forty
pounds of concentrated showbiz pointed to it and said, “Put that away, you
won’t need it! You’ll never forget this for the rest of your life!”
Mickey acted out an entire screenplay. He played all the characters.
He played the animals. He played the sun rising and setting. After an hour
he reached “Fade out! Credits!” and turned to us, pointed a Moses finger at
the door and said, “Now, go... and write!”
The Picture Nobody Should See was about a milkman with a frumpy
wife who decides to make a porn film. The couple’s been married forty
years, they need money, the husband feels he’s literally turning into milk,
and one day after reading about the latest XXX film release he decides
there’s an audience out there of folks tired of seeing young, attractive people
having sex and who crave a peek at “professional flesh,” – the people
who’ve been doing it for four decades – in that respect anticipating the trend
of Amateur Sex Videos by some ten years.
Mickey popped up in Variety every now and then for a few years,
mentioning something about having the funding, but if anything ever came
of it I didn’t hear. ($10,000)
Mickey also wanted a “gag-filled” play written based on his idea of a
female professional wrestler named Steel Gerta who wrestles a
hippopotamus, accidentally incapacitating her plucky short husband. New to
Valuable Lessons
109
L.A. and enthusiastic about working with a legend, we outlined Mickey’s
story in more detail, then broke it into thirty-nine scenes and made a binder
for the outline, with a page per scene for noting the setting, situation,
characters and jokes. We spent a month writing gags and allocating them to
the scenes in which they seemed to best work. Then, armed with our now
forty-page play bible, we began writing, slotting-in the gags as we went.
PATIENT
I have a little thrombosis.
DOCTOR
I have a little clarinet, we’ll
get together. Are your parents
living?
PATIENT
Yes.
DOCTOR
You must be a big disappointment
to them. Touch your clavicle.
(THE PATIENT DOES)
DOCTOR
So that’s where it is. I want you
to go outside, stand on one leg
and whistle.
PATIENT
Will that help my condition?
DOCTOR
No but it’ll help me get a cab.
Nurse, I need an E.K.G., an E.E.G.
and an E.G.G.
NURSE
What’s an E.G.G.?
DOCTOR
An egg, I’m hungry. (TO PATIENT)
If you have to go the bathroom in
the night, take two of these.
(HANDS OVER TWO HUGE WHITE FLUFFY THINGS)
Valuable Lessons
110
PATIENT
What are they?
DOCTOR
Slippers - that floor’s a real
toe-freezer. And if you need me,
call this number.
(HANDS OVER A SLIP OF PAPER)
PATIENT
“Seven”?
DOCTOR
Oh, it’ll have to be much louder
than that.
Oom-pah oom-pah. Mickey’s title was Wait Till The Swelling Goes Down.
The first draft came to 178 pages and that was before we wrote and arranged
the music. Every now and then for a few years Mickey was quoted in the
trades as having it in pre-production but so far as I know nothing ever
happened to this project, except that for twenty years we’ve been
cannibalizing its gags and routines for sitcoms and monologues. Bits of
Swelling have turned up on the Tonight Show, in Campus Cops, Ned’s Newt,
You Wish, The Smart Guy, Jimmy Neutron... Every part of the buffalo is
used. ($10,000)
Remember the beginning of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid,
when the surly poker player suddenly realizes who it is he’s challenged to
“Draw”? That was Donnelly Rhodes, who starred in a family series called
Danger Bay about a marine veterinarian. We did three episodes and parts of
two others. ($31,360) It was written pre-personal computer and just before
the fax, so the drafts would pass from hand to hand by mail or courier,
accumulating marginalia as they went, each contributor’s in a distinctive
color. It was on this series that we received a note that wound up in Leonard
Stern and Diane Robison’s book of ludicrous network advice, “A Martian
Wouldn’t Say That.” We’d written an episode in which the marine vet
swapped places for a day with a country doctor friend, each thinking he was
getting a day off. It was City Mouse/Town Mouse with stethoscopes.
In one scene, a woman with a sick horse watched Donnelly grapple
with an ailing mare and asked him, “Are you a horse man, doctor?” This
line was nixed on the grounds that it could be construed as a question about
Valuable Lessons
111
the vet’s penis length. Because of course that’s what all the kids watching
the Disney Channel would have assumed.
But that’s not the one in Leonard and Diane’s book. In another scene,
we’d written:
EXT. DRIVEWAY – DAY
The jeep is loaded and ready to go.
We were asked to change “loaded” – a word that wasn’t even in the dialogue
– to “packed,” because of the “association of the word loaded with alcohol.”
(By the way, I believe I have Hemingway’s “shockproof built-in
bullshit detector,” and half of the examples in Leonard and Diane’s book set
it ringing. I don’t mean that the contributors didn’t get those notes, or
something like them, but they’ve compressed and edited and nuanced to
villainize the executives who dictated them, or to clarify the context in
which the notes were given. The same thing goes for “Children’s Letters To
God,” “Children’s Letters From Camp,” etc. On the Tonight Show, I read
real letters from real kids to Santa and God and the President and Johnny for
six years. Kids don’t come up with anything cutely funny except once in a
very very long while. You know the scene in Home Alone when Macauley
Culkin is staying up watching Carson and Johnny reads a real letter from a
kid who got a little sister last year but this year he wants a bike? Ringer.
We wrote that because out of the 1,000+ real letters we ploughed through
from real kids that Christmas only about eight of them had anything amusing
to say, and we needed ten for the spot. David Foster Wallace’s massive
novel “Infinite Jest” contains a ringer we wrote for a spot called Joke Wars
Between The States because we couldn’t dig up enough inter-State humor to
fill out the Setup.)
Danger Bay was under the supervision of the late “Sweet” John T.
Dugan. He stumbled around in his Van Nuys office beneath the world’s
worst hairpiece, complaining with Larry King’s voice, “Nobody these days
can write English,” like a short tired Harold Ross. He taught us how to write
for single-camera and he ran interference by blowing off bad notes.
Besides the Two Vets story we did one called Fish Forgery that
involved painting koi, the Japanese goldfish, to make them more valuable,
and another with an orangutan. I learned only recently that the orang whose
dignified animalhood every CBC note was so intent on maintaining mauled
one of the actresses and had to be dragged away with a sack over its head
and capped.
“Nowhere do you get that happy fee-eeling...”
Valuable Lessons
112
There was a sketch show called Bizarre in first-run syndication in
1985, starring John Byner. It was sort of an American answer to Benny Hill,
produced by Alan Blye and Chris Beard in Toronto. Our manager, Ted,
knew Alan and Chris from The Sonny And Cher Show, on which Ted had
been an actor (the “Le Bomb?” guy). Alan asked Ted if we had any
sketches; we sent in three or four, and they picked one and paid us $400 – in
cash. The sketch they liked was called “Divorce.”
Eager to make another $400, we sent in three or four more bits. Sure
enough Ted heard back from Alan a few weeks later: “We love The
Narrator Sketch! So we’re taking that instead.”
A few years later, Darrell and I were on the Tonight Show and Alan
called again; he needed some material written, could we drive out to his
house the next morning for breakfast?
Over “breakfast,” a glass of orange juice each, Alan said he was being
roasted in his home town of Winnipeg in a few weeks, could we write some
jokes so he could zing the panelists back during his acceptance speech? We
said sure. And, as for money...?
“The proceeds of the roast,” Alan said gravely, “are going to charity.”
So we charitably gave him ten pages of lines and then, for some
reason lost to me, sent another five pages the following week.
A year later, at a meeting in the Beverly Hills Four Seasons of the
Alliance for Canadian Cinema and Television, we ran into Alan again: hey,
remember that roast? How’d it go?
“Great,” said Alan. “I killed. Oh by the way, I didn’t use any of your
lines.”
The Love Boat was widely syndicated and for some reason it was the kind of
show people could watch over and over, so selling an episode meant cash
coming in for many years to remind you what you’d done. Our manager
Ted Zeigler secured a meeting by sending flowers to the receptionist.
You didn’t have to write as much for Love Boat as for a typical hourlong show, or even for a half-hour, because each episode was comprised of
three interwoven stories, each written separately and patched together with
Love Glue by the staff.
We pitched a few stories to Exec Producer Mike Marmer and story
editors Diane Pershing and Bob Noonoo and sold them on one, about a
courier with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, whose professional resolve
is tested by a winsome lass who urges him to remove it for one night of
nautical belly-badminton. We left our pages behind; Mike said he’d “clean
them up” and we’d be called back in by the development team to work on it.
Valuable Lessons
113
When we returned a week later we met Tony Webster, Richard
Albrecht and Casey Keller, the story editors. Tony began by telling us he
had a few alterations to improve the story. He gave us the first one. I said,
“But that’s what we had.” Okay, good, Mike must have changed that, no
problem... he moved us on to point two: we’d never do something like... and
he described another story point we hadn’t written. Three or four alterations
later, Tony asked for our original pages, which I handed over. He
harrumphed and approved them and we went away to write.
We did a first draft, then a few small line changes and they shot it
pretty much as written, starring Michael Spound and Charlene Tilton. A few
months later when we returned to pitch again, we had seven stories okayed
by the staff. This was going to mean big bucks. But the Love Boat episode
that aired that week drew the lowest ratings in the series’ history and the
show was cancelled. But not before Beth Whelply in Spelling-Cramer
business affairs somewhat naïvely signed the testimonial letter we prepared
for the INS that would eventually get us our H-1 visas, the first step towards
our green cards. ($25,228.44)
LESSON: Buy flowers for the receptionist.
-----------------Where It Went:
MATCHING FICA: Darrell and I have a California loan-out
corporation, to which the studios when they feel like it pay our
compensation and from which we draw salaries.
If you earn over about $80,000 a year the benefits of
incorporating exceed the costs: you can hold income over the
calendar year to lower annual personal taxes, pay for gas, gifts,
printer cartridges, auto repairs and entertainment through a
corporate credit card with pre-tax income, and reimburse
yourself for other expenses.
But in exchange for this flexibility, as your own
employer you’re obliged to match your own FICA and State
Medicare deductions every time you take a paycheck. So, over
twenty years:
$180,000
In 1985, Arne Sultan, a Get Smart alumnus, created a series with Stu Gillard
called Check It Out!, loosely basing it on a British show called Tripper’s
Day starring the late Leonard Rossiter. It was in our first meeting to discuss
Valuable Lessons
114
Check It Out!, now to star Don Adams, that I heard Rossiter, a comic genius,
star of the great 1970s series The Fall And Rise Of Reggie Perrin, was dead,
so I sat somewhat depressed through that initial meeting, at the Tail O’ The
Cock restaurant at Coldwater and Ventura, where there now stands a ’76 gas
station in commemoration of the event.
Brian Cooke created Tripper’s Day, about a madman running a
grocery store, and had it in his contract that Check it Out! use x number of
his stories, on which he would receive co-writing credit. This somehow
passed muster with ACTRA, despite the fact that it meant the North
American writers would have to share their script money with Cooke, who
did nothing on this series, and whose terrific stories were of course not used.
Go Union.
It was on Check It Out! that we wrote a joke comparing the
intelligence of a character to the horse Northern Dancer, and received the
note from the independent S+P service they’d hired that jokes ridiculing
animals were unacceptable.
We also had to remove a lot of things from scripts because Don had
never heard of them. Things like PBS. And quiche (he pronounced it
KWEE-chee) and Ralph Nader. When we told him Nader was a famous
consumer rights advocate, he told us to put in a better-known one. With
actors for some reason you expect they’re alert and interested in the world
around them but you have to remember they get all their information from
TV too. You shovel it in the front of the cow all day then you go to home to
suck it out the back.
There was a curious attitude towards the hiring of episode writers –
curious to us, anyway, encountering it here for the first time. They were
hired on credits alone. But anyone can get on a show, even a good show,
and hang in there for a while before people find out they can’t dance the
dance. One name in particular was being floated around the office for a staff
position, and we knew the guy’s work from Los Angeles. He’d been made a
cash offer and had countered. The execs were considering how high to go.
We asked what Stu and Arne had read of his work. Apparently, nothing,
“But he worked on this show and on that show…”
We advised them, “Guys? Read one of his scripts.” They did. They
withdrew their offer.
The show was shot at the CFTO studios in Toronto. Arne and Stu had
written a pilot script replete with the kinds of gags that had made Too Close
For Comfort whatever it was. On our first morning we were assigned a
story, which was broken-down “in the room” with the other three writers.
We were all staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto’s Yorkville
Valuable Lessons
115
district; we caught up with Arne that night as he got into the elevator at
about 9:00 p.m. and handed him our first draft.
“What’s this?”
“The first draft.”
He eyed it suspiciously.
“Of what?”
“Script Number Two.”
He took it, flipped it open and paged through. He looked at the last
page.
“Script Number Two that we broke this morning.”
“Yeah.”
Arne sighed and flopped it up and down in his hand. “You guys are
gonna save Stu’s ass.”
At the time we didn’t know what to make of this comment (and Arne
wasn’t exactly approachable with questions. When we’d first shown up in
Toronto, Stu greeted us at the hotel’s revolving door and told us Arne was at
that moment firing someone in the elevator lobby). But it turned out Arne
had made a deal to stay on the show for only the first six episodes. A year
later, he was dead of the cancer with which we later learned he’d already
been diagnosed.
Our script was shot first, displacing Arne and Stu’s. As soon as we
finished an episode – first draft, second draft, polish – we started on the next
available story. We work fast, so inevitably we took a lot of the early
writing credits; seven of the first eleven scripts.
One character we created, a handyman played by NYPD Blues’s
Gordon Clapp, was so funny they decide to bring him back. But we would
have been owed a “Character Creation Royalty” for each subsequent
appearance, so Arne and Stu wrote Gordon into their next script and
changed his character’s name, thereby collecting the royalty for each of his
appearances over the next sixty-five episodes. They did, however, have the
wit to name him “Viker,” as a tip of the hat to Mr. Vickers.
ACTRA, brave defender of writers’ rights, had then only recently
switched its residual formula. Formerly, writers had received money each
time their episode was rerun domestically or on foreign TV; the same
formula that applies to this day in the States. ACTRA sent out a letter in the
mid-eighties to announce the Guild had negotiated a new formula, more
beneficial to the writers, in which they would henceforth receive no
residuals per se, but would become de facto co-owners of the episodes they
wrote, to the tune of 4% of the net profits. Of course, since this agreement
Valuable Lessons
116
was arm-wrestled out of the producers not a single Canadian show has ever
turned a profit. I believe the producers were also thrown into the tar patch.
A certain animosity began to build up between us and Stu, and with
another of the writers whom I’ll call Ernie, who’d got in tight with Stu.
Ernie’s family owned a shoe company or a shoe warehouse and used to
bring in running shoes for Arne and Stu. He laughed a lot at their jokes, he
conveyed their orders from the floor to the other writers with a stridency
slightly above his pay grade, he… well, anyone who’s ever worked in an
office already knows the guy. Once, when I referred to Stu as “Stu,” as
everyone else seemed to be doing, Ernie, who also had never seen fit to
stretch his boss’s name into two syllables, looked up from the new running
shoes he was about to deliver to correct me: “His name is Stuart. Okay?”
Darrell got married during this show and took a week to honeymoon
in Montreal. That week I was paired with Ernie. The first day, we had a
page-one rewrite to do of a freelancer’s draft. I typed FADE IN and
suggested an opening line. Ernie said, sure, put that. I suggested a second
line and Ernie said that’s good. I waited. Any ideas for the next line?
Ernie: I’m thinking. We wrote the entire script that way. He sat there with
his mouth open, a big dumb balding fluffer.
(Ernie had been head-writer on a show staffed by a friend of ours,
who noticed that every time a line was pitched, he looked to another writer
in the room to see his reaction before he approved or declined it. One day
our friend proposed a joke then dove between Ernie and the other staffer,
and said “No, Ernie, don’t look at him. Tell me what you think!”)
Ernie, who was senior to us by light of his more extensive Canadian
sitcom experience (watch one for an idea of what that’s worth), did a rewrite
of one of our final drafts, and when we read the results we were horrified.
Every sitcom cliché, every mirthless formulaic piece of hackery had been
crammed in. (“You must be crazy!” “WHAT DID YOU SAY??” “Uh, I
said the sky is hazy!”) It had a scene in which Don got his thumb stuck in a
bowling ball and went flying head-first down the lane into the pins. Hey, I
like The Flintstones too, but unless it’s a declared homage I don’t want their
gags in my script.
We walked into Stu’s office and asked as cheerfully as we could if we
might possibly take our names off this episode. This did not sit well since,
unknown to us, Stuart had participated in the rewrite alongside Ernie. (“How
about the old stuck-thumb gag, Ernie?” “Sure, put that.”)
Shortly thereafter we were asked to return to L.A. and work from the
D.L. Taffner offices on Wilshire Blvd. Darrell and I had already been
banned from the set because we refused to loudly fake-laugh at the read-
Valuable Lessons
117
throughs. (ARNE: “You two! Go upstairs and write!”) We’re both
constitutionally incapable of yukking on cue. The best we can manage is a
sickly frozen smile while exhaling bronchially.
This was the first show I’d worked on in which I encountered what I’d
call the Cynical Admiration Method of comedy writing. This is the process
in which industry pros don’t so much write dialogue as remember it:
“No no, that’s not how it goes, this is how it goes...”
“Wait, wait, why don’t we do the thing where...”
“How about Cyrano, but flip it on its head, like...”
The three dots in each case being replaced by some hoary piece of
tradecraft already shopworn from use on other comedies that had drunk from
the same stagnant well, reaching all the way back to Joe Miller’s Joke Book.
What startled me in each case as much as the suggestion was the
howling approval of every other writer in the room – “Yeah, yeah!” –
offered in lieu of any original work. I told Darrell, “That’s not writing;
that’s recognizing.” And when we piped up with some novel bit that we
found funny, everyone stared at us with pity like we just didn’t get it. This
method of writing also creates a very abrupt rhythm, since each phrase is
literally built upon the last, and the longest coherent piece of dialogue is the
“couplet”; an insult and a rejoinder, or an innocent/stupid remark and an
insult. Sometimes you get a one-two-three but it’s rare. A cohesive ninecue exchange that humorously develops a theme with a payoff down the line
is very hard to pitch in a room like this.
(A good friend and a funny writer, Tom Finnigan, landed on Hee Haw
in the 1980s. Hee Haw had a big book full of old gags the show had bought
off a standup Borscht Belt comic called the Duke O’ Paducah. Tom, from
the “there’s your desk” school of writing, got his first assignment, found his
office and began to type. A few moments later he noticed a face peering
around his open doorway. That face went away, and a minute later another
face peeked in. Tom waved hi on the way to his cigarette and kept writing.
Five minutes later there were three or four staffers gathered outside his
office, and Tom heard one of them say, in an awed whisper, “He’s not using
The Book!”)
So anyway, having been shucked out of the Canadian offices, we
returned home, as we now considered L.A., and started going to the Taffner
office in a Wilshire hi-rise every day to get our assignments. The writer in
the next office, whom I’ll call Ed because Ernie is already taken, was also
working on the show, and was also “in with the Stu crowd.”
One night we received a last-minute set of instructions concerning a
rewrite due at the Executive Producers’ L.A. homes at midnight, which was
Valuable Lessons
118
to be table-read by the cast at 10:00 a.m. Toronto time. When Darrell and I
got to the notes at 9:00 p.m. some of them were either contradictory, clashed
with earlier notes, or didn’t make sense to us, but it was midnight up in
Toronto, too late to call and ask what to do. We worked out a compromise
that kept the essential story intact, typed it up and faxed it off around
midnight.
The next morning we showed up at the Taffner offices as usual, only
to be called into Ed’s office.
Ed was grim. “Stu and I got your draft. Who told you you could
change the story?”
We said, the story you suggested didn’t work, and even if it had
worked, in the Second Act...
That’s not your decision to make, Ed said quietly. “Stu and I gave
those notes, we expected them to be followed. Do you know who writers
get hired by in this town?”
By now I recall we were mute. Ed motioned us to his couch.
“By their friends. When Stu’s got a job, you know who he hires? Me.
When I’ve got a job you know who I hire?”
(Your butt-hair plucker?)
“I hire Stu. That’s the way it works in this town, and that’s something
you have got to learn. The only way you work is by hiring people with the
understanding that they will later hire you. The only way. If you think
anybody reads spec scripts in this town you’re dreaming. Doesn’t happen.
Nobody reads scripts. If you have this high-class idea that you’re going to
impress people with your clever writing and have a career and rule this
town, you’re wrong. That’s not the way it works and anyone who’s survived
here a few years can tell you that. Ernie can tell you that, ask Ernie.”
He paused to crunch the end off a See’s Candy Almond Roca. We
silently contemplated the prospect of asking Ernie.
“Stu and I got your script last night and we were very upset. It made
no sense and it wasn’t funny. Do you know where we were until four
o’clock this morning?”
(Up each other’s asses with parfait spoons?)
“Fixing your pages. That’s how long it took to take what you gave us
and turn it into a usable script that the cast could read this morning in
Toronto. That is unacceptable. Do you know where you would have been if
Stu and I hadn’t done that rewrite for you?”
It involved flowing excrement and the lack of an oar. Ed spoke along
these lines for the better part of an hour. That’s Darrell’s and my mutual
Valuable Lessons
119
recollection, although maybe it only felt like an hour. At any rate, when Ed
finished it was lunch time. “Go eat. I’ll talk to the both of you later.”
We walked to the elevator without speaking. We rode down eleven
floors without speaking. We got out on Wilshire Blvd. “Wow,” said
Darrell. “No kidding. I thought it was pretty good.” We ate a truly
miserable lunch.
Afterwards we rode back up to our office, not sure what to write next.
We did have another draft to tackle but… were we fired? We didn’t know.
Ed wandered into our room. He was pale. He had removed his
trademark colorful sweater.
“I don’t know...” he started. “I don’t know how...”
He didn’t know how something.
“I don’t understand this,” he continued. “I was pretty sure – but I
don’t understand how...”
Here’s what had happened. Ed and Stu’s rewrite of our draft had gone
in front of the actors at 10:00 a.m. in Toronto. The reading had been heavy
sledding. At the end, perhaps even before, Don Adams had stood up and
announced it was a piece of ordure which he refused to perform. The other
cast members then stood, opining likewise, and the whole cast headed for
their rented cars.
Mindful of the cost of missing a week of production, the line producer
had run to Stu and asked if he had any other scripts in the pipeline that could
be read instead. Stu said no. All he had was our original draft of the one
they just read.
“Get it.”
Don and the cast were coaxed back. They skimmed through our draft.
Then they sat and read it aloud. Big laughs all the way through. At the end
of the reading Don went up to Stu and said, “I’ve been in this business a few
years and let me tell you something. This...” – waving our script in his face
– “is how you write a comedy.”
It was evidently painful for Ed to tell us this. He suggested we take
the rest of the day off.
We rode down the eleven floors in silence. We got out on Wilshire.
“Wow,” said I.
Our deal had been for us to write four more scripts beyond our first
seven, and then to negotiate for the second season. Needless to say no such
negotiations took place and we were off the show. ($184,019.46) Two
years later we were offered the series to run but were obliged to decline due
to other obligations.
Valuable Lessons
120
Within two months we’d been hired by Johnny Carson onto the
Tonight Show and a few months after that we had our first Emmy
nomination. In Toronto, Don Adams strode into Stu’s office: “So I hear the
writers you fire are now getting Emmy nominations.”
It was well-known among writers that the junior positions at the
Tonight Show were brutally tough gigs and a revolving door for talent; very
few writers got a pickup after their first thirteen weeks. Our predecessors,
Mike Reiss and Al Jean, went on to make the Simpsons what it is. Being
fired was no disgrace, but not a badge of honor either. It’s just the way it
was. Even in Canada they knew this.
Thirteen weeks after we began we got a call from Ernie in Toronto.
“Stu was offered this thing, uh he had to turn it down... it doesn’t pay much
but he was wondering if you guys needed some work and were free to write
an episode...”
Darrell said gee, thank Stu for thinking of us, but we were just picked
up by Carson and, sorry, we aren’t available.
Exactly thirteen weeks later, Ernie called again: “Stu just got this
offer for something, it’s not much but if you guys need some work...”
Darrell told Ernie that it was stellar of him to think of us but we’d just
signed the first ever twelve-month junior-writer contract with Johnny and we
didn’t think we could take on any more work.
As a matter of fact we could easily have taken on more work, and
were doing so. For the record: later, when we staffed our sitcoms, we hired
people off their scripts, not out of our address books.
Ernie didn’t call again. Ed went on to write Saved By The Bell.
Our affable manager Ted Zeigler had been an actor (Sonny And Cher, The
Andy Williams Show) and a kids’ TV host in both Chicago (Uncle Bucky)
and Montreal (Johnny Jellybean). During the latter gig, in the 1960s, he
became good friends with some TV execs with whom he’d stayed in touch
and who were now running a prodco which was a significant supplier to the
Canadian networks. In 1985 Ted mailed them one of our ideas, Diplomatic
Immunity: what if the servants in the North American embassy of an
impoverished war-torn Eastern European nation were actually the Queen and
Prince of that nation, in hiding from their miserable homeland and doing
everything they could to keep from being found out and sent back?
Furthermore, since they were receiving no money from home, what if the
second-floor embassy lobby and that of the small hotel whose street door
adjoined theirs were actually the same room... which had to be rapidly
Valuable Lessons
121
converted from embassy to hotel or vice versa each time someone came up
the stairs?
We had in mind farcical pace and characters. We closed a deal and
wrote the script. Our lead character was essentially Basil Fawlty. The
fictional country of his birth, Subservia, had been, in the 1600s, not unlike
Australia, to which Britain had shipped her more dangerous criminals –
except that Subservia had got all of His Majesty’s cowards and idiots.
We were asked by CTV to draw up a budget and received advice from
Ted’s friend producer Gary Blye, who was then also doing the execrable
sitcom Snow Job for that network. In our first meeting with Gary he
revealed his pithy philosophy of showbiz: “Every show is the same show –
only the deals are different.”
Gary saw our budget and urged us to expand it; “CTV can afford way
more than that!” He finally prepped and delivered a professional budget for
us, which we thought was nice of him. A few months later, when CTV had
passed, we heard through channels that they’d been seriously considering
canceling Snow Job because of its cost but when they saw the projected
costs of our show they dropped it like a bag of cat heads and renewed Snow
Job for another season.
Not helping was the fact that Ted journeyed to La Belle Province to
chum up to our prodco and was more or less flatly asked to kick back part of
the show’s budget to his old pal. Ted, being one of the most moral people
I’ve ever known, thought he was kidding. He got a short lecture about how
business was run and a flight home with our $10,000.
In December of 1985 we wrote a New Year’s Eve special for CBC radio. In
the style of year-end summaries memorializing the Great Ones who’ve
passed in the previous twelve months, Goodbye Lampy Lampton ($750) was
a look at the career of a fictional stage actor and producer whose every
production was an unmitigated disaster. We interviewed his family:
BEVERLY
From the time he was three, all he
was interested in was show
business. I remember he wanted so
badly to run away from home and
join the circus. (laughs) But he
never did.
INTERVIEWER
What did your parents do?
Valuable Lessons
122
BEVERLY
They were in the circus. The
problem was, there were never two
circuses in town at the same time.
... and his ex wives.
NARRATOR
They were divorced eighteen months
later, on the grounds of Lampy’s
performance of Othello. Lampton
next threw all of his efforts into
an Irish musical, One Size
Fitzpatrick, a project so illfated it almost ruined Dustin
Hoffman’s career and he wasn’t
even in it.
-----------------Where It Went
INVESTMENTS: Darrell and I started a Registered
Retirement Savings Plan in 1986. Every year we and our
manager and friend Ted put a few thousand in. Eventually
some sharpie at Merrill-Lynch San Francisco asked why we
were keeping all that loot in the bank earning 2% interest when
he could promise us a 10% rate of return. So we took our nest
egg out of Washington Mutual and put it under his control and
during a time of unequalled expansion in the American
economy it lost money every single year for five years before
we wrested it from his control.
I listened to an economic adviser on NPR the other day
who brightly calculated that if you put aside the cost of lunch –
$9 a day – at ten percent interest for thirty years you’d have a
million dollars. That’s a gross investment of only $98,550. I
contributed that much in our first six or seven years alone, and
here I am twenty years on with not much more than I put in.
Our Plan survived several attempts by The Bride to
withdraw the money to pay off credit cards. Unlike my Credit
Union account, which she emptied, she didn’t have signing
authority over this one.
Valuable Lessons
123
Mr. Lynch was pretty cautious about spreading us
around, investment-wise – no Microsoft for this lad – but he did
make one bold investment: $25,000 into something called
Radica Games, which by 1997 had disappeared below the
waterline. Anyway, this money isn’t lost but I can’t touch it for
nearly twenty more years. With any luck by then I’ll have
some common sense.
$200,000
“THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JOHNNY CARSON”
In 2002 I attended the annual Christmas party held by writers Maiya
Williams and Patric Verrone, then Secretary-Treasurer of the WGA and a
fellow Tonight alumnus. At the party, another Johnny graduate, Simpsons
writer Mike Reiss, described how, in the public speaking he does at colleges,
he frequently mentions his early credits and is surprised every time to
discover how many college students have never heard of Johnny Carson. I
find this shocking and sad.
Darrell and I were profiled in 1982 by a Canadian program called W5,
whose host asked about our ultimate career aspiration. We replied without
hesitation, writing for Carson. Actually, we probably did hesitate a bit,
because just saying that in 1982 sounded presumptuous. Nobody has ever
had the ease with a joke or projected the same whimsical and friendly
intelligence that Johnny mastered and made seem so easy. Johnny was the
only person other than my dad whom I’ve looked up to almost as a father, in
the sense of wanting to please him and being immensely gratified when I’d
managed to do so. Johnny said, at my back, as I was leaving his office one
day in 1992, “Andy, the material’s been really strong lately,” and I was so
rattled by the compliment I didn’t know what to say – even “thanks” didn’t
occur to me.
Researching this section I pulled out some Tonight Show tapes and ran
them. Cody, nearly thirteen, stopped and looked at the screen: “Who’s
that?” It was a Carl Sagan sketch in which a flaming asteroid model
smashed into a beachball-sized model of the Earth while tiny earthlings prerecorded by Johnny screamed, “Oh my God we’re all gonna die!” Cody fell
over. He was lying on the floor laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. After
he stopped crying I said, that, my boy, is Johnny Carson, and yeah, that’s
kinda the effect we were going for.
Valuable Lessons
124
The circumstances under which we came to Johnny’s attention are
described elsewhere in this book. The Tonight Show was one of three shows
where I did a lot of work I was proud of. It had one thing in common with
the other two: no (or in the other two cases, very few) network notes.
Campus Cops avoided the scarificator because it was shot on film up in
North East Jesus and the suits couldn’t be bothered to drive that far. Ned’s
Newt received few notes because it was a relatively low-budget cartoon
whose American broadcaster, Fox, had missed the opportunity to get in from
the beginning, thus becoming a mere carrier instead of a production
participant.
But at NBC our material was protected by the fact that the most
powerful man in television liked what we wrote. Johnny protected us, and
he protected the material. The creative freedom that engendered and the
gratitude we felt for it can’t be overstated.
We began in May of 1986, as junior, or turnstile, writers, working
under the looming and mildly clownlike head writer Ray Siller and vicehead-writer Kevin Mulholland, author of the famous Sis-Boom-Bah Carnac
(“Describe the sound of a sheep exploding”). Gary Belkin was the only
other material writer on staff. We worked in a trailer a quarter mile from the
show’s main office. The monologue guys, Mike Barrie and Jim Mulholland
(no relation to Kevin), Hal Goodman and Larry Klein, and Bob Keane, kept
their distance. We were nominated for the first of four Emmys in 1987 and,
had we won, the first time we ever met these five guys would have been
onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
“Material” covered anything written for the show that wasn’t
Johnny’s monologue: desk spots (or “Five-Spots” as the producers called
them, because in the box rundown they were the fifth thing up after Main
Title, Ed’s Announce, Monologue and Commercial)... sketches, ad-libs for
civilian guests, and monologue for guest hosts. Ray and Kevin had been on
the show so long they were up to seven or eight weeks of vacation a year –
as soon as Johnny left, they scarpered – so the guest material fell to the three
of us, and after Gary Belkin left, to Darrell and me.
On our first day Ray told us, “There are two things you need to know
about this show. Johnny’s usually in a bad mood so the hours are long... and
our director, Bobby Quinn, is lazy and incompetent.” We puzzled over this
but figured he knew what he was talking about. Ray had been on the show
nearly fifteen years. A few years previously he’d asked if he could leave
because he was feeling a bit burned-out. This had been taken as a disguised
request for a raise, which he was given, so here he still was, writing four
shows of material a week, most of it seemingly at the last moment. We’d
Valuable Lessons
125
write for the assigned spot and give Ray pages all morning, he’d assemble it
at about 1:00 in time for Johnny’s arrival at 2:00, and, he was right, a lot of
it got tossed.
Stump The Band was the spot Johnny did when the material had been
dumped. That, or Carnac, or Blue Cards. Carnacs were brain-killers to
write so we used every free moment to stockpile them. With Blue Cards, all
you could do was write ten good ringers then sit and wait for the audience to
line up. They were each given blue 5 x 7 index cards and a pencil by the
NBC pages, and asked to “write a question for Johnny.” The questions were
run up to us starting an hour before the show, giving us forty-five minutes to
suggest gag answers, have them typed and stuck on, and get them to
Johnny’s dressing room for a final editing. After Blue Cards I always felt
like I’d been interrogated for ten hours about something I didn’t do.
The ringers were in case we got back 150 cards asking, “Will you
marry me,” fifty asking, “How come you don’t bring us anything to drink
out here?” and 200 blanks. There were nights when, out of 500 people, we
only got three cards with even semi-legible or amusing questions. This was
when we fell back on questions we’d either saved from past audiences
(specially marked so Johnny wouldn’t call out “Where are you, Barbara?”)
or questions we’d made up. Some of Darrell’s and my sample suggestions
from 1989:
DO YOU STILL HAVE ALL YOUR OWN TEETH?
(Yes... but always wanted Strother Martin's teeth.
know why)
Don’t
WHY DO YOU START THE SHOW SO LATE?
(Ed doesn't get up until the owls start pecking at him in
the gutter.)
DO YOU EVER WEAR A DISGUISE WHEN YOU GO OUT IN PUBLIC?
(If I tell, can't use it any more. All right: I go out as
Quickdraw McGraw's sidekick, Baba-Louie)
IF YOU COULD WRITE AN 11th COMMANDMENT, WHAT WOULD IT SAY?
(Thou Shalt Not Crack Walnuts Under A Widow's Arm.)
WHAT'S THE BEST ADVICE YOU EVER GAVE ANYONE?
(Never include a "Hobbies" section in a holdup note)
DO YOU HAVE ANY ODD PERSONAL BELIEFS?
(Kind of private...but there is one. I believe curiosity
just winged the cat.)
Valuable Lessons
126
IS THERE SOMETHING YOU NEVER TIRE OF?
(Saying the word "Oblong.")
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE MODE OF TRANSPORTATION FOR GETTING
AROUND TOWN?
(I'm a little embarrassed. You'll think it's pretentious.
Rose Bowl Float.)
DO YOU HAVE ANY FASHION TIPS FOR YOUR WOMEN VIEWERS?
(Never wear a string of pearls you got from a freshwater
raccoon)
DO YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM RIGHT BEFORE THE MONOLOGUE?
(Yes, and frequently during.)
DO YOU HAVE ANY ODD PRE-SHOW QUIRKS OR RITUALS?
(Take a shower before each show, walk into NBC newsroom
naked, powder self with weathermap chalk.)
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WHEN YOU’VE GOT ALL THE MONEY YOU
WANT?
(Sit down and try to figure out a way to want more money.)
SINCE SO MANY PEOPLE WATCH YOU IN BED, COULD YOU ENDORSE A
LINE OF CONDOMS WITH YOUR NAME ON THEM?
(Don't wanna brag, but I could endorse a line with Zbigniew
Brzezinski's name on them)
IF YOU WERE MAROONED ON A DESERT ISLAND AND COULD ONLY HAVE
TWO PEOPLE WITH YOU, WHO WOULD YOU PICK?
(Ed, for obvious reasons. And Julia Childs to help cook
him.)
Ed really leaned into that last one – “Aww! Thank you!” – right before the
zinger. (Writers swoon over the memory of their boffo jokes the same way
serial killers revisit their buried bodies. I actually have a 2nd cousin who’s a
serial killer. Separate book.)
Divorce, booze, sex, money, celebrities, power, insults – when you
write for 500 live bodies every night you learn what the hot buttons are. But
none of us ever knew it like Johnny knew it. The thing that endeared him
most to me was that if he liked an incomprehensibly silly gag, even if he
knew to a toasted certainty that it’d bomb, he’d go out there and do it to
amuse himself. Is there anything greater than that?
Valuable Lessons
127
Towards the end of our thirteen-week stint, we got a letter: at the
conclusion of our three-month deal our services would no longer be needed.
We were devastated. Ray was sympathetic. A few days later we got a
message from co-Executive Producer Peter LaSally – could we meet him in
the NBC commissary?
Peter said he’d been talking to Garry Shandling. Garry had guesthosted a few times during our stint and we’d given him a lot of material, one
day over thirty pages. Garry had mentioned to Peter at lunch that he liked
our stuff, and Peter told him we’d been fired for not contributing enough.
Garry had said he was surprised – we had seemed prolific. So now Peter
wanted to confirm with us: had we been giving Ray material?
We said sure, lots of it. When we got back and counted, it was
actually 998 pages in a little over twelve weeks. Peter asked for a copy of
everything we’d submitted to Ray. We photocopied our files after work and
gave the stack to his secretary.
We kept writing up to the last day, a Friday. We took a meeting at
lunch to try to sell one of Mickey Rooney’s ideas to a production company
across town. When we returned – a message: please come to Fred De
Cordova’s office.
Fred pushed a button under his desk to close the door behind us. He
had our material in front of him. He said, “I’ve given this material to Mister
Carson. I want to ask you boys two questions. Consider your answers
carefully. First, this is all your writing?” We nodded yes. “And did you
show all of this to Ray?” I said yeah; the date we gave him the spots was
typed at the top of each page.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thank you gentlemen, that will be all.”
We went back to our office. We were packing stuff into boxes. Five
minutes later, Ray storked past our open door and went home. Fred called:
“Have you gentlemen committed yourselves to any other series since you
received the official notice that we wanted you the fuck out of here?” We
said no. Fred said, “Then I am happy to tell you we consider that particular
dictum withdrawn. We’d be honored to have you show up as usual on
Monday morning, but please be funnier.”
We did, and tried to be. Ray never mentioned it.
Three months later, while we were enjoying a week off, our manager
Ted called Johnny’s lawyer, Ed Hookstratten, to confirm that this time, since
we hadn’t received a Death Letter, we were picked up. Ed hung up, called
Ray, and we got a letter hand-delivered the same day: Services Terminated.
Valuable Lessons
128
But this time we hadn’t been informed within the contractually
mandated ninth week so again we dodged the bullet. I was in Canada when
this all played out – I bought a pair of $20 Cuban cigars and brought them
back for Peter and Fred, “From The Men They Couldn’t Hang.” Ray joked,
after we returned, “No hard feelings, right? I haven’t been able to survive
this long without throwing a lot of guys like you to the wolves.”
But clearly there was something evil in the wind. Because Johnny
depended on Ray to tell him everything about the writing staff and what we
were up to, Johnny never saw the other material writers. We weren’t
allowed to put our names on anything, and we knew better than to bother
him backstage as he prepared to go through the curtain. We’d chatted with
Johnny in May of ’86 in a thirty-minute interview but we didn’t speak to
him again until late in 1988, two years after we were hired.
So, with two knives lodged quivering in the door behind our heads,
we decided to start writing monologue. Nobody had asked for it, but it
seemed like the only way to put our own unaltered writing in front of Johnny
each day and remind him we were there. Plus we love doing topical jokes;
the sketches were fine and occasionally nerve-wracking fun but they didn’t
have the same cachet as that classic opening eight minutes.
Ray had us from 10:00 a.m. through 5:00 or 6:00. Johnny worked on
the monologue between about 2:30 and 3:30. We decided to start writing
topical stuff separately at home the night before, then meet in the office at
8:00 a.m. to compare and cut each other’s stuff and type it up. A year or so
later laptop computers would make all of this a lot easier, but for now they
were too bulky – Wayne Kline had worked on a “portable” computer on
Thicke Of The Night in 1983. It was the weight of a carry-on suitcase filled
with ball bearings and the screen was the size of a sandwich.
We wrote up our first monologue and handed it in. Watched the show
that night: nothing. But the second night we got four gags in, and we were
off and rolling.
We did this for a few weeks without anyone noticing, then one day
Ray dropped by our office: are you guys writing monologue? Jim
Mulholland and Mike Barrie had told him. These guys were (and still are,
but now for Letterman) the Barry Bonds of monologue. They were hearing
lines on-air that their comedic vibrissae told them didn’t come from the
other writers they knew, so they’d gone down to Bob Lasky’s cue-card room
and checked.
The pot boiled over in October of 1988. There’d been a long Writers
Guild strike, after which Johnny decided to clean house. He’d been calling
employees downstairs to his basement office all day and they’d been
Valuable Lessons
129
returning to fetch their coats, so when we heard, “Mister Carson would like
to see you in his office,” we gulped like a couple of de-bowled cartoon fish.
Downstairs, Fred met us coming out. He must have seen the looks on
our faces and taken pity because he intoned, “It’s not a bad thing.”
We sat on Johnny’s couch. “I suppose you’ve heard what’s been
going on today.” We said no not exactly. “I’ve let Ray and Kevin go. And
Hal and Larry, and Shirley Wood...”
Jesus Christ. Hal Goodman was writing with Johnny on The Red
Skelton Show in 1953. He’d been with Tonight since Jack Paar left.
“I’d like you guys to stay...”
And then he said some other stuff.
When we began breathing again Johnny was asking if there were any
changes we’d care to make to the way the material spot was being handled.
I ventured that we’d like to stop handing him material on the day of the
show and start getting it all to him several days in advance, by fax to his
home. Plus Darrell and I agreed that seeing the writers, all the writers, more
often would be healthier for the show.
Ray had been right about Bobby Quinn. If Bobby wanted to kill a bit
so he didn’t have to spend extra time blocking or shooting, it was dead. The
staff wrote a sketch one time, Limerick Bank Robbery. A police car is
parked outside a bank with a cop crouched behind its open door for cover.
SUPER:
“LIMERICK, IRELAND”
(SHOTS ARE FIRED.
THE INSPECTOR, JOHNNY, SHOWS UP.)
INSPECTOR
I hear you've got Mickey Machree.
COP (nods)
He's been holed-up since twenty
past three.
He tied up the cashiers
And kneeled on their ears...
JOHNNY
That despicable son of a B.
I knew I'd catch up to him one
day.
I staked out his condo last
Sunday.
COP
Valuable Lessons
130
How did you know
Mickey's plan wouldn't go?
JOHNNY
His getaway car.
It's a Hyundai.
(YELLS TO THE BUILDING:)
JOHNNY
Throw your weapon out
Mick!
please.
Nobody wins one of these.
Come out with your hands up,
We'll take your demands up...
MICKEY (in building)
Your sister and Dom Deluise!
(JOHNNY REACTS.
TAKES THE MEGAPHONE OFF THE COP)
MICKEY
Your Ma slept with half of
Killarney!
JOHNNY
Your Mother and all of South
Blarney!
MICKEY
She'd do it in Galway
In closet or hallway!
JOHNNY
Yours does it for chile con carne!
And so on. We took the sketch to Bobby and he said, “It’s no good.” I said
what do you mean no good?
“I can’t shoot it.”
“Why not?”
Bobby moved a ruler and a stapler on his desk to demonstrate: “You
want a bank here and a car here. Where does Johnny go? Where am I
supposed to put the cameras?”
I moved the stapler a bit and said, “Here, here and here?”
“Nah. It doesn’t work. You shoot it.”
Valuable Lessons
131
Bobby and Johnny went way back and the boss generally deferred to
his old friend. We lost a lot of good sketches that way.
On Monday mornings for three and a half years the material writers –
Tony De Sena, Patric Verrone, Tom Finnigan, Bob Dolan Smith, Darrell and
I – met at Johnny’s house at nine a.m. We convened an hour and a half
earlier at a Malibu coffee shop to discuss the weekend’s news and prep our
pitches. The aim was to lay out the week so there were no surprises then
listen to what Johnny thought was funny about the events in the news, write
down his sketch and desk spot ideas and pitch our own, perhaps replace
something that had already been slotted for the coming week with something
he felt was more topical, and get started on the longer-range things that
would take a while to assemble because of props, costumes, sets or pre-taped
inserts.
Back at the office on show days Johnny called me at 10:15 and I ran
down the show. He doesn’t like the telephone and neither do I – those
conversations were like two squirrels playing ping pong.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning. What’ve we got?”
“It’s Other Uses For Recycled Objects. Props look great. Some of
them, like the VCR stamp-licker, there’s buttons to make them work.
Dennis’ll have everything on stage for a walk-through at three.”
“Good. Anything else?”
“We revised next week’s sketch, Helen’ll have it when you get in.”
“That’s fine.”
“See you onstage.”
“See you there.”
There were scores of ingenious sketches and prop bits that never made it
onto the Carson Collection tapes and DVDs, and which nobody remembers
because the show only syndicated once, on the satellite pay-per-view
channel Direct TV. Some of the highlights for me:
THE GLUE SKETCH – a detective investigates the murder of the
inventor of SuperGlue. By the end of the sketch, everything on the set –
pets, furniture, the wallpaper – is stuck to him and his lieutenant, guest actor
Jan Rabson.
THESAURUS EULOGY – a thesaurus editor is eulogized, with more
synonyms for deceased than there are in Monty Python’s Dead Parrot
Sketch. (“He’s hanging ten on the satin-lined surfboard, flying the marble
kite... he’s making a call from the horizontal phone booth...”)
Valuable Lessons
132
BRUTALLY HONEST ANONYMOUS – a support group for those
genetically insensitive to the feelings of others. Wives with big noses, a few
extra pounds and ugly hats got the brunt of it.
THE SNIVELLING WEASEL’S CHOICE AWARDS – a live weasel
runs down a ramp three times and picks Best Actor, Actress and Picture
from bowls of Purina Weasel Chow. We did this three years in a row and I
felt the weasel’s choices were as defensible as the Academy’s.
TELESCAM – Two grinning hucksters, Johnny and Teresa Ganzel,
sell outrageously fraudulent merchandise, like the Fabergé Fried Egg and the
Kraftmatic Reclining Toilet.
THE TONIGHT SHOW PHILHARMOONIC – another piece of
hydraulic engineering wizardry. There was a popular car back-window
accessory in 1990 called the Moonie: a little guy grinning evilly over his
shoulder who’d pull his pants down and moon other drivers when you
squeezed an air bulb in the front seat. The NBC FX department assembled
about 200 of these on a tiered choir set, each controlled individually, or in
programmed banks, by a computer terminal hooked to actuators and an air
source. As Moon River played they did their choreographed thing, flashing
in alternating tiers, from left to right and back, doing “The Wave,” and
soloing. A Thing Of Ass Beauty.
DOMINO’S PIZZA TOPPLING – you’ve seen films where they
topple 100,000 dominoes in a gym and they spell out words and launch
rockets as they fall? With the help of resourceful director Richard Friley and
the Ashland, Kentucky branch of Domino’s Pizza we did it outdoors,
knocking down 4,000 Domino’s delivery boys in two minutes. (Guest
appearance by the staff writers, with Darrell as Pizza Boy # 1.)
HISTORY OF THE WORLD – Most sketches or desk bits were
assembled from gags written by the staff. But occasionally on weekends or
on vacation I’d write a bankable non-topical bit that could fit in anywhere
and save everybody a day of writing pressure. Frequently they were in
rhyme:
(CENTER: PODIUM WITH TOASTER, TWO WAFFLES IN TOASTER.
JOHNNY ENTERS TO PODIUM.)
JOHNNY
The complete history of the world and two Eggo waffles,
in four minutes.
(JOHNNY POPS TOASTER DOWN)
A PLATE.
Valuable Lessons
JOHNNY (RAPIDLY)
Wet and dark and cold and smelly,
Prehistoric floating jelly
Lightning flashes, water cloudy,
Jelly walking, saying "Howdy!"
Two amoebas whoopee-making,
Sex is born; so is faking
Soon there's grass and trees and roses,
Things with tails that ain't got noses
Birdies eatin' worms and fishes,
Lizard chompin' on the Missus
Noah's Moas, Noah's boas,
All from tiny protozoas
Reptiles getting big and cocky,
Pterodactyl eats your doggie
Geeses, meeses, weasels, camels,
Add some boobs...hey, you got mammals!
Monkey playing on savannah,
Great-great aunt of Daryl Hannah
Double ice-age, double whammies,
Cavemen skinning bears for jammies
Bows and arrows, quest for fire,
Neanderthal invents the tire
Ploughs, cows, bigger brows,
All the stuff that brains allows
Cro-Magnons' artistic itchin's,
Painting bisons in their kitchens
Middle East invents the hoe,
Tutankhamen is wrapped to go
Wall of China, fall of Troy,
Mrs. Plato it's a boy!
Chinese guy invents the compass,
Sphinx's nose goes caddy-whumpus
Greeks tweaks weak's noses,
Discus throwers' naked poses
Birth of Buddha, birth of Rome,
Caesar shoulda stayed at home
Alexander on the brink,
Socrates has one last drink
Rome's flames climbs higher,
Nero playing "Light My Fire"
Wise men follow Eastern star,
Christmas comes but once so far
Eclipses measured by the Mayans,
Christians gobbled up by lions
Nobles dining, peasants whining,
Roman Empire starts declining
133
Valuable Lessons
Tons of Huns in every village,
Wearing t-shirt; "Born to pillage"
Byzantines defeat the Vandals,
There's Mohammed wearing sandals!
Holy Roman Empire founded,
Vikings tell the world "You're grounded!"
Raping, looting, burning, stealing,
Ain't the Army life appealing?
Leif Ericsson, Navy nominee,
Year one thousand, Anno Domini,
Waiting out the storm he's lost in,
Hangs a left, discovers Boston
French invade while Brits not looking,
Still can't rescue British cooking
Four Crusades, then all bets off,
Genghis Khan is lopping heads off
Mongol hordes are Mongol hording,
Stealing what they ain't affording
Bow replaced by gun and cartridge,
Lousy time to be a partridge
Middle Ages comes in stages,
Knights in armor all the rages
Black Death killing half of France,
Your legs fall off inside your pants
Printing press an aid to learning,
Joan of Arc says "What's that burning?"
Spanish Inquisition gruesome,
Stretching makes a guy a twosome
Columbus says to Ferdinand,
"Look what I found; lotsa land!"
Da Vinci flaunts his Renaissances,
Martin Luther takes his chaunces
Rubens' reputation grows on
Sketching babes without their clothes on
Norse's forces plot new courses,
Henry Eighth invents divorces
Mary Queen of Scots beheaded,
Real bad way to end up deaded
Spain's Armada turned and ran,
The Shoguns divvy up Japan
Says King James, theologizing,
"Gee, the Bible needs revising"
Indians eye some beads and satin,
Gain some jewelry, lose Manhattan
Drake wonders where he got to,
Shakespeare writes "To be or not to"
Galileo on the run,
134
Valuable Lessons
135
Thinks the earth goes round the sun;
Says "It's in my telescope!"
"No it isn't," says the Pope
Noah Webster starts with "A,”
That's why you can't spell today
Spinning jenny used by many,
Cotton Dockers half a penny
King George taxes tea and foodstuffs,
Then goes on to really rude stuffs
Favors labors, rattles sabers,
Paul Revere wakes up the neighbors
Betsy stitches stars and stripes,
Jefferson declares his gripes
Revolution, Constitution,
Franklin risks electrocution
Pasteur dreams a nifty cure up,
Bonaparte is creaming Europe
"Let them eat cake" Antoinette says,
"Lose the bimbo," Lafayette says
Guillotines are record holders,
Separating heads from shoulders
James Monroe stands up and vows;
"There's a Doctrine in the house"
Beethoven has golden gift,
Takes a second, writes the "Fifth"
Bright idea of Samuel Morse's
Lays-off fifty thousand horses
Europe fused, Swiss excused,
Queen Victoria not amused
Dickens warrants "My next trick'll be
Writing all of Nicholas Nickelby"
Karl Marx gathers flunkies,
Darwin says we're mostly monkeys
Civil War a nation bloodies,
Four years later: back to buddies
Bell's phones ruins slumber,
Watson gets unlisted number
Edison takes volt and amp,
Tells his wife, "Fixed your lamp"
Freud perplexes both the sexes,
Makes his patients nervous wreckses
1903; year of flight,
Orville barfs on Wilbur Wright
(SMOKE COMES FROM TOASTER.
Kaiser sore, World at War,
JOHNNY SPEEDS UP:)
Valuable Lessons
136
One-to-nothing final score
Then, when Germans feeling better,
Second game of double-header
Frank's Yanks' tanks win,
Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin
Girls swoon, Beatles tune,
Yankee golfing on the moon
Watergate's missing tapes,
Darwin's right about the apes
"Read my lips...no new taxes,"
Lincoln spinning on his axis
That's what history records,
You don't like it? Eat my shorts!
(SFX:
"DING!")
(WAFFLES POP UP, TOASTED, JUMPING 2 FEET. JOHNNY PUTS PLATE
UNDER WAFFLES AND CATCHES THEM, POURS SYRUP ON TOP.)
Do you know how much of that would have been left if I’d had to run it past a
studio development department and then a network? Maybe the waffles. Based on
the notes I’ve been taking everywhere else for twenty five years, the reaction any
executive imagines that piece would get from an audience is stunned
uncomprehending silence.
Of course, it killed. It received more requests from viewers for copies than
anything we wrote for the show. Can I use this as an example the next time I’m
told to remove a reference to Daedalus and Icarus because “nobody knows who
they were”? No, I cannot.
There were also a lot of interesting bits written that got tossed, either
because they were overly ambitious/expensive, or because I couldn’t convince
Johnny they were worth the candle. The Cow Man Of Alcatraz was my favorite:
the story of the inmate who, to pass the time during his life sentence, raised a herd
of cows in his cell, after nursing back to health the original mating pair which had
fallen from the sky one day into the prison exercise yard. I wanted to use ten
plastic cows/bulls and three or four real ones. Johnny had apparently worked with
cows before – t’was not to be. I brought it up every six months anyway, like a
comedy parole hearing.
Johnny now got the stuff earlier and seemed to relax considerably. One day
in 1991 he realized he hadn’t done Stump The Band in over a year. We went eight
months without a Carnac. These were the two bits that previously had shown up
with regularity because they were the stand-bys for nights when the material had
been torched. Now the boss was asking to do them because he missed them. The
mood in the Monday morning meetings, my terror at filling an hour of dead air
Valuable Lessons
137
aside, was light. One morning, the assistant who normally set out our orange
juices wasn’t there so Johnny ran back and forth from the fridge himself getting
our beverages. I sipped mine, arched an eyebrow and said... “Wait a minute – is
this canned?” “No,” Johnny shot back, “but you are.”
Johnny’s last show aired on May 22, 1992. There was no material to write
for the next day’s show – that was the only night I ever sat in the audience.
The writers met with Johnny for lunch a few times a year after that. We
reminisced about the good and the bad times on the show, the jokes that bombed,
the guests who’d been pricks, and he laughed about the garbage we’d all been
forced to write ever since. Johnny passed on gossip, news, conversations he’d had
with his many acquaintances in and out of showbiz. When George W. Bush was
sort-of-elected, Johnny had asked Bill Clinton what he really thought of him. The
President said, “Johnny... he is not a curious man.”
Johnny was a curious man. There’s nothing under the sun in which he
was not interested. That, his talent with a joke, and his love of the utterly
pointless laugh are the three things I miss about his show the most. Oh, and
the money ($5,990,000).
Well, that was a breath of fresh air. Now back to the crap.
If you read the entry for The Alleged Report you saw mention of the 6,800
jokes we submitted to Toronto’s Comedy Bank over six months, trying to
beat out other gag writers so we could make enough at $6 a sale to buy fish
cakes and new typewriter ribbons. One day in 1988 in our office at the
Tonight Show we received a letter from the operator of Have A Laugh,
Toronto, a dial-a-joke service that had apparently been using our material.
The owner said he’d called the Comedy Bank years ago and asked if they
had any jokes he could use. They either gave or sold him our old gag files.
The writer was sincere and appreciative. He’d been running his
service on a shoestring budget but felt guilty and enclosed a check for $21
for what he calculated was a fair pro rata percentage of what he’d taken in
over the years from the phone company.
Six years later I was shopping for a gift in Sherman Oaks and saw a
pin-on novelty button that said, “Why Don’t You Play Hide And Go Fuck
Yourself?” This was a line I’d written for Rodney Dangerfield in 1979.
Darrell and I had concocted two pages of Rodney-esque one-liners and
mailed them to his club, Dangerfield’s, in New York. A letter came back:
“Thank you, but Mr. Dangerfield writes all his own material.” Our original
pages were returned, but there were dots in blue pen next to seven gags.
In 1983 we were in L.A., having a beer at the home of a friend, Frank
Bluestein, when Frank asked if we wanted to hear the new Dangerfield
Valuable Lessons
138
album, “Rappin’ Rodney.” He put it on; there was our line, one of those
blue-dotted. We wrote to his manager and got a nice letter and a check for
$50. (“By cashing this check you transfer to Mr. Dangerfield all rights to
the joke ‘My father never spent time with me, he used to take me out in the
back yard and play Hide And Go Fuck Yourself.’ Yours Sincerely...”) I’ve
since seen it on fridge magnets. I’m guessing there’s nowhere I can go for
another fifty bucks.
You’ve likely heard of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The
Forum, but not of the 1987 touring version, for which Mickey Rooney paid
us $2,000 to write some additional material:
“She’s a virgin.”
“What’s that?”
“Ever see your father hit his thumb with a hammer?”
“Sure.”
“You hear what he said?”
“Yeah.”
“She hasn’t done that yet.”
I don’t know what personal stuff Mickey was going through at the time –
some time after this he was sued by his longtime agent Ruth Webb for,
among other things, deafening her cats – but when Forum wound up its run
Mickey told me it had closed because, “The Jews in Hollywood just don’t
want to see a good Christian show.”
In 1983 Mickey was given an Honorary Academy Award, in his
acceptance speech for which he thanked both the Lord and Ms. Webb, so
things turned sour with the latter pretty quickly.
But goddamn it, the man has lived a life. You know how John
Dillinger was gunned down outside a movie theater in 1934? The film he’d
just watched was Manhattan Melodrama, and Mickey was in it. Mickey
may be the most talent packed into the smallest space ever. You think
you’ve seen everything he can do and one day you’ll be flipping channels
and catch him drumming like Buddy Rich, juggling, playing jazz piano, tapdancing like Gene Kelly, or doing handsprings or sinking five pool balls
with one shot or God knows what else. Regrettably, some of that talent
displaced common sense, as evidenced by the thousands of dollars he’s paid
me to write projects that never got off the ground.
Mickey’s weird Christian take on why Forum went into the
vomitorium seems not to have been a phase – in April of 2004 after twenty-
Valuable Lessons
139
six (continuous this time) years of marriage he renewed his vows with eighth
wife Jan Chamberlain Rooney, with Jerry Falwell officiating. This Jerry
Falwell:
"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for[(9/11]
because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40
million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really
believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists,
and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make
that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American
Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point
the finger in their face and say: you helped this happen."
The pagans? I get the feeling they were in there as This Performance Only
understudies for the Hebraists, don’t you?
The talent locked up in Mickey deserves better than this. Perhaps
when you actually help define the times you’ve lived through, you feel you
should have a bigger say in how they turn out. Mickey deplores the evil pit
that Hollywood has become. But he of all people should remember that the
golden city he recalls was largely built by the Jews. Quite a feat for an
oppressed people. You suppose they could all get together again and make a
reliable electric car?
------------------Where It Went
SHOW GIFTS: Shirts, hats, mugs, watches, clocks, gift
baskets, books. Showrunners / head writers are obliged to get
everyone in the cast, staff and crew a holiday gift. That’s
usually about a hundred people. From the expenses in this
entry one should probably subtract the gifts received; fifteen
Christmas gift baskets from studios, production companies and
networks, full of coffee, chocolate, two bottles of wine and a
tree ornament with their logo on it. I did save a few bucks in
this column by having a lot of shows cancelled before
Hallowe’en.
$30,000
Meanwhile, Casey Keller and Richard Albrecht, whom we’d met on Love
Boat, had landed on the NBC show We Got it Made starring Teri Copley and
found themselves needing a script in three days. Teri had done a cameo on
Valuable Lessons
140
Thicke Of The Night four years earlier. The bit was this: Alan found her in
the audience and interviewed her first as her character from this series, then
as herself. His hand-card read:
INTERVIEW FIRST AS “MICKEY,” A SEXY MAID TO TWO
YOUNG MEN. FUNNY STORIES. THEN INTRO AS TERI
COPLEY, STAR OF NEW NBC SERIES...
Alan found Teri in the audience in her maid uniform:
ALAN
Who do we have here?
like someone’s maid.
You look
TERI AS MAID
(ditzy high voice)
That’s right Alan! Hi!
The interview ran about two minutes discussing Mickey’s duties and
comical frustrations, and then:
ALAN
Folks, I guess it’s time to tell
you... this isn’t really Mickey...
this is Teri Copley, star of the
new series “We Got It Made.”
TERI AS TERI
(ditzy high voice)
That’s right Alan! Hi!
There was no difference.
We hastily watched one episode, then as hastily wrote another. The
writing staff reportedly loved it. They loved the premise and the story and
the scenes and gags so much everyone was inspired to add stuff of their own,
and then some more, until it got too long to air so they cut some of our jokes
and scenes and by the end, according to Casey, it was Nail Broth; there was
nothing left of our draft. (Tonight Show head writer Ray Siller once sold an
episode of Laverne And Shirley and by the time it aired the only thing of his
left in the script was the phrase “chocolate hernia.”)
Anyway, the network hated the mangled result and refused to shoot
the episode, so, no rerun money. ($6,310.00)
Valuable Lessons
141
The following year, Scholastic Entertainment, later to enjoy success
with The Magic School Bus, had a pilot commitment called My Reel Family
with the Disney Channel about a kid who has his own sitcom and who
essentially lives two lives – one on TV in which every problem is tidily
wrapped up in twenty-two and a half minutes, and a real, much messier one,
to which none of the lessons he’s learned from his show can be usefully
applied. It wasn’t a bad idea as these things go, and right up our alley as a
theme. Arthur Weinthal, then President of Canada’s CTV network, was
willing to commit to a series based on our pilot script, but the Disney
Channel owned it and was unwilling to go ahead. ($20,000)
Mickey called again in 1988. He wanted to do an all-singing, alldancing, all-joking stage show with Donald O’Connor! He sent us the
money ($2,500) and, as we had with Sugar Babies, we mailed him the
material:
“Remember Francis The Talking Mule? Donald did the first six
Francis films and I did the last one. He’s the one identified with the
part – but I was there for the barbecue.”
I would have loved to see it but it only played in Vegas, and I restrict the
losing of money to my RRSP.
Murray “Unknown Comic” Langston called us in 1989. Murray had
written a low-budget flick about a romance between two homeless people,
called Up Your Alley, to star himself and Linda Blair. Murray, for those few
women whom he hasn’t bedded, is a legendary swordsman with more funny
sexual conquest stories than anyone I’ve met. You just want to kick him. I
don’t know whether Linda and Murray made the beast with two agents.
Then again, nor do I know whether the Yankees will ever win another World
Series, but I know the safe way to bet.
We’d written standup gags for Murray; it was some of that stuff he
incorporated in the screenplay. This one was tasteless but not as crude as
Murray’s previous self-financed film, Night Patrol. In that effort, little
person Billy Barty, a devout born-again Christian, played a Police Captain.
Billy balked at the foul language Murray wanted him to use. So, in postproduction, Murray added a string of small pearl-sized farts on the sound
track every time Billy walked.
Murray loves pushing it. One day he said, “Hey Billy, you know
what’d be really funny? If when everyone gets here they open the door and
you’re blowing me.”
“What are you talking about Murray? You want me to pretend – ?”
Valuable Lessons
142
“No, not pretend. They walk in, you’re actually blowing me, then you
act like you’re surprised you got caught. Get it?”
“Murray, that’s not funny.”
“Sure it is! What’s not funny about that? A midget blowing me?
Come on!”
“I don’t think I should do it, Murray.”
“It’s a practical joke for god’s sake! Where’s your sense of humor?
Look, I’ll sit over here...”
As Murray says, there’s a fine line between being funny and being an
ignorant idiot. I found a copy of Up Your Alley in a Tapes For $1 bin. I’ve
never seen another. I don’t recall how much, or if, Murray paid us.
WAIT A MINUTE – AREN’T THERE
ANY DECENT TV EXECUTIVES?
Of course, as there are four-leaf clovers, there are decent executives. There are
gems like Joe Voci, Tim Flack, Armin Völckers. Barry Levy, Wendy Errington,
Alex Waring and Vince Commisso at Nelvana. Susan Land at Warner Brothers.
David Neuman, Anita Addison, Paul Aaron. Maddy Horne. Diane Scanlon, Evan
Baily. Some of these people – Armin, Barry and Joe – have become writers, and I
welcome them to the fraternity. Several got out. Some died while still trying to
improve things.
I have respect for anyone who cares – for the people who never told me,
“Hey, it is what it is.” For anyone who doesn’t consistently refer to the shows they
make as “product.” You don’t have to be thumb-up-your-ass idealistic, but you
have to think what you do makes a difference. If it doesn’t, you have to try to
change it. And if you try and fail, you have to drink a lot and bitch about it.
SITCOMS, 1990-2000
In 1990 Darrell and I were shown an existing single camera (“film style”)
pilot called Detective Spot, and told the network liked the idea but wanted
something that could be shot in front of an audience. The idea was that a
cop changed brains with his German Shepherd. I don’t recall what happened
Valuable Lessons
143
to the dog-brained cop, I think he mercifully died early, but the cop-brained
dog ran around doing his cop business and his dog business in front of an
annoyingly bland family.
We wrote a new pilot. The show sold as Doghouse and was put in the
hands of a Canadian writing team to do the showrunning for the Global
network in Canada. The Mom was played by Shelley Peterson, who at the
time was the wife of the Premier (U.S. = Governor) of Ontario. The eldest
son was played by Jaimz Woolvett, who after the cancellation portrayed the
boastful Schofield Kid in Clint Eastwood’s and David Webb Peoples’
Unforgiven. (Then, unfortunately, it was right back to dogs in the New
Zealand TV version of White Fang, for his lousy treatment on which Jaimz
was awarded a $3.2 million judgment against the producer.)
The Canadian network found the scripts the showrunners were
producing lackluster and offered us $10,000 a day to write new jokes.
Unfortunately they asked us to fax them not to the studio or network but to
the showrunners. My recollection is that they didn’t prefer ours to theirs.
We grossed $94,711 overall.
At least this one got on the air. We were pitching one day on the Fox
lot and heard the story of a two-dog pilot that got the green light and began
simultaneously training real pups and building mechanical dogs for the
many special close-up shots. Several months later they’d spent $300,000 on
the cyberhounds and God knows how much training the actor dogs, when
someone pointed out the latter were growing but the former were not. They
no longer matched. The money was written off and their pilot scrapped.
----------------Where It Went
REAL ESTATE: In April of 1990 I was single, I owned a
three-bedroom house in L.A. and a three-story weekend cabin
in the mountains, both paid off, and I had $150,000 in the bank
and no debts. This is when I received the bold investment
advice referred to earlier. I bought a house for $1,550,000. In
1997, because of the sliding real estate market, and being
crippled with credit card debt, I was forced to rent it out to Teri
Hatcher and then-husband Jon Tenney. It sold several months
pre-divorce for $1,100,000 in 1999. In 2004 the guy who
bought it off me re-sold it for $1,750,000. I was a writer; he
was a businessman. The down on The Big House was
$580,000 and I put about $200,000 in. That house was the only
Valuable Lessons
144
place I’ve ever been truly happy living, and I guess I stayed too
long.
$780,000
OTHER DOWN- AND MORTGAGE PAYMENTS: I quickly
paid off my first two houses, one in four years and one in four
months, before folding the equity of both into the Schindler, on
which I overpaid my principal by $15,000 a month for the first
three months. Then I got married; The Bride was a believer in
credit and took over the household finances, so no more extra
principal was paid-down.
Figure $140,000 to pay off House One, $75,000 for my
mountain cabin, then nine years of $7,000 a month, and a year
and a half of $2,500 a month for the new place just before the
divorce. The bulk of the proceeds from House Two went to
The Bride, post-separation.
$1,016,000
Back in town, Stu Shelsow at Fox had optioned Danny Antonacci’s comic
butcher character Lupo The Butcher, who, in a famous underground cartoon
short, slices himself to pieces with a meat axe in a splenetic rage while
yelling inchoate quasi-East Europeanisms like “Sunnimabeetch!”
We had a get-to-know-him meeting with Stu for which we were
probably the latest we’ve ever been to a meeting in L.A., which is saying
something. As we dragged into Fox on Pico late in the day, having spent
nearly two hours in traffic, Darrell said, re: the prospective daily drive,
“With our luck, this is the place we’ll get a deal.”
And so it was. Perhaps our exhaustion and don’t-really-care attitude
impressed Stu; we landed this assignment and, later, Mama Said and
Drexell’s Class.
It was a rewrite of an existing script. We wrote Lupo as a guy so
mired in the lower classes that when he imagines himself striking oil under
his house, in his fantasy life, post-millions, he’s wearing a black formal
butcher’s outfit.
A butcher in a TV show – kinda hard to imagine nowadays. I mean,
what coffee shop would he hang in? At least the development didn’t go on
long enough that we had to give this psychopathic carnivorous foreigner a
heart scene. ($10,000)
Valuable Lessons
145
“DREXELL’S CLASS”
“But in the other scenes... you’re thinking about it.”
This small but portentous comment marked the last time this show,
which began as a script called Shut Up Kids, was really ours. It prompted
the shorthand phrase “horse race,” which Darrell and I still use to describe
any large element in a story which will get whittled down one line at a time
by dithering executives who don’t themselves yet realize they don’t want
less of it, they want to remove it. If it’s a horse race, take it out now rather
than prolong the agony.
In late 1991 Darrell and I decided it would be politic to mention to our
employer, Johnny Carson, that we’d sold a sitcom which would be airing
soon, and that its star would probably be coming on his show to promote it.
We told him the star was Dabney Coleman. Johnny told us congratulations
and good luck, and added, helpfully, “Dabney’s a prick.”
Dabney’s prickishness turned out not to be a factor in the series, at
least not for us. We were committed to the Tonight Show so the pilot and
series were run by friends of ours, Phil Kellard and Tom Moore. We wrote a
handful of episodes and consulted on the rest.
Early on after the pickup, Fox had told us they weren’t going to pay
the full shot for a pilot. Full shot at that time was in the neighborhood of
$600,000. For that, a network expected a half-hour episode that could, if it
tested well, have a couple of commercials slapped into it and be aired pretty
much as it was. Fox was going to pay more in the area of $200,000. A
“Presentation,” then, instead of a Pilot.
With that little money, compromises have to be made. You can’t
build sets, you borrow them from other shows or share them with other
pilots shooting on the same lot. You can’t cast, light, shoot and edit a full
half hour (really, 22:30). You aim for more like twelve minutes. (The next
cheaper order would be a Staging. The network comes to an empty stage
and your actors read the script around a table. Total hard dollar cost: $400
for coffee and carrot sticks and a black guy to clean it up.)
So a studio ordering a Presentation doesn’t expect to get a polished
product. An exception, famous at the time, was Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper,
which shot a Presentation that aired, unchanged. The next year, every pilot
in Hollywood was a Presentation and everyone expected them to be airable.
One time I heard a Lorimar exec turn a corner away from a CBS suit,
Valuable Lessons
146
muttering, “An airable presentation is a fucking Pilot.” But nobody dared
say those things out loud.
So we got the lowball number and were told to turn in something that
“gives the flavor of the show – a few representative scenes.” We picked
three or four scenes and, on the limited budget, shot them. Later, Peter
Chernin watched the unconnected scenes and complained, “These guys may
be funny but they have no story sense.”
David Neuman, a former Reagan White House employee and
freelance TV producer with a Fox deal, had a one-sentence idea for a sitcom:
W.C. Fields teaching school. An aesthete who hates children is forced by
IRS debts to fall back on a teaching certificate he got decades ago. The title:
Shut Up Kids. Fox “got it.” They later decided they couldn’t use the phrase
Shut Up in a sitcom title lest it scare off advertisers. That’s how long ago
1991 was.
(David has a funny story – well, funny to me. He used to work at
NBC and even after leaving had a business card in his wallet with his old job
title. He was racing through a remote part of North Dakota one night in a
rented car, skidded on black ice and rolled the car. He came-to with a guy
asking him, “Are you David Neuman?” The first motorist who saw his
overturned car in the snow happened to be a paramedic. “Are you David
Neuman of NBC?” His wallet had fallen out in the crash. David says his
first thought, hanging upside-down and bleeding, was great, I’m dying and
this guy’s gonna pitch me a series. Later, in the hospital when they briefly
thought David might not make it, they called in a rabbi, who turned out to
be, at that moment, the only rabbi in all of North Dakota. This is why
showbiz isn’t based in Bismarck.)
David had read some of our material and decided we were the ones to
make sure the series didn’t end up all treacly and kid-loving. We did a
script, then about ten more drafts for David, and Fox started handing it
around. Dabney read it, we met at his house in Brentwood; he signed on.
Our pilot found Drexell stuck in a job he hates by an enormous IRS
debt, surrounded by adults and children he can’t stand.
(OTIS PUTS HIS ARM AROUND THE BOY)
OTIS
Willie, you remind me of a misfit
kid in the old country, running to
school in shorts... angry at the
world, but determined to beat it.
Valuable Lessons
147
WILLIE
You, sir?
OTIS
Hitler.
On a particularly bad day, Drexell calls the father of a troublemaking student
in to school, only to learn that the dad works at a local racetrack and knows
of a wink wink sure thing in tomorrow’s last race. Drexell places a big bet
and proceeds to systematically trash everyone and everything at the school,
while running back and forth between home and class to pack, and following
the race on the TV and radio. Of course after he’s called the Principal an
“inflexible, barren, potato-shaped sack of malice” the winning horse
stumbles on the track.
(OTIS PICKS UP THE TV AND SHAKES IT, TRYING TO GET THE JOCKEY
BACK ON THE HORSE)
Get up!
OTIS
GET UP!
TRACK ANNOUNCER (V.O.)
The jockey may have broken his
leg.
OTIS
What does he need his leg for,
he's got a horse! Get back on,
you hormone-deficient coward!
TRACK ANNOUNCER (V.O.)
The horse doesn't appear too badly
hurt... they won't have to shoot
him.
OTIS
Shoot him! Shoot him anyway!
Then shoot the jockey! Then shoot
me!
Drexell faints dead away, and the smart, cute fifth grader he’s entrapped into
doing his bidding all day with the promise of a better teacher after he’s gone
and a share of the winnings is left looking down at his miserable body on the
staff room floor as the other teachers rush in.
Valuable Lessons
148
NICOLE
I'm standin' here with a taste of
nothing you big fat swindler!
(NICOLE BEGINS KICKING OTIS.
AT HER IN HORROR)
SHE APPEALS TO THE ADULTS WHO LOOK
NICOLE
C'mon, I'm just a kid!
kick him!
Help me
The child cast included future stars Brittany Murphy, Matthew Lawrence
and Jason Biggs. (When I reminded him of this recently, Darrell said,
“Wow, we put words in the mouth of a pie-fucker.”)
At first Fox seemed to be on board with the premise of the show: the
posters had a picture of a scowling Dabney and the slogan DABNEY
COLEMAN ON FOX. IT HAD TO HAPPEN.
But as we went into production the notes on the script bespoke a
different attitude:
*character is too nasty
*give Otis’s character more genuine moments so you care about him
*he is a fundamentally decent guy and this needs to be sensed
*show how he takes the situation of anger and turns it into a positive
teaching thing
*show edgier ways of showing “heart” moments that will be unique to the
show
*he needs to have more levels in his character coming across (charming,
funny, graceful, wisdom)
*have Otis push Billy Ray to a new level and show a breakthrough and how
it has affected him
*a genuine moment is needed in the script
*show how he genuinely is a good teacher
Gee, can we get genuine enough? When I read heart moments I just about
beshat myself. I was new enough to American sitcom development to
believe that there might be some leeway in these drippy desiderata. Surely
someone was going to pop up and say, “Hey we bought a show about a
mean son of a bitch and we cast Dabney Coleman, leave these guys the fuck
alone.”
Valuable Lessons
149
One of the specific notes we got when the series was picked up from
our script was, “there’s an awful lot of horse racing in this.” It seemed
reasonable to us to have Otis tune in the race frequently throughout the
episode to check on his investment. But okay, we took their point and
eliminated a few references. In scenes where Drexell was listening to the
track announcer we just had him with an earplug in, smiling.
After the next pass: “There’s still too much horse-racing in this
draft.” Okay. We trimmed it again.
By the fifth or sixth draft the horse race was only mentioned three
times – when Otis hears about the “fix”... when he places the bet and begins
his self-destructive day... and at the end when the nag trips and Drexell’s
dream of escape collapses.
The written notes came in: “Still too much horse stuff in this draft.”
We got on the phone with Fox: how can there be too much horse-racing
here? I mean, there’s only a total of about seven lines referring to it. It’s
only mentioned in three scenes!
That’s when we got the killer note: “Yeah... but in the other scenes,
we’re thinking about it.”
The horse race came out. They had Pulled The Pin. If there’s one
thing that makes a story work, one element upon which all the physical gags,
all the attitudes and jokes in an episode depend, the network or the studio
acting on their behalf will find that pin and yank it. The script that Dabney
loved, that brought him into the project, was gone. We needed a whole new
story.
The first tape date was fast approaching. (Actually, it was
approaching at the same speed as everything else in the universe, but you
follow me.) Darrell and I sat down one weekend and wrote a new script.
Unlike the previous try, we made this one a Premise Pilot – it concentrated
more on Drexell and his two daughters, played by A.J. Langer and Brittney
Murphy. It followed the day of Drexell’s audit and his dire realization that
the only way for him to avoid jail was to dust off the teacher’s certificate
he’d gotten years ago solely because he was boffing a girl who was getting
her B.Ed.
We handed it to Phil and Tom on Monday. They loved it. No
changes, no notes. “This could be shot as written.” They passed it to
Twentieth Century Fox Studios and got the same reaction: “Brilliant stuff.
Thanks a million.” Fox Studios passed it to Fox TV. Peter Chernin said he
hated it so much he wouldn’t even give us the money to shoot it.
Not enough heart.
Valuable Lessons
150
The eventual Episode One was table-written, and used some of the
lines from our first draft, notably “holy hopping snot!” which I recall drew
the ire of several TV critics for its blasphemy or scatology or perhaps both.
After Episode Four aired we received a pithy note from Chernin &
Co: “We never want to see another scene set in the classroom.”
Honesty compels me to admit that’s not the most neck-snapping midseason course change I’ve ever seen, but it did come as a surprise
considering the show’s title, and the fact that the series premise was W.C.
Fields teaching school.
And of course every carefully-calculated character trait of every
student – the result of hours of soul-searching meetings with the studio –
went by the wayside as each kid became a short mouthy wise-ass. A new
character named Slash, boyfriend to the older daughter, was added. Slash
was The Dumb Guy. Every show at the time had a Dumb Guy. Dumb Guy
jokes are easy to write. Even dumb guys can write them.
We’d wanted Drexell to be an angry but educated man, whose
comedy came from his disdain for the boobs, simpletons and bootlickers on
the school’s staff, and the know-nothing gum-chewing ankle-biters in his
charge. W.C. Fields, right? Here’s his opening speech from the original
pilot:
(A TIGHT, LOW-ANGLE, CHILD'S P.O.V. SHOT OF OTIS DREXELL. OTIS
IS A WELL-WORN 50-ISH SPECIMEN WHO HASN'T HAD A WOMAN'S
ASSISTANCE PICKING OUT HIS CLOTHES IN OVER A DECADE. HE BENDS
LOW, AND BEGINS WITH AN ANGELIC SMILE)
Savings.
OTIS
Loans.
(OTIS SAVORS THE WORDS, AND HIS COMMAND OVER HIS AUDIENCE)
OTIS
The twin symbiotic concepts that
drive the modern banking system.
Let us consider the bank. It
tills no soil, heals no bones,
manufactures no goods. It
functions merely as intermediary
between those who have money and
those who need it. For the
privilege of having a roof over
his head, the common man pays this
building-with-some-pens-in-it ten
Valuable Lessons
151
percent. But where do you, the
banker, get this capital?
(REVERSE: WE SEE OTIS'S AUDIENCE FOR THE FIRST TIME -- A SMALL
CLASS OF UTTERLY UNCOMPREHENDING EIGHT-YEAR OLDS)
OTIS
Why, people stream in all day long
and line up on their lunch-hours
to shove it at you, and all you
need do is hire an asthmatic
octogenarian with a plastic gun to
unlock the door at ten a.m. and
let them in! For this, holidays
are named after you! You put
forty-day holds on checks and go
home at three o'clock! Life is
good!
But the kind of thing he ended up with was this:
OTIS
The Coach of the Bills this
season, man oh man that guy walks
on water!
He became a beer-swilling poker-playing know-nothing good ole boy.
Know-nothings are easier to write.
The Surprise on this show was that Dabney either couldn’t or
wouldn’t remember lines. Surprising, mainly because he seemed to like the
original, wordier script. He could deliver the gist of a line, and get a lot of
the original words in there, but if you wanted a letter-perfect delivery of a
sharp comeback, he wasn’t your man.
The ratings were never great, and it’s not that Twentieth TV didn’t put
their money behind the show. Drexell’s Class only ran eighteen episodes
but in that time it had three different Principals and three different Opening
Title sequences, each more expensive than the last. They pulled out all the
stops for episode eighteen, hiring guest stars Jason Priestly, the Swedish
Bikini Team and musical guests Digital Underground, with a rare sitcom
appearance by Tupac Shakur, whom I passed in the CBS Radford parking lot
hitting a spliff the size of Bugs Bunny’s carrot.
One day late in the run Fox studio exec Stu Sheslow called Darrell in
our offices at Lorimar and pointed out that the show wasn’t doing as well as
Valuable Lessons
152
everyone expected. Darrell said we’d noticed that. Stu said it was going to
lose money for Fox. Darrell said no doubt and that’s a pity. Stu asked us to
be good guys and kick back $30,000 of our consulting money to Fox.
Darrell said uhhhhhh no.
Five days later we got a call from Fox Business Affairs saying that in
their opinion we had failed to render services as required on exactly three
episodes of the show. (3 x $10,000 = $30,000.) They named the three
episodes, to which we’d not only consulted as per our deal and contributed
material, on one of them we’d snuck away from Tonight and sat through the
rewrite with the staff.
I told David Neuman about this latest piece of dastardry and reminded
him of the pages of material we’d written for each episode cited, all still on
my hard drive; numbered, dated. David said, “It’s all just money bullshit.
You guys were right here and I’ll say so, so will Phil and Tom. They
wouldn’t be pulling this if you’d signed with Fox instead of Lorimar.”
Fox of course stopped our last three checks. We filed a complaint
through the WGA. Six months later they offered us twenty cents on the
dollar. We declined. Then they offered forty cents on the dollar, then fifty.
The Guild kept feeding us the offers until nine months after payment was
due, when Fox finally hit 100% but refused to pay Guild-mandated penalties
and interest. The Guild said, you can push for this but ahh it’ll take a while.
We finally said fine. They coughed it up on January 9, 1993.
Nine months seems like a long time, and Fox seems like a bunch of
pricks here. But in 1994 Darrell and I realized that due to a
misunderstanding of what constituted “writing income” under a writing +
producing deal, we’d accidentally overpaid our WGA dues by about
$20,000, and we asked for it back. It took us over a year to get it.
The original script, never produced, has had its admirers. Writer Janis
Hirsch warmed our hearts by quoting from it when we met her in 1996.
John Ritter spoke highly of it, as did Larry Hagman (see Have Mercy). But
Hollywood doesn’t go back to pick up its dead. ($367,693.64)
In 1991 Fox also had a pilot called Mama Said about a black girl singing
group, written by Jeanne Romano who later wrote Fish Police. We did a
pass for Fran McConnell at Triangle Productions, the Paramount prodco
owned by the Charles Brothers of Cheers fame. Darrell thinks all of our
material ($10,000) was later cut out. Nice work if you can get it.
I should throw in another $100,000 here to cover the money we
received on overall deals between 1991 and 2002. Some of what they pay
Valuable Lessons
153
you is just to show up at their studio and not at anyone else’s. I’ve had
overall deals at Warner Brothers and at Nelvana Entertainment, totaling
eleven year’s employment. From this money must be subtracted the
“earned-out” portion; whatever an individual selling the same shows at the
same rates would have earned if paid per episode. Our “soft dollar” rates
were $50,000 per pilot script ordered, and $40,000 per episode to produce
it... then a $25,000 bonus if it sold to series, $30,000 per episode as EPs and
a $5,000 per episode royalty based on sole Created By. After January 1994
these rates rose slightly. Don’t feel bad for the studios – by my accounting,
The Parent ‘Hood alone turned a $31 million profit.
In 1991 we met with Aaron Spelling’s development department about
a show named Rehab. We were given the idea “rehabilitation facility” and
told by development execs Marcia Basechis and Danielle Claman to run
with it. Since drinking and drugs were too dark for network comedy we
made it a place dealing with persons whose unusual phobias and other
physical and mental quirks were too weird for any other accredited facility.
The head shrink was a wound-up thirty-ish Shelly Long type. The
Administrator was her handsome, charming but idiotic former schoolmate
who had dumped her at the altar four years ago, at a Little Mermaid-themed
wedding with twelve bridesmaids dressed as lobsters, then dropped medicine
for Business Admin and ended up as her boss.
The notes were actually pretty good and we thought the result was
funny. I can’t find a copy now but I recall in Act Two the unhinged inmates
of the facility ended up through some colossal blunder in the control tower
of San Francisco Airport, landing planes. CBS’s Joe Voci told us, “This is
the next Night Court. It’ll run for years.” Mr. Spelling loved it, but this was
before Beverly Hills 90210 picked up steam and put him back on top.
Then we signed with Lorimar, becoming exclusive to them and
unavailable to staff a series for anyone else, mooting all such inquiries.
Networks rarely buy a script, they buy a script-plus-a-showrunner; Rehab
disappeared without a ripple or a phone call. ($28,000)
In 1991 C.A.A. set us up with a meeting with producer Glen Larson
(The Fall Guy, Magnum, P.I.). I told my neighbor, Waltons creator Earl
Hamner Jr., that I was working with Glen, and Earl inquired in his
plummiest West Virginia tones, “Have you met his limo?” Glen didn’t
drive. We used to go to Mortons on Monday nights and talk over the
development of several projects Glen was keen on, while he put away a
bottle of red wine and his driver listened to talk radio in the car.
I mentioned one Monday night that we were soon to leave The
Tonight Show and had been entertaining offers from studios for an overall
Valuable Lessons
154
writing deal. Did he favor one studio over the others? Glen shook his head,
leaned forward and said, “It doesn’t matter which one you choose. They
can’t tell you anything, and they can’t help you.”
At the time I puzzled over this but now it feels like great wisdom.
Quick example: a writer friend of mine knows someone who was on-set for
a run-through when the young preppy studio suit questioned a line: what’s
this in the kitchen scene about eating leftovers? The writers explained the
joke to him, but that wasn’t the problem. He’d never heard of leftovers.
Another friend pitched a pilot story in which a lower-middle-class family
held a garage sale to make the extra $500 they needed to pay that month’s
rent. The NBC development ladies didn’t buy it as a story: “Everyone has
$500!”
These jobs don’t pay well. Okay, in the upper bureaucratic echelons,
when you’ve proved yourself by crippling many a series, there’s money.
But the starting salary is low, and you can’t live on a low salary in L.A. and
still wear a nice suit and drive everywhere in a BMW. So it attracts the kind
of people who don’t need the money: the children of the rich, the dilettante
kids of showbiz parents, the folks who don’t know there’s another bathroom
at the back of the plane. In the Middle Ages the useless offspring of the
wealthy became monks. Now they supervise Monk.
Glen had a finished script, by himself and another writer, called
Defective Detectives that we re-wrote and returned to him, but we heard no
more of it. ($10,000)
The other script we did for Glen was The Last Laugh ($10,500),
which I pictured being handed to Bob Newhart. Shortly after we finished it,
Newhart signed onto the sitcom Bob with writers Cheri and Bill
Steinkellner, but our script would have worked equally well for any name
star with a quiet reactive persona. We created a shy accountant summoned
to San Francisco for the funeral of his late reprobate brother, a club owner
who, besides a mountain of debts, had left behind an unpleasant love-starved
son and this comedy / cabaret.
PRIEST
He’s in heaven now...
SALLY
Father? No offense, but I knew
Benny and if he’s in heaven I will
personally eat that six foot
wooden Jesus in front of your
church.
Valuable Lessons
155
The desperate employees cajole Bob into taking the place over to keep it
solvent. He meets all the regulars, including all his late brother’s oblivious
old girlfriends:
MARGIE
Benny was real spiritual. When we
were making love he used to cry
out the names of women I was in
past lives.
The pickup decision was in CBS President Jeff Sagansky’s hands; a few
weeks later he greenlit our pilot Have Mercy instead, and The Last Laugh
went to pilot heaven.
Larry Hagman, post-Dallas, had read our original script for Drexell’s
Class and invited us to his house in Malibu to discuss the possibility of
writing a sitcom for him to star in. Larry bemoaned the changes that had
been made to Drexell and we smiled and refrained from telling him that the
same changes would be made to anything else he happened to like.
Patrick Duffy had told Larry that doing a sitcom in front of an
audience was fun. We’d met Patrick in January of 1987, when he guesthosted the Tonight Show, for which Darrell and I wrote guest monologues
and desk material. Only two months previously his parents had been
murdered during a robbery in their Montana bar. Patrick’s a funny, smart
and congenial man and a Buddhist to boot; I can see how one might believe
him even when he said making a sitcom was fun.
So we expanded on the premise of The Last Laugh, selling Tim Flack
and Joe Voci at CBS an idea, Have Mercy, about a dead millionairess who
manipulatively unites three unlikely people from beyond the grave: her
estranged sister, her long-divorced first husband, and her bratty twelve-yearold daughter Mercy, whom no one knew existed. She does this by willing
the trio a joint interest in her luxurious upstate New York hotel, where they
have to contend with her disgruntled staffers who were stiffed in the Will.
Before we submitted the script, Larry changed his mind about doing a
sitcom with a child actor, but Tim and Joe loved the idea of the show, so
onward we marched.
In Hollywood, scripts get loose because once a pilot is greenlit every
casting agent in town receives a copy. Bette Midler later met with us to
praise this one and to talk about writing something similar for her. Lupo The
Butcher begat Drexell begat Have Mercy... every failed pilot script was
becoming the Gro-Mulch for the next one.
Valuable Lessons
156
Mercy was an ensemble piece, in one of the last years when a major
network would seriously entertain such an idea without every cast member
being young and attractive. We needed a snooty English butler and read the
likes of Patrick McNee, Edward Mulhare, David McCallum, Roddy
McDowell, John Neville, Bernard Fox and David Warner. Casting director
Barbara Miller used to say God doesn’t give with both hands – that may be
why I love character actors. They’re more interesting, talented and
agreeable than the Beautiful Faces we normally see hogging the screen.
Daniel Hugh-Kelly had the swagger, the looks and the charm for the
male lead. CBS said great, so long as we have a name female to play against
Danny.
Teri Hatcher – later my tenant for a year, although I never reminded
her of this earlier contact – was one of our three actress picks to take to the
network. Teri stalked onto the CBS audition stage in a miniskirt up to here
and a tight low-cut top. Tim Flack, then one of the more Out men in
television, fanned his face and gasped, “Oh my God, what’s happening to
me? I hope it’s just a phase.”
Then Heather Locklear flew in from Las Vegas to meet with us.
Heather was and is adorable, and Lorimar and CBS said absolutely.
The bratty twelve-year-old part brought forth a lot of young girls and
their weird mothers. Darrell spied one mom and daughter on their knees
outside the casting room praying to get the part. God was at Universal that
day.
Thora Birch met with us but was unavailable for a follow-up meeting
at CBS so she was relegated to a successful film career. At the second
network call-back Courtney Peldon nailed the part for the CBS folks, just
beating out famous showbiz loser Kirsten Dunst.
On the day of the table reading the dozen suits from the network and
studio, plus the cast, and the heads of the production departments met
around a big table and commenced performing.
We weren’t two minutes in when everyone realized something was
horribly awry. Danny Kelly, as the fast-mouthed long-ago husband of the
late Madame, was supposed to spar non-stop, verbally, sexually, with the
worldly wayward sister, who’d last seen Danny when she was only fourteen
(“I’ve grown...”) and who gave as good as she got. Danny and Heather had
given fine performances alone but when the two were together it played like
a boxing match between Sugar Ray Leonard and Olive Oyl. He was beating
the shit out of her. Heather is nothing if not sweet, and no one had
considered this possibility: she just wasn’t able to play one-on-one vicious.
Valuable Lessons
157
We sent her flowers and an apologetic note, and Heather, dismissed
from Have Mercy, was forced to fall back on a successful nine-year run on
Melrose Place.
We were taping in five days and we needed a female lead. Again the
casting meetings, but we were going over old ground; we had plenty of good
performances but the network wanted a star. At the last minute someone
suggested Teri Garr, who would actually have been perfect. I tried to talk
Teri into it but she was wary of the commitment, especially on such short
notice, so we went with the best actress who’d auditioned, Isabella Hoffman.
Network VP Peter Tortorici shook his head and said, “Danny Kelley and
Isabella Hoffman… that’s the damndest reason I ever heard of for picking
up a pilot.” (I thought they were picking it up because they liked the script.
I’d forgotten that in TV you don’t audition actors to see how well they act,
you do it to find out if the people the network wants can even read.)
The shoot was a blast. David Sackeroff designed a deluxe upstate
New York hotel that I wanted to live in. Isabella was fine and funny and so
was everyone else. One exchange...
ISABELLA
I’ll have you know I have slept
with Kings!
DANNY
I hope you made them take their
skates off.
... made Tim Flack burst out with gleeful laughter then admit, “I have no
idea what that means.” (Hockey isn’t big in gay Hollywood.)
But it just wasn’t meant to be. The usual two-minute sobfest was
shoehorned in by sundry Lorimar suits before we filmed, which helped oh so
much. We used young Courtney again the following year, in the pilot of The
Trouble With Larry, and Patrick Warburton again in Death And Taxes. The
next time I saw Courtney she was flashing her breasts in a Heather Graham
movie with gargoyle pendants clipped to her nipples. Ah how quickly they
grow up. ($90,000)
Right after Mercy, we were invited to try a sitcom adaptation of New
Jersey playwright Don Evans’ stage play One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show.
We had an earn-out rate at Lorimar of $10,000 for a series outline, $50,000
for a pilot script and so on – I show that we wrote four different outlines for
this, retitling it The Harrisons. Marla Gibbs was to have starred. At the
same time we were developing something called Mr. Wonderful for Peter
Valuable Lessons
158
O’Toole. We have yet to have the pleasure of working with either
performer.
But we did pitch and sell, at Fox, something that could have been a lot
of fun. Here was our wind up: every farcical “lighter-side-of-the-news”
press item happens to somebody. Some unlucky couple had an escaped zoo
gorilla jump in their car and drive it into the Safari Burger before it was
tranquilized, or had 1,000 pounds of frozen airliner waste land in their pool,
or gave birth to American’s 250,000,000th baby. When Mt. Saint Helens
exploded, some unlucky family got stuck with a rented convertible full of
ash on a highway five miles to the leeward side of the mountain. Somebody
somewhere gave Metallica singer James Hetfield the cold germs that
cancelled their tour, earning the enmity of ticketholders...
What if, every week, these true news events happened to the same
family – the Prestons? We could call it Meet The Prestons; a nuclear
Bundy-type suburban foursome who blunder into tragic or alarming events.
No rich visiting aunts, no penitent kids caught in adult chat rooms. The
news would be the kickoff point for all our stories, jump-starting us right
into Act One. To counter potential qualms about our ability to concoct
twenty-six stories a year based on funny topical items we wrote a sample ten
episode stories from the events in a single issue of Newsweek.
Fox bought the idea and we expanded upon our concept and
characters. The Prestons’ daughter, sixteen, wanted only to get married and
escape her tempestuous family, and threw herself upon any visiting firemen,
TV reporters or paramedics:
DAUGHTER
Look at me, Brad. I’m half woman,
half woman-child! That’s threequarters woman!
I’d hoped, in success, to eventually spin off the Prestons’ equally unlucky
neighbors in a show called Face The Nathans.
Fox liked our rough bible and its sample stories. They asked us to
pick one and “expand it a little.” We chose one, wrote it out to about twenty
pages and sent it back in.
Word came back: “This is the just the same stuff you gave us before,
but with one of the stories expanded!” No arguing the point; that’s what it
was, all right. We were told our further services in elaborating upon this
concept would not be required. ($10,000)
Valuable Lessons
159
In mid-1992, Mickey Rooney called again: he wanted to do a oneman show called Mickey Rooney In… Mickey Rooney! I said sounds like a
tight fit. That’s right, he said, more stuff like that.
Mickey apologized for the money ($3,000) not being much for a
whole stage show, but he said he was only performing it a few times and
they were for charity. No problem; Mickey’s been more than good to us
over the years, we wrote the material.
A year later I walked into Jerry’s Deli in Studio City and saw a poster
on the wall: “Mickey Rooney In… Mickey Rooney! Coming soon to the
Pantages Theater! Tickets at Ticketmaster.” No doubt that was the allcharity Ticketmaster. I asked them to put the poster aside for me when it
expired. Six months later the waitresses couldn’t find it. But you believe
me, don’t you?
David Neuman, who’d produced Drexell’s Class, was sitting at a
Lakers game when he heard the couple in front of him discussing an inhouse screening of their film version of Michael Frayn’s stellar farce Noises
Off. The couple felt it was confusing and that maybe it still needed some
additional linking material to put the story across to an audience.
David reached over the seats and told the couple, Frank Marshall and
Kathleen Kennedy, that he knew a couple of writers who could give them a
new scene quickly. The next day, Touchstone called us at the Tonight Show
with director Peter Bogdanovitch’s home number and asked us to fax him
material directly. They were flying Michael Caine over from London in four
days’ time. Peter would have one night with Michael to shoot extra
material, mostly exteriors, since the movie’s sets had been struck.
We went to the Universal lot and watched the rough cut in the Amblin
screening room, then wrote a three or four-page scene in which Caine,
playing the nervous director of the disaster-in-progress, leaves the theater for
fresh air. (“Mr. Fellowes, is there something wrong with your seat?” “Yes,
it’s facing the stage.”)
Bogdanovitch and Frayn rewrote and shot the additional sequence.
Domestically, the film grossed $2.28 million. In 2004 it came out on DVD.
Go buy it and help them make back the money they paid us. ($2,500)
Nicolette Sheridan is in a bra and panties for 90% of the film, and, what may
be better, Carol Burnett isn’t.
At the Warner’s ranch (now the network lot), Brit ventriloquist Ronn
Lucas’s dragon puppet Scorch, electronically enhanced to the tune of
$300,000, was starring in an Alf-ish show from creator Alan Katz. We were
on our overall deal with Lorimar and trundled over to the Scorch stage on
what is now the WB lot, to watch a run-through and add jokes. ($10,000)
Valuable Lessons
160
The stage had been trenched so that Ronn could work standing up. Furrows
ran behind each spot in the elevated set at which the actors might find
themselves promenading.
CBS head Jeff Sagansky watched the run-through with us and seemed
to enjoy the dragon puppet a lot. A year or two later Jeff okayed another
pilot, Girl’s Best Friend, on the strength of Paul Sand jumping into his lap at
CBS and acting like a dog. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Rose Marie was in the cast, Jonathan Walker starred. The TV Tome
entry for Scorch describes it as a show that was never given a chance. It got
on the air, which is a chance most shows don’t get, but CBS was in huntand-dump mode in those days, as we were to learn a year later with two
separate CBS series of our own.
Back at Warner’s proper, John Brand and John Falsey had written a
pilot called Rise And Shine, starring Judge Reinhold. Warners/Lorimar felt
for some reason that it needed punching-up and asked us the day before the
taping to do a rewrite. At the time we were head writing the Tonight Show
until 5:00 p.m. and we had a pilot at Lorimar that was prepping for
production that week. And I had a six-week-old baby at home and The
Bride was on incapacitating drugs. I explained all of this to Lorimar exec
Tony Jonas – in a moment I’ll tell you my more-or-less actual words – who
replied, “We’d like it tomorrow.”
After the Tonight Show and after work finished on our pilot at 10:30 I
sat up to 3:00 a.m. with the baby in my lap reading and re-typing this script,
which was about a children’s TV show host.
Of course not a word of ours got into the show: we were told a few
days later that our versions were never shown to Brand and Falsey; “they
were pretty happy with their own pass.”
They were pretty happy with their own pass. These two writers, who
had produced St. Elsewhere and created I’ll Fly Away and Northern
Exposure (six Emmys in the 1992 season alone) and who had worked on this
pilot for a month or two, for some reason didn’t want to consider replacing
their own carefully-considered work with some pages typed in the middle of
the night by two guys they’d never heard of who’d been handed their script
for the first time the day before.
Which of course is what I’d told Tony Jonas. ($10,000)
“WORKING CLASS HEROES”
Valuable Lessons
161
One of the first things we were handed at Lorimar was a meeting with standup comics Rick Ducommun and Rich Shydner.
We’d interviewed Rick for our Canadian docu-comedy, L.A. Calling.
The first time we met him was on Fast Company. When Alan Thicke
wanted us to remain in California writing for an extra week during that show
but had nowhere for us to stay since he was leaving town, he asked Rick if
we could kip at his place. Rick obligingly said sure Alan, I’ll give them my
number and address. Alan left. Rick ran for his car. We ended up sleeping
on someone else’s floor for a week.
So we knew Rick.
We were going to pass on doing a show with Ducommun and Shydner
but at lunch at the pub one day we came up with an idea that had Rick
written all over it: A loud, pushy thirty-ish con artist, never married, lives
with his unemployed best friend from high school and that guy’s longsuffering wife, in Flint, MI. The wife has one iron-clad rule: just because
they’re unemployed she doesn’t want the guys sitting around at home all day
goofing off, drinking beer and becoming men of leisure. So they both have
to leave the house in their truck every day at 8:00 and they can’t come home
until 5:00. Her theory: this way they’ll be forced to look for work. What
they end up doing instead is hanging out with and annoying all their friends
who actually have jobs.
We met with Rick and Rich and gave them some pages for Working
Class Heroes. They had a development deal with Fox TV and were open to
suggestions. We wrote a script and C.A.A. set us up to pitch it.
On the way to the pitch at Fox, our agent phoned: Rick just called
from his car, he says don’t pitch the show. What? He’s serious. He read
the material and he doesn’t care for it. He read it now? Today he read it, the
day of the pitch?
We went anyway and pitched it, not mentioning there was a script.
They ordered a script. David Janollari of Lorimar read our first draft, and
told us to add a heartfelt scene where the two friends reveal what they mean
to each other. I recall that as it comically transpired one of them had saved
the other’s life on a rafting trip. Contrary to our instincts but not wanting to
kick too much in our first month at Lorimar, we added the scene and David
gave it to Tom Nunan at Fox. Nunan disliked it so much he told us not to
even bother doing a second draft.
So it didn’t work out with Ducommun and Shydner. A year later we
removed the near-death-rafting scene and sold the script again, this time to
CBS. We spent months trying to cast it with casting director Ellie Kanner
Valuable Lessons
162
but no matter what talented performers we came up with the question at CBS
in those days was, Who Can We Get Who’s Unavailable?
Actually, this is always the question. At every studio-level casting
meeting I’ve attended the suits are handed a three-page document. Page One
is a list of the actors who have impressed you and are available. Page Two
is the list of slightly Bigger Names, some of whom might have read your
script or heard of it, but all of whom are either OOT, OOC, MO or OO – Out
Of Town, Out Of Country, Meet Only, or Offer Only. The penultimate
group will come to a casting session but will not debase themselves by
reading. The last will read a script but only if it comes with a firm cash
offer, at the performer’s sole option, to film the pilot.
The last page contains the N/As and the N/Is; Not Available, Not
Interested.
The first thing every exec does after they sit down, on this show and
every other sitcom I’ve cast, is flip to the last page and start running down
the names, suggesting them as if they hadn’t occurred to you.
“What about Elizabeth Taylor?” We got this question for a bit part on
our CBS pilot Have Mercy.
“Are you kidding? She won’t do it.”
“Have you asked?”
So we called Elizabeth Taylor’s agent. Miss Taylor’s price was a
$1,000,000 contribution to a charity of her choice. We ended up with
Veronica Cartright, a wonderful actress who was great in the part but, as
Darrell said, I’d hate to fall that far off a building.
For Working Class Heroes among the names on the last page were
John Candy and Jim Belushi. Neither, at the time, was interested. We told
CBS this. I believe that was the last time this project was ever discussed
there.
(Greg Kinnear read for W.C.H. We loved his read and asked if he
could come back. His agent said sure... oh by the way, if he gets the part
he’ll need three hours off in the middle of every day’s rehearsal to tape Talk
Soup.)
Working Class Heroes remains as unmade as a whore’s bed but is still
our agent’s favorite script of ours and still gets sent out as a writing sample.
Maybe it’ll be third time lucky. Or maybe we should just put the rafting trip
back. ($50,000)
----------------Where It Went
Valuable Lessons
163
CARS, GAS AND MAINTENANCE: I bought my first new
car in 2000. Until then, I bought clean used cars or was forced
to lease. When you lease a car you have nothing left at the end,
kind of like a marriage. Why a guy would do this I never
understood. Suddenly I was hearing, “You’ll have to lease, we
don’t have the money for the down-payment.” “WHY THE
HELL NOT??” “Hey, if you want to know all the little
financial details, you are perfectly welcome to write all the
checks and do the taxes yourself.”
The first car I owned in L.A., a Subaru GL, I bought off
Pat Carlin and it reeked of pot so bad I sometimes had to run
the air for half an hour before I could close the windows. Two
years later I was eating in a coffee shop and the waitress said,
“That your car out there?” I told her, “Two hundred bucks, it’s
yours.” It had 168,000 miles on it. Betty later told me she and
her husband got it up to nearly 300,000. I hope they had their
kids before they spent any time breathing in it.
My current car is paid in full, so that four years from now
I won’t have to keep it in the garage for six months to stay
under the mileage allotment then fork out a hundred bucks to
have the seats cleaned before handing it off, along with a “lease
closing payment” to a complete stranger.
$120,000
Death and Taxes was a spec script Darrell and I had written during the
Writers Guild strike of 1988, in the hopes that its eventual sale would make
up for the money we were losing while we walked around Universal with
picket signs in the 103-degree sun.
When the strike ended we forgot about the script for a while, then
started showing it around in 1989, when it was optioned by Jon Slan’s
Paragon Entertainment for $3,150. We pitched it with them but were unable
to sell it.
Then, in 1992, while we were under contract to Lorimar, C.A.A. gave
it to client Teri Garr, who liked the lead character, Clancy Allen, a fortyish
self-educated CPA from Idaho who takes the bus to Washington D.C. with a
job offer in her pocket from the IRS only to discover they’ve already hired
Troy Rowden, a young, witty, ruthless Harvard-educated sharpie who
arrived minutes before her.
(CLANCY ALLEN ENTERS, IN UNPRESSED DRESS AND BAGGY WINDBREAKER,
Valuable Lessons
164
WITH WET HAIR. SHE'S PULLING TWO PIECES OF BEAT-UP LUGGAGE AND
HAS HER APPOINTMENT LETTER IN HER TEETH. SHE TRUNDLES THE
LUGGAGE TO STINGLEY'S FEET, WIPES THE LETTER ON HER SLEEVE AND
HANDS IT TO STINGLEY)
CLANCY
Hi. Please excuse the way I look.
I came straight here from the bus
station. I only found out about
the job on -- what's today?
Monday? So Sunday, Saturday...I
found out Friday. I've been on
the bus from Idaho for three days.
Everyone else in my family could
sleep on the wing of a plane but
I've got to be lying down or
forget it! And you wouldn't
believe the kind of people who
take the bus across country, let
me tell you...
STINGLEY
I'm getting a picture.
CLANCY
Oh, my name's Clancy.
Allen.
Clancy
(SHE SHAKES STINGLEY'S HAND)
CLANCY
Of course you know that, you hired
me. Thank you for hiring me by
the way. And please take your
time reimbursing me. For the bus
ticket.
(TAKES OUT A BRUSH, STARTS BRUSHING HER HAIR)
CLANCY
Although if it is at all
conceivably possible I would
appreciate if you could manage a
small advance on my salary? I
know nobody in D.C. and I have to
find somewhere to stay tonight.
Valuable Lessons
165
(SHE LOOKS AROUND)
CLANCY
Oh I'm sorry. You're working.
Where do I sit? I don't have any
paper... here's a pad.
(TAKES A PAD FROM STINGLEY'S HAND)
CLANCY
And a pen...do you mind if I...?
(SHE PLUCKS A PEN FROM THE SCOWLING STINGLEY'S POCKET)
CLANCY
Great. You can't believe how
traumatic this is for me. But I'm
sure in a couple of months we'll
all sit around looking back on
this and laugh!
(SHE LAUGHS.
GARDENA LAUGHS.)
STINGLEY
Take this down. "You have no job.
Go back..."
CLANCY
(WRITING)
"...no job. Go...back..."
STINGLEY
"to Idaho..."
CLANCY
"to...Idaho..."
STINGLEY
"And stay there. Goodbye."
In the series, Troy and Clancy end up sharing the desk and an apartment and
duking it out every day at work. Clancy’s compassion and liberalism are,
for the first time in her life, a disadvantage in a job where points are awarded
for coldbloodedness.
Valuable Lessons
166
Actor Craig Bierko was under contract to NBC and they loved him for
the part of Troy Rowden. Craig’s charming – he was in. David Steinberg
came on to direct.
There must have been some mention of the pilot in the papers because
the IRS called us up in our offices one day. (SECRETARY JODI:
“Andrew! The IRS on line one!”) It was an enthusiastic agent in the San
Francisco office who’d read about the show and wanted to pitch story ideas
taken from his real life. I was earning about $800,000 that year. I told him
absolutely, I’d love to hear every single thing he had to say.
The show was cast and put into rehearsal. We’d loved Patrick
Warburton from our previous pilot, Have Mercy, so he was in. Iqbal Theba
made everybody laugh just by walking into the room. Dakin Matthews had
co-starred in Drexell’s Class; he made an excellent heartless IRS Office
Manager. Wallace Shawn played a hapless professional escape artist, being
audited for a year which he’d spent in prison:
CLANCY
Did you acquire anything of value
while in prison?
GARDENA
Yes! I stole a spoon every week
and painstakingly carved each one
into a key!
CLANCY
Why did you need that many keys?
GARDENA
I was planning to escape disguised
as a janitor!
After the first network run-through, which went gangbusters, we started
getting notes about Craig’s character. Did he have to be so unlikable? We
said well, yeah, that’s who he is: Teri’s simple and sweet and conflicted,
and Craig’s a rich asshole. That’s, you know, the comedy.
NBC said this is a big problem. They said, we’ve invested a lot in
Craig and we don’t want him playing a bad guy. We have his future at
heart.
What if - ? they began. Somehow our expressions didn’t deter them.
What if Craig’s character PRETENDS to be rich and callous, BUT! We find
out he really isn’t?
Valuable Lessons
167
What if he breaks down, they pushed, and admits he made it all up?
He isn’t rich, he didn’t go to Harvard! His mother has worked scrubbing
floors for fifteen years to put him through a trade school and he really really
loves his mother.
Darrell and I must have looked like we both just drank a bowl of
warm piss. “But that’s not the show. You can’t have two good guys...
you’re suppose to root for Teri.”
“Why can’t we root for both of them?” one exec chirped.
They weren’t going to back down.
Did I explain how long we’d waited to get this show to this point?
Principled people would have said “I’m sorry, but that’s not the show we
envisioned. We are the Creators...”
But we had five or six Lorimar execs, people who’d hustled to get the
show to this point, sitting at the table with us. And actors and other writers
and a crew of thirty hoping for a job that fall.
We wrote and shot their version. They watched it, tested it, and
passed. I guess the test audiences would have preferred it to be funny.
($88,150)
On the night of the audience taping poor Teri had her engagement ring
stolen from her dressing room. It wasn’t me, I was in the truck. She’d also
injured her foot and, unable to exercise, had put on a little weight before the
taping – not much, but it was noticeable. When Teri left a message to ask
what was up, I’d already heard the show was a pass. I asked Janollari what I
should tell her.
“Tell her she got fat and she fucked us,” David charitably suggested.
That’s the kind of kidding that goes on behind the scenes in big-time
showbiz. In July 2004 David was made Entertainment President of the WB.
At around this time, Valerie Bertinelli had a pay-or-play deal at CBS
that was about to expire. The network had until December 31, 1993 to give
her a script she liked. We met with Valerie at her manager’s office on
Ventura Blvd in Studio City: she was sweet, funny, nice – what you’d
expect. We wrote a pilot, Get it Yourself, about a catering business called
Bread And Butlers, its hypertense owner and her difficult staff:
HARVEY
Hey you! What do I have to do to
get my tiny shrimp warmed up?
PATRICK
It may require finding the least
picky woman in Washington State.
Valuable Lessons
168
They’re short-staffed because one of their real British butlers, Giles (“the
nastiest thing to leave England since the Black Death”) just died in bed.
PATRICK
Another dead butler. One day
we'll be extinct, like the
passenger pigeon.
CHRIS
Except no butler ever pooped on my
car.
PATRICK
Don't bet on it, sweetheart.
We wrote “Harvey” for actor Harvey Korman – in the show a fussy out-ofwork actor who hires B&B to put on a lavish reception for his daughter’s
wedding. But the next day his check bounces, and we learn he’s broke:
INT. HOTEL ROOM – NIGHT
(THE SEEDIEST HOTEL ROOM EVER SHOWN ON TV. HARVEY PACES IN A
WORN BATHROBE. A FRAMED POSTER ADVERTISES HARVEY IN "NOT THOSE
PANTS!" ["Record-Breaking 3rd Week!"] HARVEY IS BROKE;
EVIDENTLY HIS ACT AT THE WEDDING WAS JUST THAT. HE'S ON THE
PHONE, HOLDING IT WITH A TISSUE.)
HARVEY
No, no, you listen to me Bernie,
you balding career assassin. I
haven't worked in three months.
My back's out again, I've got a
sinus pain I'd only wish it on
your mother, it's like a knitting
needle through my eye.
(HE SNORTS WILDLY ON AN INHALER)
HARVEY
NNNYAAAANG! Well you should care,
you put me here. I'd mail you a
postcard but I spent my last five
dollars on this room. I got a
special rate because I was staying
over twelve minutes.
Valuable Lessons
(SFX:
169
KNOCK ON DOOR)
HARVEY
Excuse me. That's probably a more
competent agent. Com-ing!
(HE TURNS THE DOORKNOB WITH THE TISSUE.
THERE WITH A CAN)
A ROOM SERVICE BOY IS
HARVEY
I ordered tea. This is Raid.
ROOM SERVICE
You used the bed yet?
HARVEY
No.
ROOM SERVICE
Keep the Raid.
Clancy shows up with her chef to beat some money out of him. Harvey has
seen what it’s like at Bread And Butlers and offers to work off his debt by
becoming a butler.
Valerie let the pay-or-play date pass and collected her money. (A year
later she made Café Americain, which didn’t knock it out of the park. A
year after that, we had a proposal to shoot our pilot Savvy in Toronto with an
American star and Canadian supporting actors. A Warners exec said no
way; the failure of Café Americain proved conclusively that U.S. audiences
don’t like shows with foreign accents.)
It’s a “trunk script” now. This style of comedy has more or less
passed. It may come back, as may butlers. ($50,000)
There was another pilot, Girl’s Best Friend, that the Lorimar execs
inherited when their parent company Warner Brothers digested them in
1993. The impression I got was that nobody particularly wanted to do it, but
the money was already committed from CBS. New network president Peter
Tortorici had inherited the project from the recently-departed Jeff Sagansky
(Jeff didn’t die, he went to Sony). Actor Paul Sand did a heck of a dog
impression and had clinched the sale by bounding around Jeff’s office on all
fours, leaping into his lap and licking his face. Paul had previously offered
the opportunity to write a man-as-dog show to a friend of ours, Andy
Guerdat, and his then-partner Steve Kreinberg, who had jointly and if I may
Valuable Lessons
170
say so wisely opined that it wasn’t their cup of tea. It fell to The Marks,
partners Egan and Solomon, former Executive Producers of Newhart, now
on an overall deal, to try to do justice to the concept.
The conceit of the show was that the titular Girl (Anita Barone) and
everyone else saw her pet as a gorgeous German Shepherd. Only the
hypothetical audience could see he was Paul Sand wearing a dog collar.
The only bright spot in the run-through I attended was Matthew Perry
playing The Boyfriend. Warners kept him and dumped everything else.
Darrell’s recollection is, “The jokes weren’t even jokes... they were just
mentions of dog things.” We’ve written dog episodes; we’ve written dog
series. After you do the fire hydrant, drinking out of the toilet, chasing cats
and cars and going for walks... you’re done. Johnny Carson used to call this
the Flom. We pitched him a desk spot once – Little-Known But Useful
Words. The example I tossed out was FLOM: n. the only part of Roseanne
that doesn’t float. Johnny bought the bit and we went back to the office to
write the rest of it, only to find out there was no rest of it – Flom was it.
Thereafter “the Flom” was any singular, seemingly funny idea that tricked
you into mistakenly thinking it could be successfully expanded.
We wrote jokes for the one episode of Girl’s Best Friend we saw.
When tapes became available to employees we obtained one and gave it to
Johnny, who among his many other interests was a connoisseur of bad
sitcommage. ($10,000)
I don’t know if you’ve seen the original Little Shop Of Horrors, but
Roger Corman legendarily shot it in two days and one night. On the last day
he did over seventy set-ups – changing the clapper took too long; he slatedin scenes with his hands.
USA Cable was keen on doing a half-hour TV version of florist
Seymour Krelboin’s nightmare job in collaboration with Executive Producer
Corman, who’d read some of our scripts and approved us for the pilot. I’d
heard nightmare stories about working for Roger but in person he’s quiet,
courtly, unprepossessing. Of course, I wasn’t trying to squeeze $100 out of
him to build a set.
We went to the Concorde/New Horizons offices and met with Brad
Krevoy, who would have produced this show if it had gone but who ended
up making Dumb And Dumber and a zillion dollars instead. Brad showed us
where our desks would be if we got sucked into the Corman orbit. It looked
real; I could see us sitting there, calling in phony 911s in order to get cheap
close-ups of a cop car for Carnosaur VII.
But after six months of contract-haggling and another three of writing,
somebody in the USA legal department belatedly pointed out that they were
Valuable Lessons
171
contractually forbidden from buying a show from anyone but their parent
company, Universal. We were at Warner Brothers. Nobody else had
thought of that. The show was over. ($50,000)
Director Zane Busby had some funny Roger stories. One time he sent
her out on location to a small island off the coast of California where he
promised there was a generator she could borrow for her crew’s equipment.
It turned out it belonged to a woman on an iron lung.
Another time, Zane was editing a recently-shot film when a friend
called and said he’d seen it the night before on L.A.’s Z Channel. Zane said
that’s impossible, I’m still cutting. Well, I saw it all the same, the friend told
her, and he described the plot.
Here’s what had happened: Roger had talked Zane into a contractual
clause that said if for any reason her film should air on TV before it screened
in theaters, her compensation would be cut by a specified number of dollars.
Then he’d snuck a second editing team into the lab to assemble a quick and
dirty version, and paid the Z Channel a few thousand bucks to run it at one
in the morning.
One more. When Zane was shooting for Roger she began getting
mystifying anonymous calls from people warning her not to let her main
character fall asleep. Then they’d hang up. Turned out it was folks from
inside Roger’s company. He’d shot a scene some time ago of young women
emerging from the sea, and on the spur of the moment had talked them all
into doing it topless. But one of the actresses had an ironclad morality
clause that said no topless footage of her could be used in that film. He
hadn’t shot any coverage, just one wide Master. He was screwed; whatever
he’d paid for that setup (probably about $75) was lost money...
... but the deal didn’t say it couldn’t be used in other films. So in
every feature since, if a character fell asleep, Roger had been trying to cut-in
the topless footage as a dream sequence. That’s how much it bugged him to
lose the money. I liked Roger a lot.
“THE TROUBLE WITH LARRY”
This CBS comedy started as three spec scripts. I’m told there’s a slashing
reference to it in Jeff Franklin’s low-budget comedy Love Sucks, and that
several jokes lifted from it mysteriously made their way into the film Meet
The Deedles. In my retrospective appraisal it was a noble enterprise that
Valuable Lessons
172
sank under the weight of excessively enthusiastic network noodling and low
faith.
Our title was My First Husband. Darrell and I, sitting in our office
one day, had the idea that it might be funny to create a deranged but
charming psychopath who walks back into the life of the wife who last saw
him on their African jungle honeymoon twelve years earlier, when he was
kidnapped by apes. Larry tells gobsmacked wife Sally and her new husband
Boyd alternately heart-rending and blood-chilling tales of clawing his way
through native uprisings, up raging subcontinental rivers and across the rims
of active volcanoes like Indiana Jones to return to the side of his beloved in
Syracuse, N.Y. Sally, riven with guilt, shows Larry to the guest bedroom for
an indefinite stay until he can finish his memoirs... while her skeptical cute
sister, ineffectual (and older) British husband and smartass twelve-year-old
daughter immediately conclude the guy has probably spent the last decade in
a Nairobi jail.
We finished the pilot script, delivered it to the desks of development
VPs Janollari and Rastatter and returned to our office to decide what to write
next. The next thing we thought of was another episode of My First
Husband: Larry convinces the gorgeous Gabriella, Sally’s art gallery
partner, that he knows Robert Redford from his time advising on Sydney
Pollack’s Out Of Africa, and that he’s heading to New York for a casual
reunion dinner with the actor. Would Gabriella care to come along? She
giddily acquiesces in what’s obviously a cheap ploy to get her to the Big
Apple for a romantic dinner and, oh-gee-I-guess-Bob-couldn’t-make-it. But
Sally and Boyd find out. Boyd is Redford’s biggest fan and insists on
coming along. All five end up packing movie posters, Sharpie pens and a
fruit basket into the van and, with young Lindsay gleefully sotto-predicting
disaster, set off for the Big Apple in a howling blizzard. When they
mysteriously run out of gas Larry takes Gabriella off through the storm on
foot to look for help. They – and eventually Lindsay, and then Sally –
“find” a small restaurant in the woods with a reservation for two and wine
already poured. Boyd is left in the van, burning his windshield wipers and
triple-A card for warmth.
Wrote it, dropped it on the execs’ desks, went back to our office.
Life on a studio deal is often described as Development Hell. You sit
around, you pitch things, people pitch you things, stuff gets outlined, reoutlined, it falls through – your time and your energy drip away. So we
vowed then to do what we’ve done every day since: spend the day writing,
whether we had an assignment or not. The following Monday, we showed
up at 9:00 and began writing My First Husband, Episode Three: The Lady
Valuable Lessons
173
Furnishes. Larry gets a “contest call” from a radio station contest and
answers the skill-testing question to win a houseful of new furniture.
Delighted that he can give Sally something, he decides, with Gabriella’s and
Lindsay’s connivance, to make it a surprise. He tells Sally and Boyd they’ve
won a weekend for two in the fanciest hotel in the Poconos, all expenses
paid. After they leave he’ll yard-sale their current furniture and call the
hotel, promising to cover anything Sally and cheapskate Boyd buy or eat
with the sale proceeds. The Flatts will return, happy, rested and well-fed, to
a houseful of new stuff.
But after all the old furniture is sold two detectives enter and tell
Larry the whole thing was a scam to get people out to a nonexistent
warehouse so they can rob their homes while they’re gone. Larry, Gabriella
and Lindsay speed to the Poconos to stop the Flatts from buying, eating,
drinking or sleeping on anything. They find the couple on the last course of
a three-hour lobster dinner, opening their eighth bottle of Dom Perignon and
adding $50 to the tip of any hotel employee who laughs at Boyd’s
witticisms. (LINDSAY: “My parents have turned into Nick and Nora
Charles.”) Larry realizes there’s only one sensible thing to do: hold a
lighter to their suite’s doorknob to persuade the besotted couple the hotel is
on fire, then convince them to jump out the window into the car.
Wrote it, dropped it on the execs’ desks, went back to our office.
Around about this time we realized nobody at Lorimar was reading
these scripts. In fact, they probably thought we were mildly loony. If these
had been assignments from ABC we were filling; if we were showing how
we might adapt an optioned book into a TV movie, or serve the requirements
of an A-list TV star like Perfect Strangers’ Bronson Pinchot, recently
finished with an eight-year run and looking for a new project, they would
have been all over the material. But no; these were just samples of
produceable comedy that we thought were really funny.
So we mailed the three scripts to über-manager Bernie Brillstein with
a note that said, “Hi Bernie, got a funny male, mid-30s? Feel free to show
this around; if it goes it’s gotta be Lorimar. Call us.”
A few weeks later, we received a call from Bernie’s client Bronson
Pinchot, vacationing in France. He loved the scripts and wanted to make My
First Husband his next project. Bronson had a six-commitment on CBS so
if this was his pick, we knew it was on the air.
We didn’t tell Lorimar. They weren’t going to read our projects?
Fine, we wouldn’t tell them when we sold one. We asked Bernie if he had
anyone for the other parts. He managed Courteney Cox. We hadn’t seen
Valuable Lessons
174
her in broad comedy but she was adorable and there’s nothing wrong with
that.
One night we were working at Darrell’s when the phone rang. It was
David Janollari, apparently working late over in Burbank. Were we up to
anything in particular? We told David yeah, we’d got this existing script
from producer Anita Addison aimed at Faye Dunaway and we were messing
with it, trying to see what we’d change, what we’d keep. David said uh-huh.
In fact, we said, Faye just called here to ask Darrell a few questions about
playing comedy for TV, timing and staging and whatnot.
Uh huh, said David. Cool. Well, I’ll see you guys tomorrow. Oh,
while I’ve got you – cos I’ll forget to ask you in the morning – did you
guys... happen to sell a show to CBS?
Oh yeah, said Darrell. Didn’t we tell you?
I love that, “Cos I’ll forget to ask you in the morning...”
A friend of ours, Gary Belkin, who wrote gags for Sid Caesar, for
Carol Burnett, MAD Magazine, Carson, Charles Addams, told us the story
of a writer friend of his who, despite the gloomy prognostications of his
longtime agent, went out with a piece he thought was pretty good and sold it
on his own. A few days later his agent called him up and angrily said, “I just
heard something I don’t want to believe. Did you sell something?”
The pilot for My First Husband was made for next to nothing in TV terms.
It wasn’t even a pilot, it was a Presentation. (see Drexell’s Class) We
borrowed what sets we could. An art gallery was made from a bunch of flats
painted white plus a coffee machine. Our living room was the living room
set custom-built for It Had To Be You. When we needed a ship’s cabin in a
storm for the opening sequence, our line producer Stew Lyons sketched one
on a sheet of paper with a drawing of a rocking gimbal underneath and sent
it straight to the wood shop.
That opening made for a memorable testing session a month later.
We wanted to fade in on a sequence which showcased Larry’s big mouth
and Groucho-esque irreverence. Larry’s stowed away on a tramp steamer
bound for America, the Captain of which is described as A VERY LARGE
WOMAN. We hired Marianne Muellerleile, already a girthsome wench, and
padded her out with pillows:
CAPTAIN
There aren't many women sea
captains, sailor. Do you know
why?
Valuable Lessons
175
LARRY
You ate them all?
CAPTAIN
Because of men like you. Do you
know what the world lost the day I
stepped on this ship?
LARRY
About eight feet of beach? You
know, Captain...or do you prefer
"Captain-ette"?
CAPTAIN
Quiet! It lost a wife, a mother,
and a homemaker!
LARRY
Is this your way of asking me out?
I'll have to meet your father
first, although I'm sure you're
more than a reasonable facsimile.
I'm so honored... I'll be the
first thing you've spent the night
with that didn't have a Defrost
button. We'll get married inside
a month. That is, if we can fit
you inside a month...
And so on, for five minutes, as Larry smarted off and the Captain tossed him
around the cabin like a big-nosed rag doll. When we sat at ASI Audience
Testing in March and watched the audience troop in from the other side of
the one-way mirror (aren’t all mirrors one-way mirrors?) we choked on our
complimentary M+Ms. They get these audiences from mall food courts.
The first six test-audience members were women bigger than Marianne’s
character.
DARRELL: “Oh no.”
ANDREW: “Oh God...”
The Facilitator cheerily explained the rules: “Okay! If you’re really
enjoying what you see and hear, turn your dials to the right, all the way up.
If you’re really not enjoying it...” Their dials stayed glued to the bottom of
the screen until about the second Act Break.
Valuable Lessons
176
As we filmed, in the middle of a scene Bronson for some reason
began to leave large pauses between his sentences. I don’t know if this was
something he learned on Perfect Strangers to give the editor more cutting
room, but the audience got thrown by the odd rhythm and the laughs began
to dry. David Janollari ran down the steps from the bleachers in a blind
panic and told Darrell and me, “We need a complete rewrite!” I said,
somewhat understating the absurdity of this request, “Now?” Without taking
his eyes off the monitor, Darrell got more to the point with a pithy “Fuck off,
David.” The following year, David ran over to us during the first scene of
The Parent ‘Hood taping and said, “We need to rewrite this to be more like
Married With Children!” Not at the premise, outline, or script stages over
the last two months... now, while we’re shooting it.
When it came time for us to design the end-of-show vanity card
animation for our production company, Highest Common Denominator, our
first impulse was to have the mythical Sisyphus straining to climb a hill,
pushing an enormous boulder with “Lorimar” written on it. We settled for a
large film reel.
Bronson and Courtney’s verbal sparring was a highlight. Larry
wanders into his former sister-in-law’s gallery and attacks a short arrogant
man who’s rudely critiquing a painting.
SHORT CUSTOMER
This is no good. I’m looking for
something small that will please
my wife.
LARRY
May I suggest something in a
coffin. Yourself, for example.
SHORT CUSTOMER
Pardon me?
(LARRY LOOKS FAMILIAR TO GABRIELLA BUT SHE CAN’T QUITE PLACE
HIM)
LARRY
You'll only need three pallbearers
at the most. And of course some
party balloons for later and a big
portable dance floor. But you
look tired...
(TO GABRIELLA)
Valuable Lessons
177
Do we have a golf tee so he can
sit down?
SHORT CUSTOMER
Is he making fun of my height?
GABRIELLA
What height?
LARRY
Did you find us in the phone book?
Did you find us by standing on the
phone book?
SHORT CUSTOMER
That's enough! You won't be
seeing my face again!
(THE MAN RUNS OUT.
LARRY CALLS AFTER HIM:)
LARRY
Not unless you draw it on top of
your head!
GABRIELLA
Thanks a lot. I assume you're
buying this now?
(LARRY HELPS HIMSELF TO COFFEE FROM THE COURTESY POT)
LARRY
You know, when I lived in Kenya I
used to crush my own beans in the
morning.
GABRIELLA
Did you try wearing boxer shorts?
My First Husband got picked up for the Fall (CBS changed the title without
notifying us), along with our other CBS series, It Had To Be You. Each
night that summer when I drove home I saw Faye Dunaway and Robert
Urich on billboards, on the sides of buses, plastered on construction sites.
There were ads in the trades, in fashion magazines, on the radio. No
mention of Larry anywhere. Complementary copies of the I.H.T.B.Y. poster
were sent to our offices. When we asked Warners for a copy of the Larry
poster there was an awkward weeklong pause, then they sent over a large
Valuable Lessons
178
photo of Bronson in a dressing gown glued to a sheet of fiberboard. For the
Main Title of Faye’s show director David Steinberg was given a budget to
shoot a beautiful sequence with colored silk flowing and rippling over wood.
For Larry, we received $500 to pay an artist for five paintings of Bronson in
imaginary peril, and some Public Domain music to play under them. You
can see how successful shows are often self-fulfilling prophecies when you
have two of them going at once and your Main Title budget on one is less
than your star’s glove budget on the other.
As we began to put the show together it quickly became apparent that
CBS had bought a show it didn’t like. They wanted Bronson, they just
didn’t want something this alarmingly, kinetically daft. Every note we
received until it was cancelled amounted to “tone it down, this is too silly.”
Our second and third spec scripts were thrown out and a new subplot
requested for the first. We submitted a script by staff writer Charlie
Kaufman which so aroused the ire of CBS they summoned Darrell and me to
the network, where we sat at a table in a conference room and listened to
half a dozen people including the head of the network patiently explain to us
why it wasn’t funny and wouldn’t work.
We drove back and conveyed the notes to Charlie, who said
plaintively, “I can rewrite it... but this script – (his original draft, which, yes,
contained a monkey) – this is a show I’d actually watch.” No doubt Charlie
wrote a few extra pages of Being John Malkovitch that night in the hopes of
escaping the moronic crudity of television.
No gag we attempted to sneak into the show escaped scrutiny. At one
point Jeff Sagansky asked to have Polaroids of the costume Bronson wanted
to wear sent to him at CBS for approval. Too wacky. Too silly. We’d
created something akin to a Marx Brothers movie or Blackadder and they
wanted The Cosby Show.
We had an “Ernie” on staff who went on to be a feature writer – not
Charlie, another one. I’d suggested this particular Ernie be hired because his
samples were funny, despite the fact that everyone we called about him
either said he was a prick or politely declined to comment. One day when
Ernie was holding forth at the snack table a studio exec walked from the
day-old donuts over to me and asked, “Who is that incredible asshole?” On
another occasion, the girlfriend of a staff writer sat on the same electric cart
as Ernie to ride from the stage back to the offices, and upon dismounting
asked her boyfriend the same question but with a different and shorter
modifying adjective.
We overheard Ernie walking into Charlie’s office one day bragging,
“The guys were going to use one of your lines... but I talked them out of it.”
Valuable Lessons
179
He went to other writers and urged them to submit less material because
their productivity was making the slimness of his own submissions more
conspicuous.
Sitcom writers do long hours. Ernie marched into our office in a huff
one day and said, “I’ve got Dodgers season tickets and I am not going to
miss another game!” He took off to Nova Scotia for a week once because it
was his grandmother’s birthday, promising to do rewrites by email. Never
heard from him.
The staff disliked Ernie so much that one day at lunch they articulated
their collective revulsion to our star, who decided to play a trick on him. At
that time we were trying to cast the gormless second husband in the show,
Boyd Flatt. I’d spoken with Edward Herrmann in New York and tried to sell
him on it but he sounded dubious. Our second choice was Peter McNichol.
Peter was driving to New York with his dog to appear in a play and had
intimated he might call us from the road. Bronson called the office during
lunch, and Ernie, eating alone at his desk, picked up. Bronson said this is
Peter McNichol. (Pinchot, a bit of a prick himself, is among the most
talented actors I’ve worked with and his McNichol impersonation was deadon.) He asked if Ernie was in charge of the show, the perfect question.
Ernie went into self-esteem mode; “Well, there are a coupla guys and some
chick over me but yeah, I’m basically in charge.” Bronson kept him going
this way for twenty minutes while the other writers took turns listening in.
Small comfort to us, considering the guy used to sit in on network notes
sessions and whisper “that’s stupid” and “that sucks” to the executives
during our proposals to fix scenes.
There was a six-month gap between shooting the pilot presentation and reshooting it with a full budget for the regular series, during which time
Bronson miraculously put on twenty-five pounds of pure muscle. The
waifish character who’d been tossed around that ship’s cabin in the show’s
presentation tape now looked as though he could pick up Marianne and ram
her through the porthole. Everyone said it had to be steroids. He’d been
working out at a gym all summer; even his face was muscular. Watching
Buster Keaton get tossed around is funny; watching Arnold Swartzenegger
isn’t. A lot of the empathy of the character was gone. But how can you go
to an actor and tell him to lose tone?
Bronson did appreciate the writers. On every Rewrite Night he paid a
chef to come by the offices with a sumptuous meal and exquisite desserts.
Generosity? Enlightened self-interest? Probably a bit of both. We
eventually got sick of eating Chilean Sea Bass and profiteroles every
Valuable Lessons
180
Wednesday, but the chef was a nice guy. His restaurant was next door to the
gym where Bronson worked out, and he told us many a ‘roid rage story.
For the series the cast was filled out with Shanna Reed, Perry King,
young Alex McKenna and Marianne Muellerleile, who played a different
obnoxious overweight woman in each episode, a long way from being the
first Sarah Connor killed in The Terminator.
Then the notes, oh my god the notes. More empathy, more heart,
fewer jokes, more heart. It was during this period that Darrell told Les
Moonves, “Heart is for hacks,” a line Les could often be caught quoting
laughingly to himself at auditions and screenings. Les once called me to his
office to ask, “Why doesn’t Darrell treat me with more respect?” He’d
phoned our office one day to request some material to spice up a speech he
was making to the Viewers For Quality Television. Darrell said, “Sure, Les.
Are you for it or against it?” I told Les that’s how he is; some people’s
naked ambition just rubs him the wrong way.
Darrell walked up to our office one day and found me glumly
watching a rehearsal on the office monitor. “Why are you so miserable?” I
said, “The actresses are down there blowing our lines and not us.” In a
memorable late-night session Courteney Cox and Bronson did over twenty
takes of one exchange and ruined each one by cracking up. It was 3:00 in
the morning. Writer Tom Finnigan observed, “It’s so late the craft services
donut flies have gone home.” On the twenty-somethingth take, a few of the
crew members giggled too and Miss Cox snapped at them, “Do you mind? I
am trying to be a professional here!”
Courteney’s then-boyfriend Michael Keaton used to drop by the set.
Before every pilot taping, Darrell and I send roses and a poem to all cast
members. The one we’d considered for Miss Cox was:
Roses are red,
Even in Khatmandu
We want to do to you
Roughly what Batman do.
Something more appropriate was penned at the last minute.
After we assembled our staff we discovered that the fathers of three of
the writers were ministers. They obviously weren’t praying hard enough.
Jeff had promised Bronson he’d air all six taped episodes of Larry, but he
only put on three of them. Faye had dropped to about half our Larry
numbers, but they let her go four episodes anyway, to amortize those gloves.
($395,000)
Valuable Lessons
181
ABC counter-programmed against our premiere by airing two episodes of
Home Improvement back-to-back. Our third episode aired against the season
premiere of Beverly Hills 90210. That was all the discouragement CBS
needed to pull us out of the race – we went down with an average 13.0
rating. As I write this American Idol is atop the Nielsens with a 14.9. Today
our 13.0 would put us safely in the Top Ten, but in 1993 there was no UPN
chipping away at the viewership, no WB, no 500 cable channels – not even
one CSI. Fox was so small it still wasn’t even considered a network by the
creative Guilds, and pre-DSL the internet was so slow you popped on for
your email then got off again and turned on the TV.
CBS put Bob Newhart’s series, Bob, on in our place. Its first twentyfive episodes averaged a 10.7.
Larry had some some memorable studio audience moments. There
was the time we had an all-Japanese audience who made cell phone calls
during the taping. The time we had a large audience contingent that was
mentally handicapped and who started crying when we turned down the
house lights to film. The time Bronson was into a rhythm – “Whatever
happened to eight-track tapes? Whatever happened to Anson Williams?”
and a hostile voice from behind the VIP curtain cried, “Hey, I represent
him!”
(On Parent ‘Hood one night, Darrell was eating a fist-sized
strawberry at the snack table beside the stage when he realized the entire left
side of the audience was watching him and not the actors. He later
discovered the audience service had bused in seventy-five homeless people.
Tom Finnigan said, “Never mind the food – we had ‘em staring at a fake
house.”)
I mentioned Bronson’s talent. We were short one night and needed a
mini-Tag at the end of the show when we hadn’t planned for one. The
audience had gone home. Bronson asked, “What do you need?” There had
been a gag in the show about him keeping his underwear in the fridge. I
asked if he could ad-lib some more clothing schtick in the kitchen.
“Sure. How long you need?”
We needed exactly twenty-three seconds.
“Give me a minute.”
He walked off the set and collected some props. Then, as Joel Zwick
called “Action,” Bronson, as the indescribable Larry Burton, strolled on set
belting Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” at full voice, dropped some underwear in
the toaster and popped it down, flopped some filthy socks into the blender,
took a pair of pants from the icebox and pulled them on... hitting the last
Valuable Lessons
182
gentle note of the aria as he pulled up the zipper with an ecstatic flourish and
operatic roll of the arm.
Twenty-three seconds.
Then, for a safety, he did it again, in exactly the same time.
On a macabre note, The Trouble With Larry, though only a six-episode
order, was a three-murder show. During production one of our (male) grips
was found floating in an L.A. reservoir in a dress. A writer’s father, one of
the three ministers, was killed by a couple of hitchhikers – guys he knew and
to whom he’d given a ride. And our sweet quiet eighteen-year-old stage
P.A. was murdered by her trainer, a case that made it to America’s Most
Wanted, resulting in his arrest a year later as he returned to the U.S. from
Mexico. I’ve worked on over 150 other pilots and series and don’t know of
a single murder on any of them... well, unless you count Malcolm And Eddie
and that was really more like manslaughter.
-----------------Where It Went
ENTERTAINING: Shortly after I was married The Bride and
I hosted a dinner party at my house for friends and co-workers.
We hired a four-piece band and caterers. A hundred and
eighty-five friends and business contacts came; it cost about
$25,000. Nearly ten years later The Bride rented the Riviera
Country Club in Pacific Palisades for my step-son’s wedding
reception. That, plus the wedding, cost about the same as the
earlier shindy. And I had a dinner party for twenty-five at my
house in 1994. So, for those three nights...
$55,000
“IT HAD TO BE YOU”
This project owed more to the persistence of producer Anita Addison than
anything else. Well, and to the fact, as someone said at the time, that CBS’s
Tim Flack wanted to be able to hear, “Miss Dunaway on line two!”
The concept – that a powerful, neurotic female book publisher falls in
love with the carpenter who comes to install shelves in her office – was
writer John Steven Owen’s, and had been filmed already in 1992 starring
1960s Brit model Twiggy. It tested very well but CBS wasn’t convinced
Valuable Lessons
183
that Twiggy had the appeal to carry a series, an odd decision considering
they were the ones who hired her.
So in 1993 they began casting around for another female lead, which
is when they discovered that Faye Dunaway would, given the proper script
and co-star, consent to do a weekly television sitcom. Tim Flack and Joe
Voci in Development were nuts about the idea.
John Steven Owen was gone by the time. He’d spent enough time
chewing on this particular pencil and didn’t want to invest another year in it,
making him the winner in this saga.
We wrote a new script which delighted Ms. Dunaway and we tested
some co-stars, of whom Robert Urich had the standout best charm and style.
The three children, Will Estes, Justin Whalin and Justin Jon Ross, stayed
over from the previous year’s pilot and Robin Bartlett was added as Faye’s
sarcastic man-hungry secretary. (We auditioned Jane Leeves but, as I recall
it, someone at Warners didn’t think anyone could understand her accent.)
We first met Faye on the set of Designing Women, then being directed
by David Steinberg, the former standup who had developed the reputation of
having a great rapport with performers, particularly actresses. Faye was
enthusiastic and asked a million questions. These questions would continue
as we set to work on the script. They continued at night when we were at
home. They came by phone, pager and fax. They only really ended when I
died. No, wait, I didn’t die, it only seemed like it. I passed the suffering on
to others.
During our first lunch with Ms. Dunaway and Anita, Faye sent her
salad back to the kitchen three times trying to get the right size and
consistency of bacon bits on the mixed greens… and she went into the
kitchen with it twice.
Faye had gone to the trouble of interviewing Joni Evans of Turtle Bay
Press to see what a powerful female publisher looked and acted like. Ms.
Evans worked at a circular glass-topped desk. Faye’s character acquired a
circular glass-topped desk. One day I came to work at Warners Hollywood
and the grips were hauling the desk out the stage door. Faye had brought a
tape measure to work and discovered that the stage desk was three or four
inches smaller (or larger, or thicker, I forget) than the real desk on which the
stage desk had based its performance.
We later had to move Faye’s trailer two feet closer to the stage door
because she’d applied that same tape measure to the steps of her trailer and
found out that Robert Urich’s trailer, on the other side of the stage, was
eighteen inches closer to the door. It could have been worse; you get two
stars like that and eventually nobody can get in the door.
Valuable Lessons
184
In the opening scene of the pilot Faye was supposed to stride into her
office on the phone with an author whose manuscript was due weeks ago.
He was blocked; he couldn’t finish, he was standing on his balcony
threatening to jump. She breezily dismissed his whining and told him if he
was going to jump, to at least take the typewriter with him and write on the
way down, or some such line. One day as we sat in our office re-drafting the
script the fax machine started rattling out a cover page that read “17 pages
follow.” It was from Faye; a lengthy psychological analysis of suicides in
Denmark, to help us rewrite that joke. Overthinking small problems is what
some people do when they lack the capacity or will to tackle big problems.
The big problem in this case was her memory; on the night of the pilot
shooting, after a month of preparation, Faye strode onstage and couldn’t
remember her first line.
It soon became apparent that Faye wasn’t satisfied with anything. Her
costumes changed, her hairstyles changed, stylists and artists were fired.
Her living room set underwent three complete decorative remakes in only
ten episodes.
She went outfit-shopping at a ritzy store in New York before we
began shooting, spilled ink on a $12,000 dress and told the store manager to
add it to our show’s budget.
At the 10:00 a.m. photo shoot for the show’s poster, Faye stayed in
Makeup until 2:00 p.m. keeping Robert Urich waiting four hours.
At one table reading, the seventh in a row to which Faye had been at
least half an hour late, keeping thirty people from doing their jobs, Robert
leaped up when she entered, yelled, “Every – fucking – time!” and stalked
angrily out. Faye tripped out after him on her heels. The Warners
executives followed. The rest of us ran to the window. In the parking lot
below we watched Robert – a truly sweet and fun man – striding away in the
distance, Faye toppling after him, and the executives bringing up the rear at
about three mph in an electric cart.
I started having chest pains a month in. At one point I was standing in
front of an X-Ray machine with my arms up when the radiologist asked if
I’d been doing anything lately that might have caused extra stress. At that
moment my beeper went off – the beeper I was only carrying because The
Bride had recently calved... the beeper whose number was known only to
her, Darrell and our secretary. It was Faye, at home. Somehow, her
assistant, Andy Spaulding, had managed to either torture it out of someone
or had lowered himself from the ceiling over Jodi’s Rolodex at night with a
flashlight taped to his head. I held the beeper up to the doctor and nodded. I
don’t deal well with horror.
Valuable Lessons
185
I later heard from a costumer friend of Darrell’s wife that on the
feature Faye had just shot, The Temp, after a week the hotel staff had refused
to visit her room, telling the movie crew if they wished Miss Dunaway to
stay in their hotel, they’d have to feed her and change her linen themselves.
Another memorable moment during that shoot had been Faye’s insistence
that her double was too short for the job. Faye is about 5’ 10”. She grabbed
the woman – they lined up at exactly the same height – and said, “I am six
feet tall! Does this woman look six feet tall to you?” She was a turmoil
junkie. To quote the character Jimmy Hoy from Charlie Hauck’s brilliant
novel “Artistic Differences,” Faye’s default state of mind was: “I’m
unhappy and it’s your fault.”
We’d shot three pilots that season and sold two of them; this and The
Trouble With Larry, both for CBS. We set up shop on the Warners lot in
Burbank in a V-shaped suite of offices with the Larry writing team up one
arm, the Faye team up the other and our corner office at the apex. We
quickly elected to superintend Larry and let Eugenie Ross-Leming and Brad
Buckner do the showrunning honors on It Had To Be You.
Faye was not responsible for all the horrors on this show. One child
actress had been put on hold by CBS for a year, ever since the Twiggy pilot,
for a walk-on part in which she had two cues; about fifty words of dialogue.
Jeff Sagansky decided she’d grown a little too busty in the intervening
twelve months to play the part. At first it was, “I don’t know about that
girl...” We trimmed the part. Then it was, “I don’t like her.” We cut her
lines further. Two days later: “I’ve got to tell you... if that girl’s in the pilot
it seriously hurts your chances of getting picked up.” (see Horse Race,
under Drexell’s Class)
It was the girl’s birthday. We gave her a cake, she blew out the
candles and her mom escorted her off the set. The child actress who
replaced her had, a few months before, been playing the lead in The Secret
Garden on Broadway. I’d seen her; she was amazing. She did the fifty
words beautifully.
The pilot rated highly but the numbers did a shit-dive starting in week
two. In an unusual move, CBS had tested each of the first five episodes.
When the ratings began to tank there was a meeting to discuss strategy. The
CBS exec in charge of delivering bad news gave us the works, ending with
the gem that in Episode Four – to which a basket of newborn puppies had
been added to soften Faye’s image – our star’s likeability tested at “minus
six percent.” The exec had never seen a minus rating before. One testaudience member had said, “She looks uncomfortable in her own skin.”
Darrell commented, “Anyone’d be uncomfortable in something that tight.”
Valuable Lessons
186
(Faye told our makeup lady “I play thirty-eight.” Old actresses never die,
they just Faye Dunaway.)
There was a lot of discussion over possible courses of action to save
the show. More guest stars? More promotion? More puppies? Darrell
finally offered, “I have an idea.” All heads turned. “The pilot was funny. It
tested well and Faye came off appealing. The last few episodes have all
been about psychotherapy and middle- aged angst and dead people. It’s a
sitcom; why don’t we try to make it funnier?”
There was a hesitation. Then the room returned to seriously trying to
figure out what was wrong. David Steinberg half-turned in his chair and
sottoed, “Nice try, Darrell.”
Later, Brett Butler, then reigning on Grace Under Fire, told a friend
of ours, a staffer on her show, that our Episode One was the best-written
sitcom pilot she’d ever seen. Maybe we should call Brett and try to shoot
this thing a third time.
It Had To Be You was cancelled after the fourth airing. In Faye’s
memoir, “Searching For Gatsby,” she appears to have forgotten us, saying
that things went downhill after John Steven Owen, whom she never met, left
the project. Some people just breeze through life on a big inflated cloud of
their own self-worth with the rest of us staring up and gasping. ($535,000)
The Mighty Quinns was our next project. We referred to this as the DoneAway-With-Faye show because it followed hard on the cancelled heels of It
Had To Be You. Robert Urich, Robin Bartlett, Will Estes, Justin Whalin and
Justin Jon Ross all returned from that series and Ms. Dunaway did not.
She’d moved on anyway, and was hard at work being fired from Andrew
Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Blvd. Nobody from CBS had the balls to let her
know her show was going on without her – Faye read it in the trades.
The network’s feeling was that the chemistry of Robin and the four
guys, unlike their development money, was too good to waste. Warners
called us and asked if we’d like to write the new script in partnership with
the Executive Producing team who’d run IHTBY. We said there was a lot of
bad blood between us; they’d spent the last eight weeks trying to get us fired
to save money on the show budget. We told Warners, “It’s them or us; you
pick.” They called David Steinberg and asked which team he preferred.
David wet-fingered the air and went with the other guys.
I don’t know if they were burned-out from dealing with their
demanding star for months, or if it was too hard for them to separate
themselves from the family dynamic they’d become used to writing, or if it
was maybe just their screaming lack of talent, but the script the team wrote
Valuable Lessons
187
made a smell that reached the top of the WB water tower. While it was
being read aloud around the conference room table, Warners VP Tony Jonas
sketched a withered hand pulling a plug out of a wall socket and showed it to
Les Moonves. I know this because I was sitting behind him – we’d seen the
script early and Executive Producer Anita Addison had called to ask if we
were going to attend the reading. Darrell told Anita he didn’t know which
would be worse, not showing up and being considered snobs, or sitting in
the room during the read-through and getting sucked into the blame thresher.
So we made an appearance, but sat back against the wall.
Out in the hall afterwards, as the network discussed what they’d just
heard and the studio made calls to get the writers’ parking spaces repainted,
CBS’s Joe Voci spoke up: “Andrew and Darrell are the only ones who’ve
ever made this work, why don’t we see what they can come up with?”
Robert was tired and skeptical. He flew home to Utah, and we sat
down with staffer Lisa Rosenthal to knock out a brand new story, which for
some reason turned out to be as difficult a thing as we’ve ever tried to write.
Time after time we got part-way through a plot and realized it didn’t resolve.
Imagine taking any piece of coherent dramatic work, removing the main
character and trying to make it work. (Disregard the fact that with 1983’s
Amanda’s, ABC had tried to remake Fawlty Towers without Basil Fawlty.)
We started and stopped again and again. I had a holiday party to plan; I was
at home with caterers when Darrell and Lisa called on the third night and
said they’d cracked it.
And they had. It was a beautiful two-page story; clean, moving,
funny. These things seem so obvious when you finally lock them, but I
often wonder if the audience realizes how much of the writing on a TV
episode is just smashing your head on a table trying to come up with the
three-number combination out of a possible 216,000 that opens the lock.
The writing went fast and we faxed the results to Robert Urich. He
later told us he read it through, put it aside, then read it again because he
couldn’t believe it was that good. He was a generous man but I like to think
it actually was a solid script. Robert flew back to L.A. for the read-through.
David Janollari stepped up and congratulated us beforehand, then asked
Lisa, whom he knew, “What did you do, Lisa, make the coffee?” I don’t
forgive him for that, nor should you.
The read-through was probably the most successful I’ve ever
attended. The script was approved as written. We shot it in one of the
calmest, most enjoyable weeks I’ve spent in showbiz.
So of course it was DOA. We had taped it off-season, in December.
By the time pilot pickup time arrived I doubt the network even remembered
Valuable Lessons
188
it. There is an unseemly libido in television and films for the new. A year
ago, a month ago – the definition of “old news” is revised seasonally.
Drexell’s Class alumnus Brittany Murphy is, as I write this, starring in a
movie called His Little Black Book. Is there a book in this movie? No there
is not. “His little black book” is a PDA. The trendites at Revolution
probably ate themselves new ulcers worrying whether to change the title or
the book before they realized that the film’s target audiences was so hip, so
today, so removed from awareness of anything that has its roots in anything
else, they wouldn’t even question the disconnect.
Robert Urich called us from time to time; “You heard anything?” But
in an industry where twenty-nine-year-olds trim years off their age to avoid
seeming over the hill and studios buy galleys of books that haven’t come out
yet in order to be more “current” than today, three months old is three
months dead. ($85,000)
In 1993 Comedian and actor Tommy Blaze had a development deal at
Fox; that is, until he barged into the office of the head of Fox TV in
performance mode and somehow schticked his way out of it. Between those
two bookend events we wrote a script for him about a loudmouth men’s
magazine columnist who’s hired onto a woman’s mag to give it some
opposite-point-of-view controversy. I don’t read a lot of women’s
magazines but the few I’ve flipped through have cover teases like: The Ten
Things He Really Wants In Bed... then you open it up and the list starts with
Dirty Talk and ends with Cuddling. Where’s Ice Cube Blow Jobs, and Your
Sister on that list? The magazines are intrinsically untruthful, hence
unhelpful… and helpful’s the only thing they’re consistently claiming to be.
The pilot story had to do with a statistic we’d read in American
Demographics magazine: men in their twenties have a sexual thought on
average every twenty seconds. With women the same age, it was closer to
every half an hour. So on Tommy’s first day at the magazine we had him
sell the Editor on a difference-between-the-sexes article, cataloguing the
objects of a full working day’s priapic fantasies, in the process both
disgusting and mesmerizing his female co-workers.
One of the notes from a woman at Fox was, “We should tweak the
statistic so women have closer to the same number of sexual thoughts as
men.” There’s Pulling The Pin for you.
After we handed in the draft, Tom Nunan at Fox called Lorimar’s
David Janollari to say it was his favorite script of the year.
Three weeks later he called about the project again: the current script
needed a little tweaking.
A few days later: based on this draft, the project is in trouble.
Valuable Lessons
189
A week after that: it would take nothing short of a miracle for this
show to get picked up.
You’re way ahead of me. We only wrote the one draft. ($50,000)
Tommy has a great relationship story which for me sums up the
difference between men and women. His longtime girlfriend left him for his
booking agent, who had mysteriously and for some time been sending
Tommy on longer and more out-of-the-way road trips. Post-split, Tommy
was sitting in a bar with a guy friend, pouring out his misery and anger,
when the friend asked Tommy, “Did you fuck her?”
Tommy looked up from his drink – “What?”
“I said, Did you fuck her?
“Jesus, Mike! I was with her four years, we were about to get
engaged, of course I fucked her!”
A big there-ya-go smile: “Then YOU WIN!”
Director and co-Executive Producer Barnett Kellman sent us each a bottle of
champagne after we worked on the pilot of Something Wilder, a real classy
thing to do, and only the second time we’ve received free alcohol for doing
our jobs. In 1979 Mike Star had given our band free beer after we played a
rowdy set at his Star Club in Ontario; in three years of playing clubs, the
only bonus we’d received after a set other than the clap.
This was a Warners show for NBC, originally titled Dadoo, which is
what Gene Wilder’s young son called him. If they want you enough they let
an eighteen-month-old name your show.
Gene had done a sitcom pilot the year before, Eligible Dentist, that
had reportedly cost the network upward of $2 million. Okay, what I heard,
from an insider, was six million. But I wasn’t there and I frankly don’t see
how that’s possible so let’s say two.
So, gutsy-call-wise, you had to hand it to NBC for greenlighting
Something Wilder one year later, though they notably disinvited Eligible
Dentist writer/producer David Seltzer, screenwriter of the Tom Hanks film
Punchline, which someone should have watched before putting him in
charge of a comedy. (To be fair, asking someone to write half a dozen
sequences in which a stand-up comedian credibly “slays” an audience is to
hand them an impossible task.)
Barnett asked us to do a pass on the pilot script; we did, and the
material he used worked just fine. But as CBS’s late great Tim Flack used
to say, “Honey, if they don’t come to your party…” ($10,000)
In early 1994, Mickey called me to say he was going to Australia to
perform in Treasure Island. He said he’d have a lot of down time so he was
Valuable Lessons
190
going to drive around the country and put on a series of one-man shows in
small venues in the Outback.
I remember thinking they sure picked the right guy to play Andy
Hardy.
The gig mostly involved supplementing the stack of stuff he already
had from us for Sugar Babies, various Bob Hope Classics and Vegas, with
gags about the long flight over there from America, Australian-rules
football, Olivia Newton-John, kangaroos and beer:
This is a beautiful country you have. What the hell is it doing out here
in the middle of nowhere?
The flight here from L.A. is so long you have to eat the other
passengers to survive even if you don’t crash.
You know why the World Limbo Record will never be held by an
Australian? Cos a beer bottle’s eight inches tall.
It was after this tour that Mickey declared bankruptcy. We were invited to
file with the court for whatever he owed us but I felt like calling him up to
see if he needed a loan. ($3,000)
Sam Simon was running a new series for Fox – The George Carlin
Show – in which George played a regular at the Moyland Tavern, a real
location from George’s youth up at 123rd and Amsterdam in Manhattan. We
were on our overall deal at Warners – we punched-up a few episodes for soft
dollars and wrote two others. I remember Sam was having bad back pain
and, judging by the fact that he’d just divorced Jennifer Tilly, probably some
financial pain too. He used to gleefully fling Chinese throwing stars around
the office during pitches. One day Sam called me while I was agonizing
over some Parent ‘Hood detail and asked how it was going: I said “Hey,
pilot development, the usual grief...” He asked, sincerely, “What grief? I
love development!”
We did an episode where recovering Catholic George helps his downin-the-mouth friend Harry (Alex Rocco) recover his youth by stealing a large
crate from an open truck, hauls it home, cracks it open hoping for cigarettes
or liquor and instead finds a seven-foot tall statue of Jesus Christ. George
spends the rest of the episode dragging Jesus around, hiding him in
bathroom stalls when the cops get close, and trying to return him without
getting busted. My favorite line has a long-faced priest telling the nervous
George, who’s come to church for confession:
Valuable Lessons
191
PRIEST
Didja hear what happened to Jesus?
Not originally; Tuesday.
Another great exchange, from the episode The City – which the website TV
Tome improbably claims was written by Paul Reiser – has George in a N.Y.
cab with a Pakistani driver played by Iqbal Theba:
TAXI DRIVER
In my country, I was a doctor!
GEORGE
Hey – in your country, I could be
a doctor.
After the series was cancelled George said he was going to call his next
performance outing the Fuck Hope Tour. So far as I know he didn’t.
George never had any hope to begin with, that’s his charm. ($41,540.26)
-----------------Where It Went
IT’S A BOY: Cody is twelve. He has no cell phone and isn’t
in one of those $24,000-a-year Junior Highs like the children of
many of my friends. But between clothing and feeding him,
drum lessons, hockey lessons, toys, medical...
A friend of mine was at a party talking to a writer who’d
gone from many years of making Big Money to making only
Good Money. This writer joked that the biggest adjustment
he’d had to make was re-training his kids, when they walked on
a plane, to not automatically turn left.
Anyway – I spoil him I guess, and he has to eat, so for
twelve years, let’s say:
$180,000
“THE PARENT ‘HOOD”
Valuable Lessons
192
In 2002 Darrell and I visited the WB network with Triage Entertainment to
pitch the reality show idea that would become The Cube. The pitchees – the
development staff of the network – were two white women in their early-tomid twenties. The production company president who accompanied us
noted by way of off-topic introductory chat that Darrell and I had written
and produced the first series ever to shoot for their network. One of them
said, Oh? Which show was that? Stu Shreiberg said, The Parent ‘Hood – it
ran for five years.
They exchanged an amiable but helpless look. Neither of them had
ever heard of it.
In moving from Bronson Pinchot on The Trouble With Larry to
Robert Townsend on The Parent ‘Hood, I joked with someone a few weeks
in that I’d gone from dealing with a man who didn’t suffer fools well to one
who didn’t spell fools well. The year before we’d had four pilots produced,
which may be one reason Warners handed us this project. It was Robert
Townsend’s idea, with his character’s job and family size modified by the
WB’s Garth Ancier. Robert wanted to do a show about a black family man
with two kids who was having trouble being a traditional father in the
anything-goes nineties. Later the two kids became three, and just before we
finalized the pilot outline that became four, using the time-honored network
calculus, Smart-Alec Kids = Viewers.
The first day we heard of it, C.A.A. and Warners jointly told us, using
virtually the same phrases, “He’s learned his lesson,” and “On this one, he’s
just going to be an actor for hire.” Garth promised me, “If he’s the slightest
trouble on this one, phone me at home and let me sort him out.”
Robert’s previous show apparently hadn’t gone well.
Father Knows Nothing was the working title, taken from something
Robert said in an early meeting. A good title; funny, got the point across.
But that blatant dis right up front would have undercut the respect for
parents that he yearned to foster, so Robert later chose The Parent ‘Hood
from a list compiled by Steve Billnitzer which also included my favorite
title, Stark Raving Dad. (Because of fears about Paramount’s Parenthood,
an edict came down from Warners that the apostrophe had to be included in
all correspondence. When we got into production someone even came by
our ratty second floor offices at Warner Hollywood to make sure there was
an apostrophe in the building directory listing next to the stairs.)
We met with Robert and told him how much we’d liked Hollywood
Shuffle. Robert asked what we thought of shows like Martin and Hangin’
With Mr. Cooper and we said, well, not much. He played his cards close to
his chest but I sensed this was a plus; he wanted a show with dignity. We
Valuable Lessons
193
wrote a pilot. There was a guest-star part for a rapper – we hired Coolio,
only a year away from his big hit cover of Stevie Wonder’s Gangsta’s
Paradise.
Then came Ernie. This was not the same Ernie I mentioned in Check
It Out! or The Trouble With Larry, but then again maybe it was; maybe
there’s only one Platonic Ernie. Ernie was a black writer, and we needed
talented black writers. He’d worked a lot, he was recommended by the
Warners execs – who knew if they’d even read him? He was Hot At That
Moment. We asked for a sample, and we called some people who’d worked
with him. They were unanimous: don’t hire him, he’s a lying politically
manipulative jerk who’ll smile to your face but suck up to your star and try
to take your job.
Wow. Could anyone be that bad? And if they were, why couldn’t it
have been one of the white writers we were considering?
Then the other calls started coming. Unprompted, friends of Ernie
began phoning and saying Hire Ernie. How they knew we were considering
it, I never learned. We’d never met or spoken to Ernie or to his agent. Andy
Borowitz, creator of Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, called me from a plane over
the Atlantic to say Ernie was a great guy and we should hire him. I had
never called, written for or spoken to Andy Borowitz and he’s calling me
from a plane to put in a job plug? How do you get this kind of pull? I’ll
return to the Ernie saga later.
Writing team Christian McLaughlin and Valerie Ahern were
graduates of the Warner Brothers Writers Program, which meant they’d
spent two months listening to guest speakers from Full House telling them
how to structure a Second Act. Every team selected had paid $250 to cashstrapped Warners to participate in this program, with the promise that after
graduation, if they were offered a sitcom by anyone on the lot their salary
would be picked up by the company – a huge incentive for a showrunner,
always fighting budget battles, to hire untried but promising writers.
A few weeks after Christian and Valerie had settled into their office,
our line producer Pam Grant told us Warners was refusing to pay for them.
Their excuse: “We already spent all the Workshop Program money.” Did I
mention Christian and Valerie paid $250 they barely had to attend these
workshops? So we made trims in the music budget and kept them on, and
they wrote some funny scripts.
We met in a coffee shop with a black director who provisionally
agreed to shoot the pilot. Two days later he called us back: “I’ve been
asking around The Community and... I just can’t do this show. Life’s too
short.” He confided to one of our writers, “Everyone I talked to says Robert
Valuable Lessons
194
will lay back for two episodes, then try to take over on episode three.”
Eventually the pilot was directed by Joel “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”
Zwick, with whom we’d worked productively before, and who evidently
wasn’t plugged into The Community.
Casting went well. Suzzanne Douglass played wife Jerri, and Bobby
McGee was best friend Derek. The kids were the adorable Regan Gomez
Preston, fifteen-year-old actor/ musician/director/genius Kenny Blank, the
precocious pudgy Curtis Williams and Ashli Amari Adams, who, three
weeks before we first auditioned her had been two years old. The cast was
rounded out with Carol Woods (the only actress who ever gave me a
Christmas gift – a kettle I’m still using) and Faizon Love, who could get a
laugh by lifting an eyebrow.
Robert wanted his character to be an ad exec. Garth had insisted he
play a college professor. The nascent WB liked the script very much and
made only minor changes before approving it.
As a bizarre portent, we had a meeting one day set up at the WB ranch
but we didn’t have a time for the meeting so in the morning Darrell called
WB Development Head Susanne Daniels to ask when she wanted us. No
more than ten minutes after he’d hung up, Warners’ David Janollari called
Darrell and said, “Can I ask you guys to not go calling the network behind
my back?” Darrell said, David, we’re going over there this afternoon, just
me and Andrew, we needed to know the time. David said, you need to know
anything from the network, call me, okay?
Okay.
A few days later, Susanne phoned me to say, “Call any time, don’t be
a stranger, we’re always here to help.” We were mid-script and I took the
opportunity to suggest that Robert should play something other than a
professor, since after meeting him, hearing him talk, making him an
academician seemed to us like a bit of a stretch. After we hung up, Susanne
immediately called David to complain that I’d taken advantage of a friendly
call to “harass” her. David called Darrell and said Susanne was very upset
and that we were never to call the network again. Never mind that we
hadn’t placed the call; never mind that the entire conversation was cheery
and upbeat. If we had anything to say to them, we were to call him and he
would relay it. We protested but to no avail. For the duration of this series
we never again phoned the network for which we were making it.
In his earlier invitation, Garth hadn’t said to call him at home if his
own executives started giving us stick.
One night after we’d shot a few episodes Susanne called us in the
production offices to make three or four suggestions on a future episode.
Valuable Lessons
195
One involved changing something significant. Until you open a script and
go through it page by page, you don’t always know if a big change can be
made without undoing the “lock”; whatever piece of probability-stretching
holds the story together.
Plus, on a sitcom you work on six scripts at once – the one you’re
writing, the one you’re re-writing, the one tabling this week, the one
shooting this week, the one from last week that you’re rough-editing, and the
one from two weeks ago that you’re sweetening and preparing to online.
We didn’t even remember what happened in the most recent draft of the
story Susanne was talking about, plus we were in mid-draft with writers in
our office, so Darrell said “Sure, we’ll take a look at it.”
Janollari called me back: “Susanne is very upset. She says Darrell’s
sloughing her off.”
We never found out what her problem was. We ground onward.
LESSON: At a network in transition, expect weirdness.
As we rehearsed the pilot episode it became obvious that Robert
didn’t like it. When we’d sent him the (network- and studio-approved) first
script he’d crossed out over a hundred lines and sent it back. We went to see
him and asked, “Is there anything you like about it? Anything at all?” He
looked at the script and flipped through it and flipped and flipped and
flipped...
The studio had been pressing us to solicit Robert’s input but when we
showed them the crossed-out script they blanched and said, “You’re just
going to have to wing it.”
Robert, besides being an actor, is a writer and a director (The Five
Heartbeats, Meteor Man). But his biggest and earliest success, the
admirable Hollywood Shuffle, was co-written by Keenan Ivory Wayans. (In
1993 Wayans sued Townsend for $1 million for lifting a sketch they’d shot
together for an HBO special and sticking it in Townsend Television without
seeking his co-author’s permission.) Now he was having the greatest
difficulty saying, even in rehearsal, any lines that he hadn’t written.
Everything was “wrong for the character.” Stupidly, we didn’t submit the
first Parent ‘Hood script to WGA arbitration for Created By credit, so
Robert has shared credit even though he wrote nothing. But it’s a truism of
writing that everyone feels they created everything they were involved in.
He told us he wanted to play a guy with some kids, a “father of the nineties”
– and in the end, he did... so to his thinking he co-created the series.
Valuable Lessons
196
On the stage Robert fought every line, bumbled through every scene,
insisting it all wasn’t working because the writing was weak, because we
didn’t “get” the characters we’d created. Warners suits David Janollari and
Maria Rastatter visited one night, huddled with Robert for half an hour,
heard all his complaints, then came to me and Darrell and said, “Fix it.” We
protested: ask the director, the cameramen, the sound guy... he’s not trying!
Can you back us up a little here? Tell him to at least try the lines in the
script. You approved it.
They said there’s no time, just make it work.
We weren’t working with an abundance of resources. The Parent
‘Hood had been the last of the initial four network series picked up, had the
lowest budget and was the first to tape. But still, we screened a cut of our
show for network executives before their next series even tabled.
We got up and running quickly. We pitched twenty-five stories to the
studio, of which they approved seventeen. We pitched those to the network
and they bought twelve. With those plus the pilot we had the entire thirteenorder first season mapped out. We were told this was unprecedented
organization and success at such an early stage. We launched nine
simultaneous first drafts.
The following week the WB shot two more pilots, Unhappily Ever
After and The Wayans Brothers. Suddenly there was a problem. Our show
was too “family,” too un-hip, too “ABC,” too tame. It no longer “fit in.”
They called us on a Tuesday and told us to change the episode we were then
rehearsing – the episode we were shooting in three days – to a more Married
With Children, edgier style of humor.
If you’re going to shoot an edgy show you don’t put four adorable
kids on a comfy pastel-pillows-and-oak set with a star who explicitly wants
to be “the Cosby of the nineties” and refuses to allow any of his showbiz
offspring the mildest insubordination. Robert objected violently, but for
once the edict from on high was biting him in the ass. His character was
now delivering put-downs to his wife, children and housekeeper.
I’m figuring you, the reader, are not a network president. I expect you
haven’t had years of experience developing and fine-tuning comedy series.
But I wager even you wouldn’t take a gentle family show with four sweet
kids that’s already in rehearsal – a Cosby Show, if you like – and ask the
Executive Producers mid-week to turn it into South Park by Thursday.
We showed the network the results at the Wednesday run-through.
They winced and said, “Change it back.”
Episode Two went well, considering the staffer who had written it quit
over the notes. On Thursday night, our shoot night, the network and studio
Valuable Lessons
197
pronounced themselves “very happy.” The studio audience roared. Then,
before a few late pickup shots, Robert called the execs into his trailer and
told them he wasn’t happy with the jokes, the stories, the dialogue, or the
characters. As for the great audience reaction, he accused Darrell and me of
stacking the audience with professional laughers.
Robert was also keen to know where were the stories he had pitched?
He’d handed us two pages early on, with nineteen point-form episode ideas:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Robert checks up on his daughter at a rap concert
Robert gets in a fight with his sister’s abusive boyfriend
Robert thinks his brother stole his VCR, but makes a mistake
Robert finds out his son’s teacher is gay. He goes to school to
confront him....
6. Robert forgets his anniversary...
10. Jerri accuses Robert of being a cheapskate...
15. Robert and his mother-in-law get into it...
19. Robert goes to see his hustler father...
This was the only writing he did. We pitched some of these ideas to the
network as a courtesy and they mostly either shot them down or said,
“That’s it? Where’s the story?” Number One we used as the pilot.
Robert’s Number 11, “Jerri’s friend Jodi hits on Robert,” we made into son
Michael’s girlfriend hitting on Robert, and sold as an episode. (Notably,
Robert misspelled his own name in twenty-point type at the top of Page One:
“The Robert Towsend Show.”)
It was 11:00 p.m. when the suits came out of Robert’s trailer and told
us we were in “serious trouble.” The episode they’d praised an hour earlier
was now “way off track for this series.” And we were going to have to “start
listening seriously to your co-creator and co-executive producer,” who
wanted the show to be more like Roseanne, with an Issue in every speciallymarked box.
The next three scripts, the first of which was to table-read the next
morning, had been in Robert’s possession for a while – in the case of the
very next one, for three weeks and two days. When we questioned him
more closely about his objections he admitted he had not read any of them.
He had based his criticisms on the titles and the fact that none of his own
one-sentence story ideas had yet shown up.
Valuable Lessons
198
At the table read for Episode Three there was a weird vibe. David and
Maria said a quick “hi” at the donut table and hustled past us. Writer Ernie
avoided us.
We sat at the table and the cast read the script. Enormous laughs. A
junior Network exec told us, “One of the funniest script readings I’ve ever
heard.” After a table reading, normally the executives from the network and
the studio huddle separately before giving notes. For some reason this time
they were in one huddle. It lasted a long time. When they finally broke and
joined us, they said... no major notes, just produce it the way it was written.
Robert came to our office later and said he wanted to fire guest-star
Michael Dorn and re-write the entire show around an idea he’d thought of in
the last few days but hadn’t mentioned to us. We punted this one to the
network. The WB folks sensibly refused to fire our guest star and toss the
script, but told us to make whatever changes of Robert’s we possibly could:
“It’s his show and we’ve spent a fortune promoting him.”
A few months later we found out what had happened at Table Number
Three. The plan had been to fire us after the table read, because Robert had
said he hated the script and it didn’t work. With the thoughtful help of
Ernie, the studio had another potential showrunner, a friend of his, sitting up
in the bleachers watching the reading, ready to step down and take our
office.
But as I say Robert hadn’t read the script before the table. He barely
read them at the table. Assuming we’d be gone and he’d write a new one
himself with the replacement guy, he figured why bother.
So when the script killed, nobody knew what to do. “Holy shit, it’s a
funny episode!” Thus the huddle. They finally decided not to mention
anything to us of their plans and asked what condition the other scripts were
in, because they’d also been told we were working very slowly (see The
Tonight Show and Ray Siller). We should have had the next episode in good
shape by now... so where was it?
In fact we had four more finished scripts which we told them they’d
have before the weekend. They said oh. They filed out, and we went back
to work, thinking, “Nice table read, huh?”
Robert was stuck with scripts the network liked, written by guys he
wanted to get rid of. How best to get rid of them? By demonstrating how
bad the shows really were.
Ernie watched and bided his time, as all good Ernies do. Two years
later, after we read that he’d worked with writer/show creator Chris
Thompson, we mentioned his name to Chris one day outside the Pearl stage.
Valuable Lessons
199
Chris looked up and snarled, “FRIEND of yours??” He’d had a similar
experience.
It became increasingly apparent that Robert had the acting range of Larry
“Bud” Melman. A Warners Current exec told me, “He doesn’t even look
like he’s talking to the other actors. He’s just desperately trying to
remember his next line.” A dialogue coach was added to the budget, at
which point Robert stopped reading the scripts altogether, relying on lastsecond cramming before the audience takes.
That week’s director, who estimated he’d shot 300 episodes of TV,
said he’d never worked with so hopeless a performer. Our editor
complained that he couldn’t insert reaction shots of Robert into the show
because his only expression was, “What’s my next line?”
So skip ahead a month. One staff writer with a great deal of sitcom
experience had just quit because she said if she ever saw Robert while she
was driving onto the lot in the morning, she was almost certain she’d run
him over. David Steinberg, who directed episode three, had strolled up to us
onstage on Thursday after a horrible Producers Run-Through and said,
smilingly, “So! I suppose you’re wondering what I’ve been doing for the
last three days!”
Not exactly. What we had been wondering was why our star spent so
much time leaning on the center island in the kitchen scenes and looking
down. That is, until we found script pages taped all around the inside of the
sink. Son Michael entered the living room in one episode and called his dad
to come out of the house. Robert got up and followed but he took the
newspaper he’d been reading. We asked if he could leave the paper behind.
No he couldn’t, because it had his lines inside it. There were lines inside his
coffee mug.
(I have, in a display case in my apartment, a prop from the show – a
stick that Robert had to throw to a dog, on which is written, “Here, boy!
Fetch!”)
In one scene of Episode Three, Robert, sitting on the couch, had a
fourteen-word cue which he delivered in take after take at a Steven Hawking
cadence and with a pace we could do nothing to accelerate as he searched in
his head for le mot juste. Normally you can tighten these awkward moments
with cutaways – a brief shot of another character nodding or smiling, during
which you snip an awkward pause. But this was just Robert sitting alone in
the room talking to himself. In editing later, John Neal showed us the
shortest version he’d been able to find and pointed out that this one sentence
Valuable Lessons
200
took up two percent of the running time of the show. John had to switch to
Heavyworks, a whole new editing system, mid-season, because his previous
system, E-PIX, required frequent laser disk changes and thanks to the
retakes we were now shooting on average thirty hours of tape per show –
seven and a half hours per camera.
We’d hired two talented freelancers, Andy Guerdat and Wayne Kline, to
write an episode each. We knew Wayne, but Andy’s script hadn’t been
among the 800 we were sent by the agencies when we staffed-up. A friend,
Lisa Rosenthal, had called us after we were underway and told us to hunt
him down. Sure enough; a terrific script. How had we missed him? We’d
missed him because Andy was at C.A.A., our own agency, and had “gone
cold” there – they were no longer submitting him. Gee I wonder what that’s
like.
Someone accidentally typed the same Social Security Number in the
first draft of each of Andy and Wayne’s deal memos and Robert decided
neither man existed (in the real, not the C.A.A. sense); that we’d invented
them to pad the writing budget. He demanded their unlisted home phone
numbers, and that they be brought in front of him that afternoon. Wayne
was writing for Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, Andy had other
commitments. We told Robert we weren’t going to drag a couple of writers
from wherever they were working down to Warners Hollywood just so he
could tell them he thought they were fronts. Wayne obligingly asked Jay for
a few hours off and came by. His episode turned out funny, but the
experience was humiliating. We couldn’t call the network to appeal for
sanity, and the studio, well, they backed Robert.
There was a moment in one script when Regan’s character was getting
the third-degree from Dad about a boy she was going to bring to the house
that night before a date. Her dad made it clear he was going to grill the boy,
question him about his parents, his hobbies, his grades, his intentions.
Seeing this, three-year-old Ashli’s line was, “Man! I’m meeting my dates
on the corner!” Robert and Suzzanne demanded the line be removed; we
were saying Ashli was a prostitute.
Another time, the two smart-ass older kids were putting one over on
Dad, cackling over some juvenile stunt in the kitchen. One of Michael’s
lines was, “Man, if stupid was glue, Dad could wallpaper New Zealand.”
Robert said the line had to come out. His character wouldn’t let his son say
that. Darrell said, but you’re not in the scene – the kids are down in the
kitchen and you’re upstairs asleep. His reply: “If one of my kids said that,
no matter where I was, I’d know it.”
Valuable Lessons
201
Knick-knacks. Princeton University. Brooke Shields. All things we
had to remove from the next script because our star hadn’t heard of them.
(“Put in a better-known university.”) In the read-through of a script about
impressing the Dean for a promotion, he pronounced the mathematical
constant Pi with a short i. This was supposed to be a college professor.
He’d never heard of Pi. (To be fair, no one in the cast had, except Kenny
Blank.)
Another time the cast told our line producer, “You don’t know how to
feed black people.” They wanted the catering budget doubled. We checked
with other shows; our catering budget, based on requests from early on, was
already 120% of the average for sitcoms. Warners said do what they want.
We took away all the salads, fruit and cereal and added even more ribs,
bacon and chicken wings.
Meanwhile the notes poured in demanding that we make Robert funnier, at
the same time that even WB Current execs were confiding to us, “He’s the
worst actor I’ve ever seen in a series.”
It all came to a head on a show guest-starring seventy-three-year-old
Chitlin Circuit legend LaWanda Page (who had strolled into the audition in a
skirt slit up the front and drawled, “Honey, where the one slit ends, another
begins!”)
The run-through was a howling success. An hour later, we were still
sitting in a small hot room while the Warners execs pressed for a change to
the story that Robert had requested. The suggested change not only ruined
the comedy, it made no sense. Sixty minutes earlier they’d been laughing
out loud at this episode. Darrell bluntly reminded them there was nothing
wrong with the story – what was wrong was the star they’d chosen, the
format and character they’d picked for him to play, and the constant
pointless changes they were forcing on us to appease a man who couldn’t
even be bothered to read the scripts he was denouncing.
David Janollari then made a fix-it suggestion now lost to history that
was one of the dumbest things I’d ever heard in a notes meeting. I looked at
my shoes, hoping the throbbing room-vacuum would prompt him to say, “...
or not.” Who knows if this one came from him, from Robert, or from some
absent player who’d insisted beforehand that a certain agenda be pushed.
Anyway, Darrell opened his mouth and said what everyone in the room was
thinking: “David? That’s just stupid. That is a stupid note.”
That was in October of 1994 and we haven’t created or run a sitcom since.
We haven’t had a meeting to create or run a sitcom since. We had brought
Valuable Lessons
202
in every show we’d ever done up to that point under budget and on time and
to warm congratulations and approval, but in the last four years C.A.A. has
secured us exactly one sitcom meeting, to staff the quickly cancelled Fox
series Replay.
I mention this with some emphasis because I’m pretty deep into the
book now and I imagine a typical reader, reading all the dumb script
requests I’ve cited, will have thought to him or herself, “Why didn’t you
push back? You’re the writer; you bear some responsibility for turning out
all this crap. Why didn’t you ever just say No?”
This, to my best recollection, is the first time we ever said No. And
despite The Parent ‘Hood being at that point the top-rated show on the
fledgling network, a fact for which I felt we deserved some credit, that
feeble protestation in the face of a ludicrously untenable demand is why
we’re writing children’s animation today.
Wayne Kline subsequently gave us a copy of a letter from his agent,
Matthew Solo, dated December 9, saying Wayne could come back in and
pitch if he wanted, but, “I know Andrew and Darrell are no longer on the
show, so I hope the new showrunners will let you go to teleplay.”
We didn’t know this. However, the next day we were notified that
our services on the overall Warners deal would no longer be required, and
that they were going to pay us off at the rate of 25¢ on the dollar. Nancy
Tellem in Warners Business Affairs called David Tenzer on December 23
and said, “If they don’t take it, we’ll just let them sit out their deal.”
The week before this we’d had a memo from Maria at Warners saying
how great the scripts had been, telling us what a good job we were doing,
and asking if it might be time for us to start talking about extending our deal.
We thumbtacked the two memos side-by-side on our corkboard.
Scripts were still due. We kept writing. Monday to Friday (actually,
Friday through Thursday) we had half a dozen suits in our faces at every
moment, at every casting session for each minor character... ridiculous
suggestions for changes, even after “Cut!” had been called on the floor
during filming. We once got an edit note from a junior WB executive the
day before the episode in question was due to air.
And then Ernie and the other black writer disappeared.
A sitcom staff works a lot of weekends. We did five consecutive
Sundays and these two writers failed to appear at any of them. On weekdays
they both customarily showed up at noon, even though their presence was
requested at ten. They both frequently left early. Ernie set business
meetings on rewrite nights. When he did show up he refused to do punch-up
Valuable Lessons
203
with the other writers, instead returning his copy of the script with the lines
he disliked crossed out but nothing added.
Michele had a rewrite due – we’d given her the first draft but on
November 26 she said she was going to work on it from home.
December 12: Ernie has called in sick for four consecutive days. He
said he was going to write Michele’s script with her, at home.
December 16: “You’ll have it Monday.”
December 18: all-day Sunday rewrite. Network and Robert still
asking for more authentic black dialogue. Michele and Ernie, our only black
writers, are the only writers not to show.
December 19: Michele has a bad back, can’t come in to work. Ernie
has caught her bad back.
December 20: Bad back, working from home, script tomorrow. At
night, we tape Episode Four. Michele and Ernie show up but watch from the
Green Room with the network execs. Ernie is overheard telling a suit, “That
won’t happen again,” and “You’re right, I didn’t want them to take that line
out either.” Michele left her script pages “at home.”
Wayne Kline drops off his script and says he was told we were fired
two weeks ago. He says every agent in town has been asked to submit
clients to run the show. The first we’d heard of it.
December 21: Ernie shows up for work. He says he’ll have his script
finished “by lunchtime.” Michele says she left her script pages at home. I
ask why she didn’t bring the pages to work – it’s been almost four weeks on
one rewrite, normally a day’s work. She gets defensive and storms out of
the office.
Looking at the audience Guest List, I spot a familiar name. On a
hunch I call Ernie into our office. I tell him, “You knew they tried to fire us
a long long time ago, right? Did they offer you the job?”
Ernie bites. He says yes, they offered him the position but “out of
loyalty,” he declined. Out of this same loyalty he had, however, arranged
for that showrunner friend of his, the name on the Guest List, to attend a few
tapings to get the gist of the series so he could take over. That’s why Ernie
and Michele haven’t come in; they figured with us gone any day, why bother
writing anything? Just because they were the two highest-paid writers on
staff? Feh.
But the studio had been putting off the coup because of a problem
they had: they liked the scripts. And now we learned of the whole sordid
plan to dump us back on Episode Three.
We call David and Maria at WB to get notes we need for episodes
nine through thirteen. They refuse to call us back. I reach Maria once on
Valuable Lessons
204
her cell; she mumbles something about Christmas shopping and having a kid
with her and hangs up. Okay, so this is the chop, over the holidays.
We excuse Ernie and Michele so they can get back to work crossing
off our jokes, and call the other writers in. We say they’ll probably be
working under Erich Van Lowe in the New Year. He’s supposed to be
good. Meanwhile, we ask them to keep writing. We want to get all four of
the scripts for the New Year handed in to the network before the break.
We get four scripts in before we break for Christmas. This gives them
a problem even greater than they’d had heretofore – they like these four
scripts the best of the season. Uneasy lies the head that has to shoot off the
crown.
December 22: Ernie and Michele turn in loose pages all day long and
by the end of the day we have the missing script. A typical first draft sitcom
script is forty-five pages. Theirs is thirty-five and contains lines like, “Then
Robert smacks all the kids upside the head.” They clearly wrote it today.
They smile at us. There’s nothing we can do. We’re running a show for the
WB but nobody has called us back in two weeks, and we’ve been told to
never phone the network. We’re living and working in a hate vacuum.
Darrell and I write the script from scratch over the holidays. We can’t
assign work to the staff because all of the white writers’ contracts are up
December 31 and we assume that, having finished the entire season’s scripts
by December, they won’t be invited back.
But January rolled around and so did we. We lasted out the season
and talked Warners up to fifty cents on the dollar. Robert got his new
showrunners, Dennis Rinsler and Marc Warren from Full House. We
crossed paths as we left our office lugging boxes of scripts. One of them
said, “What the hell have you gotten us into?” Quoth Darrell, “Hell is
right.” ($2,082,155.08)
We owned 31% of the Adjusted Gross of any series we created for
Warner Brothers, with our percentage “reducible by third parties to a hard
floor of 21%.” When Robert asked for ten percent of the gross, down to that
floor we went. When we negotiated our release from the Warners deal we
traded a few more points in return for the fifty-cents-on-the-dollar thing, so
Darrell and I effectively own 18.5% of the Adjusted Gross of this series,
which sold for $535,000 per episode to Tribune Broadcasting in 1997 in a
package with The Wayans Brothers, and a similar amount to Turner
Syndication, packaged with Moesha. Multiply by ninety episodes = $96.3
million.
We hashed out the budget for the first season: our per-episode cost
was $605,000, of which $380,000 was paid back to the studio by their own
Valuable Lessons
205
network in the form of a broadcast, or license fee. So that’s an actual cost to
the studio of $255,000 per episode for Season One. Well, not exactly,
because $25,000 of that “cost” was their own Studio Overhead. Okay, we’ll
give them that.
Even with a generous annually-compounded budget increase of 25%,
that comes to a cost over five years of $33.5 million for all ninety episodes,
and a profit of $62.8 million. Figure another 50% right off the top for the
interest they charged themselves and corporate greed and there’s still thirty
mill in mad money and a check to us of just over $5.8 million. Right?
L.A. entertainment lawyer Eric Weissler looked over our deal and told
us, “C.A.A. accepted a poor definition of adjusted gross.” Warners can
presumably charge itself $35,000 for putting a tape in a cab and sending it a
mile up the street to its own network, then call this a “distribution fee,” as
Universal did with The Rockford Files, an arrangement which, alongside
many similar quasi-legit peculations permitted the company to claim, after
that series had made $160 million in syndication, that it was only six figures
in the black.
LESSON: Don’t be so excited to get the job – or so blasé about it – that
you don’t carefully read your contracts.
The Parent ‘Hood is still in debt, and the more it earns in syndication
the deeper in debt it gets, because of the considerable cost of packing away
obscene profits. By 2004 Warners’ cost statement showed $22 million in
Interest alone charged against the series. Who charged them all that
interest? They did.
Yet somehow Warners makes money – huge money, according to
their shareholder reports. You figure it out. In the meanwhile, if you create
a series yourself and they offer you fifty percent of the back end for your
idea? Take an extra ten bucks a week instead. With that at least you can
buy a sandwich.
Shooting a show, we always position one of us on the floor to fight
the actors and one in the truck to fight the director. I’m in the truck. We
went to black once during a Friday shoot. Director Rob Schiller ran out of
the truck then came back; “I’m not getting into this.” Darrell was in the
alley behind the studio preparing for a fist-fight with Robert over a line that
Robert refused to have Faizon Love say. It wasn’t even Robert’s line and he
was standing there demanding we audition replacement lines at 10:30 at
night with an audience waiting.
Valuable Lessons
206
He’d asked for a replacement for the line that morning and we’d given
him a revised script at lunch. Robert must have been concentrating on his
own lines; it hadn’t registered until now. The way it was written, Faizon’s
character Wendell made some dumb suggestion. Robert said, he’s not going
to say that line. Wendell is not an idiot. He’s a college professor.
He’s a WHAT?
Since Day One, Wendell had been given lines like this: “Fell for a
special lady once. Followed her everywhere. To the beach. To her job. To
the Laundromat. To her home. Police called it stalking. I called it love.”
He talked about doing jail time, about knowing guys who could get you
anything you wanted. Knowing a guy in the Army who had a naked woman
tattooed on his back... “Man, on Valentine’s Day? He slept in the woods.”
Wendell didn’t go to work; he was around all day, mooching out of Robert
and Jerri’s fridge. Now he was a college professor? And this was going to
be announced in the penultimate scene of episode Eight?
In later seasons, with us gone, I believe Robert did effect this
promotion. But on that Friday night I came up with a bad compromise line,
and Darrell walked. We ended up cutting the scene.
The biggest laugh-getters on the show were Bobby McGee, Carol
Woods and Faizon. As soon as we left, someone saw to it that Carol and
Bobby were fired.
And then we fled Warner Brothers itself, our tales between our legs.
With two exceptions, a joke in one episode of It Had To Be You, and one
rejected story idea for The Parent ‘Hood, the studio had not in five years, on
three series, six shot pilots, and nearly twenty other projects, backed us in
any creative, producing or casting disagreement, large or small, with any
network, staff writer or star.
LESSON: Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets replaced.
-----------------Where It Went
SPENT BY THE BRIDE: Sounds churlish to enumerate, but
I’m including everything here. Clothes, cars, classes, makeup,
her family, her charities. I’m still getting letters from Jane
Goodall wondering why the monkey contributions dried up. I
finally obtained most of the credit card summaries: “we” made
$2.5 million in charge payments from August ‘95 to December
‘99, after which we still had $140,000 in card debt.
Valuable Lessons
207
I don’t use credit; I carry an American Express on which
I put about a grand a month. So for this I’m going to guess
$100k a year.
$850,000
“FUNGUS THE BOGEYMAN”
Five hundred dollars for over two years’ work, and that was the per diem for
a trip we made to London in an attempt to find out if this project could be
salvaged.
Raymond Briggs is best known in the U.S. as the author and artist of a
charming children’s book and video called The Snowman, and slightly lesswell known for a less charming but brilliant Art Spiegelmanesque cartoon
about a post-nuclear-holocaust world, entitled When The Wind Blows, in
which an elderly couple follow all the advice of their country’s survival
pamphlets and wind up dying in their cottage with their skin falling off.
In 1979 Raymond created a dark, scatological illustrated novella
called Fungus The Bogeyman, in which, and with some follow-up material,
he outlined the mythical world of the Bogey, whose lot it is to arise from his
moist subterranean bed and give frights and boils to Dry Cleaners, the
Bogeys’ name for us. It was Monsters, Inc anticipated by two decades but
without the American gloss and Billy Crystal’s crypto-ad libs.
The hardcover book sold mainly in Britain, Raymond’s home, and in
those commonwealth countries still sucking the cultural teat of Mother
England. I received a copy of the book that year for Christmas and soon my
brothers and I had memorized and could recite on demand the disgusting
details of Bogey lore, customs, poetry and hygiene.
In 1994 Darrell and I met the peripatetic and disarming George
Ayoub, who had until recently been the foreign distribution head for George
Harrison’s Handmade Films. George A, with partner Ray Cooper, was
striking out on his own, assembling projects for production. With seed
money and encouragement from Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael
Palin – the three ardent medievalists among the Pythons – George had lit on
Fungus as a “name project” prime for development. Ray Cooper, his
producing experience apart, is a legendary name in British music and in
1994 was the percussionist for Elton John and for Eric Clapton – you can see
him whacking stuff in the background of Clapton’s MTV Unplugged video.
Ray has also done the music for a number of Terry G’s films – for trivia
Valuable Lessons
208
buffs, he’s the bald looming computercrat at the beginning of Brazil who
whacks the fly that falls in the printer, transliterating “Tuttle” into “Buttle.”
(Super-trivial trivia: Ann Way, appearing in Brazil as Old Lady With Dog –
the one outside the Ministry Of Information with two bandages in an “X”
over its butt – was, many years previously, my mother’s high school acting
coach.)
We were running The Parent ‘Hood and were sorely in need of
diversion by something resembling humor. George had in hand a short VHS
model-test shot by Terry G., and sample Fungus scripts by Brazil and
Ripley’s Game co-author Charles McKeown and sundry others, all of whose
efforts had been pronounced not-quite-right by Mr. Briggs. The BBC was
interested, the model shops at Shepperton were primed to begin
construction, a lot of impressive names were involved (we also met with
seventh Python Neil Innes) – surely this had to turn into money and a
memorable experience, if not just money.
One of the difficulties with turning Raymond’s book into a live-action
show à la ABC’s Dinosaurs was its ruminative nature. Fungus didn’t speak
when out on his Frights. His dank thoughts were etched behind him in a
verbose moody existential fog. Television abhors a dialogue vacuum so we
added the character Blot, an annoyingly upbeat bogey apprentice whose duty
it is to learn the tradecraft and take Fungus’s place when he eventually drops
dead.
Looking at the book again, a lot of what had been funny to me at
twenty seemed a tad simple after I’d been standing waist-deep in the comedy
pit for years. The Bogeys’ sensibilities as often as not involved simply
doing things backwards: they took time off work when they got well. Their
vacuum cleaners blew dirt into the house. They lay in the bath to get filthier.
A smidgen of this goes a long way, and it can stay there.
We added a household pet, an egg-sucking ferret in a cage who insults
Fungus, a free-spending wife who squanders her husband’s every paycheck,
anticipating Fungus’s raise and promotion that never comes; two callous
children, a tyrannical boss... we in general piled on the agony as my
grandmother used to say, to make our horripilific host a filthy scab-riddled
correlate of the middle-class family man. Big changes, but after all this was
an adaptation and you can only swim so far with jokes derived from Latin
puns on household words (barathrum for bathroom – n., pit, abyss /the
underworld). Raymond is erudition personified, I always pictured him as an
Oxford Don type putting on a jacket and tie to go buy milk. George told me
that Raymond had begun dating a neighbor lady in his small South-England
home town – a woman he’d been living next door to for decades but to
Valuable Lessons
209
whom until recently he’d never spoken. For some reason we didn’t translate
set-in-his-ways as “intractable.”
Encouraged by everyone’s reaction to our script, we surged ahead and
outlined twelve more morbidly detailed stories, while pitching the series
around L.A. We got meetings, but to people used to hearing only variations
on they’re-a-family-and-they-live-in-Seattle, this stuff was pretty intense.
Raymond had also put out a brilliantly engineered pop-up book of Fungus,
which, when we passed it around in meetings, got the sort of awed reception
you’d expect by circulating a bucket of pig bowels: holy shit, willya look at
that, get it away from me.
All along, though apprised of the direction in which we and Messrs
Ayoub and Cooper were taking his material to make it producable, Mr.
Briggs held his own counsel. But as 1996 waned it seemed George’s option
was going to expire, so we all booked a trip to London to shake loose an
authorial blessing to get the project rolling.
In England we met with the BBC, with Terrys Gilliam and Jones, and
with Charles McKeown and other talented writers whom we’d need working
on scripts as soon as a go-ahead was secured. We lunched with animal
choreographer Peter Elliot, primate inter pares, who’d just finished playing
the title character in Buddy inside a gorilla costume opposite Rene Russo,
and who offered insight into the difficulties of shooting an animatronicenhanced fantasy comedy. We went to Shepperton and met the Fungus
modelers and artists. And finally, we dropped by the offices of literary agent
Steven Durbridge Esq. to meet with his client and see what else needed to be
done before we could begin to pull all these creative strands together.
Raymond wasn’t there. And, in their conference room, his agents
informed us he wouldn’t be coming – he didn’t care for the changes that had
been made to his characters and story, and he’d be taking back the option as
soon as it expired. So sorry.
Did I mention that this whole time our line producer was carrying
around the ashes of his dead father, on his way to scattering him in Spain?
Somehow it seems appropriate to throw that in at this point.
Back in America, we conference-called with Raymond but he was
intransigent. He wanted NO changes to his book but, as solace, he said our
material was sufficiently different from his as to constitute an entirely
separate series, should we be disposed to rename the characters and re-pitch
it.
Which of course we did. But Dumpton The Dreaded Lurgy didn’t sell
either, and a few years later Dreamworks released Monsters, Inc, and... well,
Valuable Lessons
210
you can only bang your head against the wall so long before some of it starts
to stick.
I’m grateful for the experience because I got to meet many fascinating
and equally beaten people, some of whom have gone on to work for us on
other projects, and some of whom remain friends. I never did meet Ray
Briggs but I wish him all the best. Too many people let the solid sharp blade
of their ideas be dulled to scrap iron for commercial reasons, but he didn’t
even allow the first drop of oil on the whetstone. Bravo, you sick bastard.
As we finished out our Warner Brothers TV deal in 1995 a call came
from C.A.A.: Universal has a show that’s in a bit of trouble, can you take a
meeting with John Landis?
Landis had Executive Produced and frequently directed HBO’s
Dream On, from the pre-Friends team of Martha Kaufman, David Crane and
Kevin Bright. John had a hold on the old Dream On film production
facilities at the corner of Roscoe and Laurel Canyon in the North end of the
San Fernando Valley. And he’d sold this slapstick-and-sex series, Campus
Cops, to USA Cable. But it had been in pre-production for four months and,
everyone felt, was going nowhere. Could we help?
On our first day, we discovered some of the particulars that had earlier
been withheld from us: the show was going to shoot thirteen episodes in
thirteen weeks, with no down weeks, not even any down days. It started
principal photography in ten days. And there wasn’t a single usable script in
the hopper.
We thought one of those revelations was the Big Surprise (see
Rocketship Bedroom). The Big Surprise didn’t actually come until the
second week, when, during a production read-through, someone offhandedly mentioned, “Don’t forget, we lose the writers next week.” I said
something like, pardon me?
We had three teams of staff writers, all of whom have since gone on
to greater glory. It turned out that between them and the former
showrunners the entire writing budget had been spent in anticipation of a
camera start two months previous. That start hadn’t happened. Now the
money was gone and so were the writers. It was just us and Brian Benben’s
fist holes in the office walls.
We cajoled a few bucks for a gag writer friend, Steve Billnitzer, to
join us, and we said goodbye to David and Jason and Eve and Dennis and
Andy and Chris. We felt bad about one of the teams in particular, hampered
over the previous month by an obvious medical problem producing frequent
nosebleeds. We wrote an episode for them and put their names on it. Later,
Valuable Lessons
211
we found out the writer in question had a serious coke problem and hadn’t
done any work in three months.
But, and to our considerable surprise, the production weeks that
followed were sheer bliss. No studio interference. No network problems.
And no actor egos. (Quick ego story: our late manager, Ted Zeigler, was a
writer/performer on the Shields and Yarnell Show. Robert Shields and
Lorene Yarnell were the most famous mimes in America so naturally they
were given their own variety hour. Robert called all the writers in to his
office before the season began and said “I don’t want anyone in this room to
think of me as a star. I want you to think of me... as a Superstar!” Ted
laughed out loud; he thought Robert was joking.)
Campus Cops was trouble-free largely because it was shot on film,
and that film was mostly exposed, as I say, at Roscoe and Laurel Canyon in
the North of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. That’s an hour’s drive from
Hollywood, and one the suits didn’t want to make, especially since we were
a single-camera show shooting out of sequence. They had no way of
knowing when they got in their cars if the scene on which they were hoping
to provide helpful advice had already been filmed.
We’d shipped our Warner Brothers memorabilia into the production
facilities and hung the posters on the walls of our new office. One day,
spinning in my swivel chair, I realized what a difficult haul it had been for
us since 1992. Someone had mistakenly decided that working with Johnny
Carson for six years had fitted us for dealing with difficult stars. Staring
back at us from their promotional posters was a rogue’s gallery of monsters.
And now here we were, working “off-net” with seven actors who actually
came to us and asked if they could change a word or a line, actors who we
overheard zealously rehearsing bits of tricky dialogue or physical business.
Actors who made us laugh.
INT. DEAN'S OFFICE - DAY (DAY ONE)
An enlarged preserves jar LABEL, reading "Granny Pilkington's
Preserves," with an oval hole. Dean Pinklington poses in the
hole in a bonnet, as CAMPUS POLICE CHIEF HINGLE takes his
picture. [This photo will later be the actual label on the
jars]. There are Mason jars on his desk, and pots of BOILING
JAM. Pilkington holds up an ORANGE.
PILKINGTON
"Citrus sinensis."
Hingle snaps the photograph and Pilkington steps out from behind
Valuable Lessons
212
the cutout with his orange.
PILKINGTON (CONT.)
The orange. Or is it? It's
orange like an orange. It's
roughly spherical like an orange.
It even has a sticker with a
smiling sun on it to convince me
it's an orange. But this is no
orange, Hingle.
HINGLE
Is it a moo-cow, sir?
PILKINGTON
It's what the people who grow
oranges think we want an orange to
look like. It's been waxed,
injected with dye, irradiated so
it won't rot, genetically mutated
so it's sweeter and won't...
He hurls it at the wall.
PILKINGTON (CONT.)
... bruise. You're not looking at
an orange, Hingle, you're looking
at a lie. A deception, like the
St. Bernard.
Pilkington indicates a St. Bernard in a painting.
PILKINGTON (CONT.)
God didn't design the St. Bernard.
He was too busy creating head
lice, the platypus, and that
wobbly thing that hangs down
beneath a turkey's chin. The dogs
He designed weren't good enough
for us. We bred this four-legged
drink cabinet because we didn't
like the snarling, Red-RidingHood-eating, un-cuddly truth. We
don't want reality, Hingle.
HINGLE
You're telling me, sir.
Valuable Lessons
213
One particularly memorable moment: taking a call from USA Cable head
Rod Perth commending us on the “reasonable and grounded” material that
had lately been crossing his desk... then walking fifty feet to the stage, on
which Monte Markham as Dean Pilkington, in a white tuxedo, was playing a
white baby grand piano complete with tip snifter, in a filthy lamp-lit mine
shaft while David Sage as his Chief of Police pickaxed a tunnel under the
school in search of buried treasure left by the school’s founder, who
invented the paper clip. And that scene followed a play put on by rat
puppets in the Dean’s office to mask the sound of blasting in his fireplace –
a play from which the Dean later improvised a musical, standing on his desk
with a hat and cane. This series is one of the few I can still watch with
pleasure.
Not that you’ll ever have that opportunity. After season one we wrote
two more scripts and attended a series of meetings in which every possible
change was suggested to “fix” the show and bring in bigger ratings, except
for promoting it better and leaving us alone. But then John Landis moved
his production company from Universal, where it had been since The Blues
Brothers, to Disney. Universal lost some of its zeal for the show, and that
was that. ($420,264)
Ryan Hurst, Ben Bodé, LaRita Shelby, J.D. Cullum, Jerry Kernion,
David Sage and Monte Markham, thank you. We gave you long pointless
speeches. We put words in your mouths that hadn’t been spoken aloud since
the Renaissance. We attached wires to your testicles and put live ferrets
down your pants. We put you in alligator costumes and blew you up and
stuffed you down chimneys and handcuffed you together in a Maltese Prison
Circle. Every day was a delight.
At 1:00 a.m. one weekday, after the last shot of the last episode, I
gave the crew a brief heartfelt speech in which I said I’d never worked on a
first-season series that more deserved to come back for a second. Good one.
Several respectable physicists have written books following up on
Hugh Everett III’s startling 1957 theory that the quantum wave function
needn’t collapse; that somewhere each possible outcome of every “worldstate” is taking place in superposition. This would mean that in some sector
of infinite-dimensional Hilbert space Campus Cops is now shooting its
eighth or ninth season. I bet it’s great fun. Unfortunately, dimension-wise,
I’m stuck in this one.
In 1996 we took an original script, 15 To Life, to Fox. In it,
essentially the same conceit as Kaufman and Crane’s Dream On – that
someone’s secret thoughts could be amusingly reflected in clips from classic
Valuable Lessons
214
films – was adapted to music videos. Five teenagers working at a high
school radio station squabble and learn, with think-clips from bands matched
to their personalities; techno, country, metal, pop, alternative.
The script used about twenty sets; two or three indoors – radio station,
classroom, hallway – but all of the rest outside in various locations around
the school and the neighborhood: parking lots, car washes, diners, teen
hangs. Near the end of one meeting at Fox, one of the junior network
executives with whom we’d been discussing the script for an hour asked, “Is
this going to be shot in front of a live audience?”
LESSON: Jean Cocteau: “Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how
often you encounter it.”
After Fox passed we shopped the idea around. MTV’s John Miller
told us that even though MTV did have the re-use rights to the clips from the
videos they aired, this idea was unlikely to please the departments within
MTV that parceled out those rights, since they needed goodwill with the
artists and couldn’t just hand off a clip that might illustrate some nasty
thought, prompting an angry phone call from the band’s offended manager
or coke dealer. The solution to that, contacting each band before using a
clip, wasn’t feasible.
The pilot script had one cute bit. The kids need to raise money to save
their station. They each make efforts appropriate to their personalities –
giving temporary tattoos, running a car wash, a car-smash at a buck a swing
– but Arlo, the slacker vinyl kid, shows up with something called The Box
Of Arlo. It’s mailbox-sized and has a snug hole to stick your head in; it’s a
buck to look inside. Everyone who pays their dollar and pokes their face
inside says “Wow!!” When they extract their head they won’t tell anyone
what they saw. By the end of the episode The Box Of Arlo has earned more
than enough to renovate the radio station.
One of the cynical radio station kids finally has to bite; she pays her
buck and sticks her head in the box. We see what she sees; what everyone
has seen: a sign reading, “You’re completely helpless. Say WOW! or I pull
your pants down.”
Every note on every draft of our script said the Box Of Arlo was
“confusing” and “needs simplifying” to something more “familiar” and “kidaccessible.” Couldn’t we just have, like, the car wash earn a whole lot of
money instead?
Valuable Lessons
215
Because you’ve seen a car wash and you haven’t seen a Box Of Arlo,
so You Won’t Understand It. These are the people whom you are paying
every month along with your cable bill. ($20,000)
-----------------Where It Went
TICK-TOCK: I got the expensive wristwatch bug in 1991. It
was my first Father’s Day as a dad and I was in Toronto with
The Bride and Cody, expecting to receive that first oh-so-cute,
to-be-treasured-forever card and gift from my four-month-old
son and heir. When I found out The Bride had neglected to
assist him in this regard (“He’s four months old – you expect
him to buy you a gift??”) I flipped through the Four Seasons inroom catalogue and spotted an ad for Patek Philippe that
mentioned it took nine months to assemble each wristwatch. I
scooted down Bloor St. to Tiffany’s and bought an 18k yellow
gold self-winding Patek 3802/200 on a black crocodile strap for
$8,500, with all taxes reimbursed through the Canadian GST
Refund program. A few years later, it was a Patek 5015 semihunter self-winding moonphase with small seconds and powerreserve indicator, then a Breguet 3637 yellow gold
chronograph, a 1920s silver minute repeater wristwatch made
for Abd-Al-Aziz, the first king of Saudi Arabia, several pocket
watch minute repeaters with triple date and chronographs, and
finally a used Patek 3970 perpetual calendar with moonphase
and chronograph.
I bookmarked all the watch web sites, I checked the eBay
wristwatch auctions daily, I bought International Wristwatch
and Chronos and Watchtime. I stopped at the window of every
high-end jewelry store, and I made pilgrimages: in Toronto, to
Royale de Versaille to see the Breguet minute repeater, the
Audemars Piguet carillon repeater and the Vacheron Mercator.
In London: Harrods. In Los Angeles: Westime and Tiffany’s
and various shady dealers who traded watches on the side while
conducting more respectable businesses in the open. I met an
Asian guy in a Rodeo Dr. office – a visitor to the dealer/owner,
an addict like me – who had a million dollars worth of watches
in the inside pockets of his filthy jacket like a 1940s Saturday
Evening Post cartoon. And I saw other collectors who had the
Valuable Lessons
216
bug worse than me – a guy I met in an Encino Starbucks had
spent, by my calculations post-conversation, two million dollars
on wristwatches in the previous three years.
There’s something about an instrument the size of two
half-dollars containing 600 moving parts that mesh with the
complexity and precision of a car engine that got my juices
going. Those Pateks, if kept running, require only a single
day’s adjustment to the moonphase display – 0.035 of a full
month’s rotation – every 122 years. Complicated wristwatches
are an exquisite kind of magic squeezed into a small space, like
the best jokes.
I sold all of them during a bad year, to pay alimony,
some for more than I paid, some for less. That first Patek from
Toronto was stolen from a fire safe in my house, probably by a
handyman, along with $38,000 of other uninsured jewelry, in
1998. Demonstrating the same brilliant market timing I’d
mastered with real estate, I sold the gorgeous used PP 3970 for
$30,000 in 2002, only to see the model discontinued and the
grey-market price soar to around $50,000 within ten months.
Sic transit tempus et pecuniam.
$50,000
Don Reo’s sitcom Pearl debuted in 1996 with a 25.0 share; one quarter of all
homes watching TV tuned it in. After that it dipped, and CBS, who’d
decided not to promote it, decided not to renew it. Rhea Perlman played a
blunt-spoken mature student returning to college, to the exasperation of her
professor, Malcolm McDowell. Lucy Liu was a fellow student and Carol
Kane was her best friend. Darrell and I came in at the invitation of WittThomas-Harris after a few episodes had already been shot. (Notably, W-TH paid us promptly every week, one of the few companies we’ve ever
worked for that did)
We were one-day-a-week guys, with Chris Thompson and, later, Jerry
Belson. Witt-Thomas-Harris splurged on director Jim Burroughs for the
pilot. Janis Hirsch and Teresa O’Neill held down the writers’ table with
creator Don Reo and wife Judith Allison. There was also a cheery team of
junior writers, Josh Goldstein and Cathy Yuspa, who would later write What
Women Want and 13 Going On 30.
Don ran the show beautifully. We never stayed late, he loved to
laugh, and, rare among showrunners or indeed among comedy writers
Valuable Lessons
217
generally, he had a soft spot for lunatic whimsy similar to Johnny Carson’s.
He was keen to incorporate Lucy Liu’s ability to sing America The Beautiful
in Mandarin but I didn’t watch all the episodes and I don’t know if that ever
made it.
CBS was not so playful. Don turned in one script which new network
President Les Moonves said he read on a plane, after which he felt like
jumping out the window – so far as I was concerned, a satisfactory solution
to the problem. That episode, when shot, was the highest-testing and bestreviewed of the series.
There was a truism at CBS at the time that for the first six episodes of
a sitcom you had to “remake the pilot.” Whatever character dynamics and
basic story you’d told once, you had to keep telling for the audience
members who were tuning in late or “didn’t get it at first.” The staff felt that
though this might reward casual or stupid viewers, it would turn-off true fans
of the show, who’d hunger for more variety and then, not getting it, give up
and tune out. Indeed, several early reviews of the show (and
Jumptheshark.com), unaware of the dictum from on high, remarked that, to
its discredit, Pearl seemed to have only one plot. Networks have whims too:
you ignore them and get cancelled by the network, or you follow them and
get cancelled by the viewers.
The wrap party at Rhea and Danny De Vito’s house was lavish and
wonderful, in keeping with the generosity and respect with which the writers
were treated all the way through. Good people, a nice memory. ($190,000)
At the same time, Amy Sherman-Palladino created a Fox sitcom
called Love And Marriage about a working-class family, and we came on for
two-days-a-week punch-up. There was a lively writers’ room with a couple
of funny people none of whom I’ve seen since. Mel Brooks had an office in
the building and used to drop by the writers’ room on his way home,
probably because the staff was 80% young and female.
I remember Amy coming off a phone call once and telling the writers,
“Columbia’s the worst! Don’t ever work for Columbia!” I said “Amy, have
you looked out there? They’re all the worst.” We had by then worked for
every network, every studio. Darrell and I were in our thirties; we were the
Old Wise Men.
The show was cancelled several hours before the last episode was
taped. Amy tried to keep the cast from finding out but somehow when we
got to the stage, they knew. Regardless, they gave a game performance for
the benefit of the tape storage facility rats.
Lead actor Tony Denison was quixotically convinced that a letterwriting campaign could get the show back on the air, and kept saying so to
Valuable Lessons
218
everyone who showed up for the deathly wake at Trader Vic’s in Beverly
Hills. I sat and chatted with guest actor Jon Polito while sucking up as much
free booze as I could hold, to maximize the show’s payoff. Amy went on to
create The Gilmore Girls, a witty show. Lucky girl. ($93,500)
In a rare instance of a studio blunder paying off in our favor,
Columbia’s Business Affairs Department picked up our option on Love And
Marriage, making it pay-or-play, the day before Fox cancelled it. They now
owed us $52,500, and the show they owed it for was gone.
They asked if we’d work one day each on three episodes of Malcolm
And Eddie. The contract said Hey Pay Us, but we are not unreasonable men.
We did the three days and I don’t believe a single word of ours got into the
scripts. But we did have the great pleasure of meeting Eddie ‘Where Are All
The Nigger Writers?’ Griffin, and on a day when he had not brought a
firearm to the set.
Character actor Jason Bernard (Liar Liar, Herman’s Head) guested on
the third of the three episodes we attended, “The Dead Guy.” Mr. Bernard
played the title character, a con artist who faked incapacitating falls in
restaurants to extort money from their owners. In the script, his character
had a heart attack and died on the day a health inspector was visiting
Malcolm and Eddie’s eatery. The stars spent the second Act dragging Mr.
Bernard hither and yon to hide him from the inspector. And there was a
scene at the end with The Dead Guy in a coffin.
From the heart attack onward, this was manifestly not a rewarding
part for an actor, so Mr. Bernard was lured to it with a First Act rich in lines
and business. But as the week went on his lines began to disappear. He got
angrier by the day at a Certain Actor who was eliminating him piece-bypiece from the show to make room for dialogue and business of his own. On
Wednesday, during a rehearsal break, hoping to calm down, Mr. Bernard
went out to sit in his car, which was where he was found shortly thereafter,
dead of a heart attack. The Dead Guy, who had already spent several hours
that week lying in a prop coffin, was now headed for a real one. He was
fifty-eight.
The Certain Actor found this incredibly amusing and, rather than
rewrite or delay the episode, suggested replacing the Dead Guy with a
Chinese actor delivering all his lines, unchanged.
Cos it’s a business with heart.
Malcolm Jamal-Warner had taken the writers aside one day before we
got there and given them a typed précis of the character that he’d limned for
the series, titled Who Is Malcolm McGee? It contained in point-form such
questions as, “Would Malcolm ask a woman out?” and detailed responsive
Valuable Lessons
219
disquisitions: “So many women surround Malcolm at all times there is no
need for him to ‘ask’ a specific woman out...”
There was a copy of it stuck on a bulletin board in the hall outside the
writers’ room. After Who Is Malcolm McGee? someone had written in thick
black pen: STRAIGHT MAN
ANIMATION – 1997-Present
The life cycle of a Hollywood comedy writer is: Freelancer, Staffer,
Showrunner, Creative Consultant, Animation, Pre-School Animation, Death.
After nineteen years of writing for human beings I began crafting stories for
drawings of animals in 1997.
Birdz was the creation of top Nelvana in-house animator Larry Jacobs,
who’d labored on The Magic Schoolbus among other series. Darrell and I
saw the early art and were invited to do some pilot stories. We wrote two
outlines and a nine-page bible of the series, adding a few new characters to
what Larry already had.
Going through the notes we received on the bible, I see this statement:
“One thing that still haunts us is, ‘Who is Eddie Storkowitz?’” This grand
existential plaint finds its way into many an animated series notes session.
After the first screening of Disney’s Super Cooper, someone said, “My main
question is... Who is Cooper?” This question followed a year’s work on
several twenty-page bibles, a dozen story outlines, and as many drafts.
“What does she want?”
Like this was The English Patient.
When the exec in question was told exactly what the cartoon twelveyear-old wanted, as not only demonstrated in every action in the episode, but
actually spelled out in her own words four or five times, he sucked on his
pencil and waited to push the point further in the post-meeting meeting.
Every Note Must Be Taken. See The Parent ‘Hood for what happens when
it isn’t.
And, this gem: “Avoid gender stereotyping. As discussed, the mother
is a bit too flighty.” And, “We need to be mindful of woman characters who
seem to be scatterbrained.” The male characters could be as scatterbrained
as we cared to make them, for the same reason that it’s not offensive to draw
a French guy with big lips.
Valuable Lessons
220
Unfortunately for Larry, a decent and funny guy and savvy whisky
connoisseur, the show didn’t last. It ran on CBS Kids, which had an
educational mandate, something that further cripples any attempt at humor.
This mandate was handled on Birdz by having a child psychologist consult
at every stage of writing, leading to notes like, “This attitude from the duck
could be very threatening to younger children.”
When a show has an educational mandate, a Ph.D. is thrown some
money to prepare a Statement Of Educational Mission, which two-page
document is handed to the broadcasters to file away some place. Nelvana
had a Ph.D. on staff. She had a file on her computer that read like this:
EDUCATIONAL GOALS:
- To teach viewers to critically assess and value their own
capabilities and skills, leading to an appropriate sense of selfesteem, self-confidence and independence.
- To aid viewers to learn and accept and appreciate the competencies
and differences in others, leading to the development of openness,
trust, tolerance and respect.
- To assist viewers to learn techniques associated with critical
thinking in goal-setting, decision-making and problem-solving,
bringing them to an appropriate sense of self-reliance and an
understanding of the consequences of their actions.
- To help viewers learn to employ conflict resolution skills and
models in order to assist them in their interpersonal and social etc.
etc. etc…
This page was customized for each project: “By means of the fanciful
bovine feline avian world depicted in “Cowz” “Catz” “Birdz,” youngsters
are provided with a view of reality in a nonthreatening way. By following
the model of the Mooskowitz Pussowitz Storkowitz family, children can
learn to accept the diversity around them...”
This form was printed and handed to the writers of each show to
ignore in much the same way California’s Employment Laws are posted in
the lunch rooms of offices.
In the first pass at the bible, Eddie Storkowitz was a “dreamer.” This
was felt to be insufficiently “proactive,” a word I could happily go to my
grave without hearing again, so he was turned into an amateur filmmaker; a
dreamer with a camera.
Valuable Lessons
221
I hope the show that resulted was funny, and didn’t just assist viewers
to learn techniques associated with critical thinking in goal-setting. It was
put in a block of six shows, all produced by Nelvana for CBS Saturday
morning. When CBS withdrew that commitment, Birdz fell from the sky. It
received scant promotion because it wasn’t based on a popular book (The
Dumb Bunnies) and had no toys, books or tapes to sell (Roly Poly Olie). It’s
a franchise world. ($21,124)
Meanwhile, Fox TV inherited the Never Ending Rotating Dolly
Parton Pilot Project in 1997 and we did a few drafts after another writer,
from his premise. It was sort of Designing-Women-esque and by ‘97 that
wasn’t playing anyway. The setup had Dolly managing/owning a catering
company with sundry catty female employees. One desideratum: we had to
incorporate in the story a “Wish Box” that one supposedly filled with one’s
written wishes and placed in a closet until they came true. By asking enough
pointed questions about how exactly this was supposed to work we managed
to keep it out of the story. The network sniffed around the edges of the
script and went to pee somewhere else. ($30,000)
“HOLLYWOOD DOG”
Hollywood Dog was produced by Paul Aaron, who’s done a lot of stage
work, including a Broadway play called 70, Girls, 70 about how the elderly
can do anything the young can do, which came to a poignant end when actor
David Burns, while attempting to demonstrate this laudable principle in
dance and song, had a heart attack and died onstage. Imagine how silly he
felt.
For many years Paul’s pal cartoonist R.P. Overmyer has drawn a strip
for alternative newsweeklies called Hollywood Dog, featuring a foulmouthed misanthropic canine who drives a cab at night, hangs out with
strippers and likes to torture cats. Our kind of material.
Overmyer had piloted the project once before, in 1989, at Fox, the
same year The Simpsons launched. The Simpsons got the airdate and Ron
got the dogfood.
This time Paul Aaron had set the project up at HBO Independent
Productions with executive David Bartis, who’d worked on the animated
series Spawn and Spicy City. David told us to be as raunchy and as sexy as
we needed to be to be true to the material and make the pilot funny. We
pushed him on this: language? nudity? A-okay, so long as it’s funny.
Push those buttons, abandon that box.
Valuable Lessons
222
We worked out a story based on something we’d been told by sitcom
writer Janis Hirsch, but which is probably apocryphal. A famous movie
actress, nearing death, had supposedly had her Personal Assistant call up an
equally famous hotel and communicate Madame’s desire to take her final
breath in their nicest suite, surrounded by roses and champagne. The hotel,
the story has it, agreed, but with the stipulation that no ambulance, coroner
or hearse be called to distress their other guests. Madame, wasted away to
ninety pounds, would have to be stuffed into a large suitcase and carried out
a back stairway, a proposal to which the PA supposedly agreed without
giving his employer any unnecessary details.
We made the actress into a ball-busting heavy-boozing Bette Davis
type named Faye Collins with a tragic history – her heyday long past, she’d
sunk into “smaller and smaller movie roles, then drink, drugs, prostitution...
and eventually, television.” Her opening line upon awaking from an
alcoholic stupor: “Who fucked me and did I get the part?” We also had an
idiot actor bumming a ride in Dog’s limo to a second callback for Man
Number Three in Twister 2 with Hollywood’s shortest director, Willie
Schumacher, confident he has the gig because one of the other contenders is
named Norge. Trust me, it all fit together.
HBO showed our script around and William H. Macy, fresh off
“Fargo,” signed on to play Dog’s friend, pathetic actor Donny. Woo hoo.
The rest of the cast included Mark Hamill, singer David Johanssen of
The New York Dolls and Buster Poindexter fame, pre-stomach-stapled
Carnie Wilson, and the gravel-voiced Dee Dee Rescher. A kick-ass lineup.
That day in the studio was a delight. William Macy, turned back at
the Paramount gate, squealing, “They let fucking Norge in!” Dee Dee
Rescher as Faye, sourly reminiscing, “... I danced with Marlene in this very
hotel, and later we went back to the Marmont and ate each other bald.”
The art department finished the black-and-white drawings and
matched them to the audio. HBO head Chris Albrecht had supposedly been
keen to see the result, but the way it worked out, the VPs of development
decided not to even show it to him. The reason? New Time-Warner Deputy
Chairman Ted Turner had recently been vocally concerned about the level of
“lewdness and profanity” on TV. Dave Bartis left HBO to become Senior
VP of Primetime series at NBC. So far as we know nobody at HBO
watched the lewd, profane pilot. ($38,500)
Voice Director Ginny McSwain (the best in the business, bar none, by
the way) is still using the script in her Acting For Animation class, seven
years later. So, once a week, somewhere in this fair land, Faye Collins’
tongue yet snakes into that empty tequila bottle in search of the elusive
Valuable Lessons
223
agave worm... and Orson Kugelman tries to sell his best friend an internet
video of Pamela Anderson sucking a fish through a pelican.
In 1997-8 we worked on half a season of The Smart Guy, starring Taj
Mowry. After a short while, Omar Gooding, brother to Cuba, started
scoring big as T.J’s friend Mo, and was scaled-up accordingly, which I
understand didn’t sit well with sundry senior Mowrys. (One of the writers
heard eight-year-old Taj enter the studio one day plaintively keening,
“Mommy? Mo’s got more lines than I do!”)
We wrote an episode about T.J. going on a Jeopardy-like game show
to make money. The notes on the first draft were, “Why would T.J. want to
make money? He’s not selfish. Give him a more altruistic motive.” This,
despite an opening scene with his dad, showing the household bills were out
of hand.
So in the next draft we switched everything around so T.J. wanted the
money to buy his brother a Harley. The notes on the second draft: “This is
totally unbelievable. Why would T.J. do something like this for another
person?” Altruism as motive is suspect at the U.N. and on TV. On our
cartoon Super Cooper, which started with some young people cleaning up
the polluted town creek, the Disney execs were similarly dumbfounded:
why would she do this? They suggested that her motivation be free concert
tickets.
And then there were the game show questions. We went to the
encyclopedia and dug up some good ones. They were all simplified post
hoc, in a manifestation of the Nobody-Will-Know-This Syndrome. Again;
as on Jimmy Neutron, and later on W.I.T.C.H., we had a TV kid whose
defining characteristic was his intelligence, but for whom it was
impermissible to know anything the average audience member did not.
The Disney business affairs people made us an offer for the second
season. When Season Two arrived, nobody called. Our agent finally
reached Disney – they said they were sorry but, at the rates they’d
negotiated, they couldn’t afford us. ($116,508.28) The network let The
Smart Guy die a lingering death. There were few promos, and no
advertising comparable to the Dawson’s Creek and Felicity-type shows that
were already by 1998 re-defining the WB as the place to go to learn how
often retarded-looking blonde guys say Dude.
-----------------Where It Went
WRITERS GUILD DUES: WGA dues are $100 a year plus
1.5% of Guild-covered earnings. On an overall or producing
Valuable Lessons
224
deal, per Article 14.k the amount deemed to be “writing
services” for dues purposes is 110% of the weekly variety show
minimum, which in 1995 for example came to $3,602 a week.
$45,000
Bob Young of The Smart Guy sent our material over to Michael Jacobs,
which was how we ended up as two of the six Co-Executive Producers on
You Wish. It was great writing for Jerry Van Dyke (“Quick! Hide behind
the woman!”), and for young Alex McKenna, whom we hadn’t seen since
she’d co-starred in The Trouble With Larry in 1993. Everything else about it
was pretty much a wash. Darrell describes the series as “a love song to
intolerance.” Michael (Boy Meets World) is an intent workaholic who likes
to hunt-and-peck the rewrite drafts himself while a dozen better typists sit
around a table at midnight watching on the big screen and vainly suggesting,
“You don’t have to hold down the arrow – if you hit Home it goes to the
beginning of the line...” Several times this process took the staff to 2:00
a.m. and once to 6:00 a.m. seeking the elusive perfect Genie comedy scene.
The ABC series was about a family of three who acquired a Genie and
his Grandfather. Special Effects costing what they did, a reason had to be
found in each episode to circumscribe, eliminate or comically misdirect the
Genie’s powers, since by definition someone whose every wish is magically
granted can’t get into the sorts of scrapes that make for a killer Act Break.
The same problem arose in each episode of The Fairly OddParents and
Sabrina The Teen-Age Witch – partly because they were following the old
Fantasy Island formula. On that series, every week someone spent $5,000 to
discover that what he wanted wasn’t really what he wanted. The plots were
a giant dialectical cattle chute herding every aspirant, male or female, no
matter what their desire, from Oz back to the comforts of Kansas.
John Ales starred. The TV-Tome write-up on our credited episode
contains the phrase “Mickey teaches Grandpa a lesson...” which pretty well
summed up the series for me: Americans showed another race why
everything they did was wrong.
When the series was cancelled we still had a few episodes to write and
shoot. We used to joke that the work we were doing was to amuse the tape
storage facility rats; “Yeah, put that, the rats’ll love it.”
As for those long rewrites – we noticed that good jokes we knew had
been put in the run-through drafts mysteriously disappeared before the
studio or network could hear them. Michael was the first person to speak up
after every table reading, usually offering something like, “I know, it’s not
Valuable Lessons
225
there yet and the second Act sucks, but I have a couple of ideas that I think
will fix it.” Sure enough, goddamn it, when it got up on its feet there were
new jokes, the episode was more or less solid and Mr. Jacobs was
vindicated. On our way back from one such exhausting debacle, Darrell
announced out of the blue, “I’ve got it: Michael’s a firefighter who starts his
own fires.”
On our first day, a senior writer who’d been with the showrunner for a
long time told us with a straight face, “Michael is a genius,” as if daring us
to suggest otherwise. This woman, a funny writer judging by her spec
scripts, had been Stockholm-Syndromed into an almost Condoleezian
contempt for anything that challenged Michael’s jokes, Michael’s rewrite
notes, Michael’s way of doing things. She seemed to be gleefully whipping
herself on the back as she savagely tore every script apart so we could wait
for Michael to repair it. This was at first faintly amusing, then
annoying/puzzling and later completely debilitating. Darrell eventually had
to seat himself on the opposite side of the writer’s table from her, so the
computer monitor would block her from seeing on his face the contempt that
he’s normally more than adept at disguising.
Because of two things. Number One: this was a crappy little show
that two or three people on the staff, including our own Leni Riefenstahl,
insisted on treating like a Ken Burns documentary. And Two: to our minds,
the philosophy of the show as articulated in its storylines and Message
Scenes was not only wrong, it was hateful. Every week, the two Genies had
to learn that their way of doing things in Genie-land was wrong. Their
customs and holidays were wrong, their opinions about love and life were
mistaken. Every week this plenipotent duo was brought up short by the
realization that modern Republican men and women had pretty well licked
every problem facing sentient beings.
The show’s few acolytes were committed to a philosophy in which the
Humans had to be Morally Superior to the Genies. If we celebrated
Thanksgiving and they’d been celebrating Klunderbuk for 10,000 years, at
the end they had to be hanging their heads and admitting Klunderbuk was a
pretty hollow sham and Thanksgiving was the way to go. This ran
spectacularly counter to any instinct the staffers had about writing light
comedy. I’d only twice before been on a show where the atmosphere was so
poisonous. Speaking up with demurrers of any kind you felt like Colin
Powell in the George W. Bush White House before the invasion of Iraq.
Colin, go park a car or something will ya?
Michael sent Marc Sotkin and ourselves to a meeting with the
network one day to explain why the proposed “clones” episode was nothing
Valuable Lessons
226
like the “human robots” episode. We believed otherwise, but those were the
orders. Twenty minutes into our pathetic tap-dance, Michael popped into
the room and asked, “What’s up?” The network woman said, “We still don’t
understand the argument about why the clones episode isn’t essentially the
same as the robot episode.” Michael said, “You’re right, they’re the same.
Guys, let’s re-write it.”
Michael had taken a break from Boy Meets World to run this series.
The Boy offices were downstairs. When a couple of their writers came
upstairs one day with a question and heard we’d been cancelled and that
Michael would shortly be re-joining them, you never saw poorly-disguised
glee occupying the same room with such misery, as Les Miserables
schlumped back downstairs and the gleeful ones prepared to turn in their
CBS Radford parking passes. ($228,568)
“NED’S NEWT”
Ah Ned, ah Newton. One of the delights of my career was this seventyeight-episode series produced by Nelvana Animation for Fox and Canada’s
Teletoon.
Andy Knight owns Toronto’s Red Rover animation house. He’d
drawn an aquarium-bowl-headed kid with two hairs named Ned and given
him an affectless newt that basically ballooned up and turned into Robin
Williams when given too much of a certain brand of pet food. Nelvana’s
Toper Taylor laudably gave Andy the money to animate a full two-minute
demo, bits of which, with music by Toronto’s Pure West, eventually became
the series’ goofy Main Title sequence.
We wrote a bible for the series, added the other characters it would
require, and wrote a few sample stories. It was a solid pitch-package.
Mary Harrington at Nickelodeon watched the clip, took in the entire
pitch, then took a deep breath and asked, “Why... would a boy want a pet?”
Now, I don’t mind if you want to pass on a show – if you don’t like
the idea or the drawings, if you don’t have room on the schedule, or if it
doesn’t work well alongside your other ouevres. But don’t make people
who’ve driven across town to see you jump through hoops to answer stupid
questions, their fumbling at which you can then pretend forms the rationale
behind your rejection. Jesus. Why would a boy want a pet? “Why would
anyone not want to eat a lump of shit?” This is really Stalin asking, “Is
Valuable Lessons
227
everybody happy?” There’s nothing you can say to it. “What, are you
nuts?”
We pitched the show to Fox Kids, and they too, unable to see it,
passed. Then, after Teletoon scheduled it and made a few episodes Fox saw
them, flipped, and enthusiastically picked it up. Their myopia was our gain.
If they’d taken it from the beginning, as contributing producers they’d have
had input into every story and each draft of every script. As broadcasters
only, their contribution was limited to Standards And Practices notes, which
okay were still sometimes pretty dodgy but all in all we ducked a stupidity
bullet. (Still, we got some doozies. Newton couldn’t wave a pocket watch
in front of Ned and chant “you’re getting sleepy” because, “Hypnotism
should only be practiced by trained professionals.” On another episode Ned
is flown 5,000 miles to a desert island by a manic Newton and stranded there
when Newton shrinks to salamander-size. Tiny Ned looks up, sees a
freighter on the sea in the far distance and morosely raises a thumb. The
gesture had to come out: “We cannot encourage children to hitch-hike.”
Sure, let’s leave them on desert islands to die.)
We flew to Canada to “break” the first six or seven stories. On live
TV they call it breaking because afterwards few of them work. Andy Knight
recommended a friend of his to write one of the first episodes. I asked, “Can
he write?” Andy’s calm reply was, “We’ll find out.” The guy’s first (and
only) draft later arrived in short story form: “Ned walked down the street.
There was a smile on his face and a bounce in his step, because he knew
there was no school today...” That wasn’t the outline, that was the script.
Try telling a cartoonist to draw “He knew there was no school today.”
Animation writers don’t get paid much, they get no pension or health
coverage in the United States, and their misspelled names on the credits go
by in about eleven-thirtieths of a second – but the better ones do basically
what a good director does. They have to be precise because the people
following the scripts and bringing the characters to life live in Korea, Hong
Kong or the Philippines. (Or France. We just got a storyboard back from
Paris [August, 2004] in which a character “places the dandruff in the
camera.” In French, pellicule is both film and dandruff. The line had gone
from English to French, and then come back, in English, with a different
meaning.)
Early on, this one did have its share of odd notes. One producing
partner was ProSeiben. We were asked one day by the Germans to remove a
WWII reference because “nobody in Germany will know who Patton was.”
Darrell said, “You oughta know, he marched through half your country.”
Valuable Lessons
228
We wrote a scene in which Mr. Flemkin, Ned’s oblivious father, reads
a magazine in the car. “Imitatible behaviour, please revise.” We asked in
what sense this was imitatible, since children don’t drive. Were they saying
adults would imitate it? That children would store it away and imitate it
when they were old enough to drive? That they might read magazines in
their toy cars and risk crashing into the toy cars of other, non-reading child
drivers?
“As noted on last draft, please revise.”
On our first credited episode our names were spelled wrong. Nelvana
isn’t signatory to the WGA and was not then signatory to the WGC: it
doesn’t have to spell writers’ names correctly. (On the Emmys on Fox one
year we were nominated as Daryl Nickens and Andy Vidker.) We were
spelled wrong, so were other contributors, despite frequent emails and phone
calls to the production office. Spelling people’s names correctly must seem
to the current crop of twentysomethings who run production offices like
curtseying or tugging your forelock when the King passes. Dude, what’s the
problem? On the six-foot-tall glossy cardboard standup for Little Bear in the
Toronto lobby of Nelvana Animation’s production office, they’ve spelled
the name of creator Else Holmelund Minarik wrong. She’d dead, and
Scandinavian, but still.
Comedian Harland Williams did a yeoman’s job of voicing Newton.
But after two years on Fox and while winning its time slot, Ned’s Newt was
cancelled. What we were told by someone at the network was that Haim
Saban had indicated he’d like to have the entire Fox afternoon kids’ block to
himself and, unable to risk losing a full table of shows like Power Rangers,
they gave him our chair.
The show continued for another year in Canada, Germany and the
UK, but today to see it you have to go to those places or to one of the other
seventy-five countries where it runs in syndication. Watching the tapes it
strikes me now as rather Spongebob-like. We were seldom told to remove
words or phrases because children wouldn’t understand them (a rowingcompetition episode was titled Regattadämmerung) and we had a free hand
to expatiate on any topic under the sun. Where else could you have a regular
character called Eddie The Bridge-Licking Crazy Kid? Or a town whose
bay is filled with prehistoric coelacanths, or which annually sends all its
adult males to jail for the weekend as a Scared Straight tactic to cut down on
the theft of office supplies?
The show remains popular among both children and college students.
Ned and Newton were Grandmasters at a St. Patrick’s Day parade a few
years after it went off. They were loved. I certainly loved them.
Valuable Lessons
229
A few years before he died, Edward Gorey was asked in an L.A.
Times interview by Mary McNamara about his favorite TV shows. He
replied that he detested most current animation, but he did love Ned’s Newt:
“I noticed a little blurb on it in the TV Guide… Well, I taped it of course and
it’s marvelous. Just what a very small child would like – the writing is for
people with razor-sharp minds who can take in a lot of information in a splitsecond.”
Crusty macabre seventy-three-year-old author/artists – that was our
audience all along. ($300,000)
LESSON: Satisfaction can come from the unlikeliest projects.
Then came The Blob. We developed this title as both a movie and a
TV series and it didn’t get produced either way. Original Blob producer and
rights holder Jack Harris optioned the concept to Gullane Entertainment,
which was afloat at the time with Thomas The Tank Engine money from
owner Britt Allcroft. There was some internal questioning about what we’d
done with the original concept: the dead-serious 1958 original ends with the
Downington Diner and its occupants saved from the marauding ectoplasmic
anthropovore by chilling blasts from CO2 fire extinguishers. The frozen
mass is then choppered off to the Arctic under the title card, THE END?
We posited a modern-day Downington in which a tiny unfrozen chunk
of the original Blob had survived in the Diner’s basement by eating cooking
scraps and grease that fell behind the stove, with the complicity of the
Harvey Fierstein-esque female owner, whose son is now a college-bound
maladroit à la Seymour Krelboin. I forget exactly what Charles Falzon at
Gullane didn’t like about our take, but he was willing to defer to Jack and to
Britt.
Director John Landis got involved and the Blob project was retooled
as a hip, scary gross-out TV series using a CG-created Blob with the
personality of Little Shop Of Horrors’ Audrey 2.
John is an aficionado of everything cultish and filmic and lots of fun
to pitch with; his enthusiasm was infectious in the room. MTV liked it. We
changed the movie into a two-hour pilot. Then we wrote a one-hour version
and a character-and-setting bible.
Development dragged on. MTV doesn’t have a regular development
season to hurry it into bad decisions like the broadcast networks – they make
their bad decisions at leisure – so there was no haste to move from step to
step.
Valuable Lessons
230
The script contained a line I envisioned putting on the crew t-shirts:
“You ate my possible future girlfriend, you crimson pudding from hell!”
Finally, in 2000, Gullane could wait no longer. They called MTV and said,
“We need an answer this week or we’ll consider it a no.” MTV said they
couldn’t answer that quickly, only a year into development, so no it was. All
of which amounted to grounds for an I Told You So from Mr. Falzon, which
was effectively the end of that. ($32,678)
In 1974, Monty Python alumni Terry Jones and Michael Palin
published a thin hardback with Methuen UK called “Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book
For Boys And Girls.” I got a copy for Christmas that year and memorized it
from cover to cover. It was retitled “Dr. Fegg’s Nasty Book Of Knowledge”
for its 1976 U.S. release, and again as Dr. Fegg's Encyclopedia of All World
Knowledge in 1985. The conceit (to use a piece of sitcom development
jargon) of 1998’s Dr. Fegg’s Lerning Channel at Nelvana was that a hulking
ignorant homicidal behemoth had been put in charge of educating
impressionable young children about history, literature and science, when it
was patent to the viewer that Burt Fegg would just as soon rip the kids limb
from underdeveloped limb.
Nelvana Entertainment VP and super-salesman Toper Taylor signed a
deal with Michael and Terry to develop their book for an animated series.
We’d met Terry before, in 1996, while developing Fungus The Bogeyman,
in which Terry had invested some time and money. Sitting in London’s
Groucho Club, chewing bowlsful of “nibbly bits” and downing an excellent
Macon-Villages, I’d ventured the opinion that Briggsy had perhaps
unconsciously poached part of 1977’s Fungus from Michael’s and Terry’s
book.
Now we found ourselves linking up with Terry in Nelvana’s Wilshire
Blvd offices and discussing how we might be of service in bringing his
creation to life. Terry had created another cartoon series for Nelvana,
Blazing Dragons, written with Gavin Scott, which eventually went twentysix episodes, all of them, to hear Toper tell it, wrenched into existence at the
speed of Carbon 14 decaying. Toper’s concern was cost; if Terry couldn’t
be sped up, Fegg, funny though it might be, wouldn’t be worth making.
Which we saw pretty quickly was going to be the case. John Cleese
has long parodied Welshman Terry’s “whingeing” and indecisiveness and
had thrown a rare fit on the set of Monty Python And The Holy Grail because
of Terry’s seeming inability to roll camera while John stood freezing his
yarbles off in a stiff, cold, uncomfortable costume in the middle of the
Scottish highlands.
Valuable Lessons
231
Fegg was a project dear to Terry’s and Michael’s hearts, and it didn’t
take long to see they weren’t about to let it be bastardized by some
Americanized pseudo-Brit sitcom writers. We drank as much wine as we
could at the final dinner at Il Campanile to discuss the project. Terry later
emailed us that bits of our last draft made him laugh out loud. That alone
was worth it, though probably not to Toper. ($9,981)
------------------Where It Went
I.R.S. FINES: The Bride would frequently call my business
manager and asked to have no taxes withheld from that week’s
paycheck because of some pressing purchase or another. The
IRS later took umbrage at this and I discovered, post-divorce,
several draughts made out to them to patch things up.
$30,000
“THE MAGIC HOUR”
“My pants are down around my ankles and I’m bent over my desk.
What do you want?”
This was the Fox business affairs guy to our agent in the Spring of
1998. Seven months earlier we’d head-written the pilot – actually four pilots
– of The Magic Hour starring Earvin “Magic” Johnson, at the invitation of
Earvin’s manager Lon, and Executive Producers Giovanni Brewer and Jeff
Fischgrund. It hadn’t been a rewarding experience. They hire you because
you know the mistakes to avoid, then they ignore you and put out a product
with your name on it that makes you feel like sticking a butter knife through
your chest. Now, a year later, they were calling to see if we wanted to staff
the series proper and we were saying no thank you.
Beyond the normal job stress in 1997 there had been a lot of behindthe-scenes acrimony, just as I was trying to stay off the antidepressants I’d
began gulping since 1994 during The Parent ‘Hood. I’d been off them
eighteen months and was handling unvarnished life pretty good when this
pilot came along, followed by a difficult sitcom with some more loud
unpleasant people, and losing my house, and – though I didn’t know it yet –
my marriage falling apart. I told Darrell all this and he said fine, we don’t
do it. Fresh in my mind was the experience of going to the cue cards and
finding jokes that had been added by one of the show’s typists. We used to
submit a desk spot – this is only a few years after being head-writers for
Valuable Lessons
232
Carson – and Jeff and Gio would hand it around the office to see what the
secretaries thought of it, letting them cut out jokes they didn’t “get.”
Earvin’s opinion didn’t matter; he’d amiably read anything you put in front
of him, but this little display of comedic democracy was galling.
So in 1998 they offered us more money, which we turned down.
Earvin called us at home, saying come on, I can’t do this without my boys.
We said, there’s a lot of good writers out there, just trust your judgment, do
a good show, we’ll be watching, good luck.
So they offered us more money.
At this time unbeknownst to me I had a considerable credit card debt.
When The Bride, who’d signed my name to most of those cards, heard about
the job offer and had her memory refreshed about why I was loath to
consider it, she compassionately suggested, “Take more Prozac, we need the
money.”
LESSON: Don’t get married just because you’re 33 and still single.
So a deal was struck. We’d come in three days a week, we didn’t
want to be head writers, call us “consultants.” And the pay would be
$12,000 a day. I’d feel guilty just driving onto the Paramount lot, but at
least I could afford a higher calibre of shrink. We could spend the other four
days a week writing Season Two of Ned’s Newt.
The show already had a head writer, a guy who was in an untenable
position from the start, so I won’t name him. He’d left a good-paying gig to
come here but when they got him behind a desk nobody liked his material.
Lon, Jeff and Gio told him he was still the head writer... but he had to use
our stuff. I protested, that’s a recipe for chaos: head writer isn’t just a title,
he has to have final say, or else what’s his job? Frequently Boned Up The
Ass Guy? They said no dice, we were the pros, what we said would always
go... except of course for the other guy being head writer. He lasted a few
weeks then got the axe. He’d been hoping this would be a chance to erase
the memory of the last teeth-gritter he’d worked on, The Chevy Chase Show.
Our co-host was Steve White, then he was Barry Sobel, and then he
was Craig Shoemaker, right before he was Tommy Davidson. We pushed
for a black co-host, if only because the chemistry would have been better,
the banter more natural. Steve White had done such a great job of keeping
things moving in the pilots we were hoping it would be him.
So of course we ended up with the hostile white guy. Craig is a
standup, which is to say, a member of the most self-centered group on the
face of the earth. No matter what comedy spot we were discussing – all
Valuable Lessons
233
geared to fit Earvin’s comfort level and delivery style and what his fans
wanted to see him saying and doing – Craig could think and talk about
nothing but how he was going to come across. “I can’t say this.” “This
doesn’t sound like me.” “I’m not comfortable with this.” One of the staffers
made up a large sign that said “BUT WHAT ABOUT ME?” which he used
to hold up behind Craig’s head in meetings. From such small moments is
our meager satisfaction hewn.
And all to get a bigger white audience. But was that ever the
problem? Magic has a huge fan base of all colors – he’s one of the greatest
basketball players who ever slapped another guy’s ass. It might have made a
scintilla of sense to stick a female co-host in there, or a duck to get the zoo
viewers, but not a white guy who does Barney Fife impressions.
Nevertheless, as soon as the ratings began to dive, the catchphrase
became “make it more urban.” Urban, to me, means city, working class –
poor, even... it means downtown. On this show it replaced the word black,
so you’d hear things in booking meetings like, “We need someone more
urban for the top spot, how about Whitney Houston?” The only time
Whitney goes downtown is to score more heroin.
Urbanizing the writing was another matter. Gio, who is urban herself,
would nix anything she felt was racially sensitive in a sketch or monologue.
Now, let’s face it, Earvin is black, a large part of his audience is black.
You’re going to get laughs from things that relate to the African American
experience. (African American as a phrase still seems weird to me because
my black friends until I was twenty-eight were Jamaican or AfricanCanadian, which is a bit too precious for even liberals to say.)
But if we did a gag that mentioned blacks talking back to movie
screens or enjoying chicken and ribs with hot sauce, it was racist. Sketches
and opening comments were screened for subversive moments. If Magic
was to hold a cane for some reason, it was an offensive reference to 1920s
minstrelsy and had to be changed to an umbrella. Menthol cigarettes?
Racist. Drinking fo’ties? Uh-uh.
When the talent coordinators did book Whitney Houston she was
given an embarrassing piece of business to do, vacuuming the Home Base
carpet. (Other talk show staffs at the time fondly eponymised this bit,
referring to any unnecessarily elaborate piece of guest-mortification as
“doing a Whitney Houston.” Whitney did sing – something she’s known for
– but only to the studio audience, during a commercial break.)
It was never enough to have a celebrity come on and talk. In the timehonored tradition of unwatchable start-up talk shows the order was to Pile
On The Wackiness. Mel Gibson had to demonstrate funny mouth noises.
Valuable Lessons
234
We’ve got Harrison Ford? Can he build an end table? Let’s surprise
Morgan Freeman with his eighth-grade Phys-Ed teacher!
Still, Craig wouldn’t deliver the jokes he was given. Not that we were
crazy about the material, but hey that was the job: write and perform jokes
following network criteria A, B, C and D as ordered by executives E, F and
G. Once, during a desk spot, he took it upon himself to cut out all the
punchlines. They went crazy in the booth: “What the fuck is he doing?”
Craig told Tony, who ran up to him during the break, that he’d been ordered
to slice the gags by Gio. Silly to lie about someone who’s standing fifty feet
away, but that’s how his mind worked.
My personal argument was that Earvin would have come off best on a
small set with a small audience, no co-host, no sketches or monologues, and
no band – just one-on-one chats between a likeable celebrity host and people
in whom he was interested and with whom he had a connection. That’s how
much my expensive advice was worth. Fox’s instincts said: you bag the
biggest wild boar on the island, you don’t serve him as sandwiches, you
throw a luau.
After Craig was canned he went on a vindictive rampage; a nonvictory lap around the talk shows to explain how The Magic Hour didn’t
give him enough space to be himself. Hitler had the same complaint about
Europe. Craig slammed Darrell and head writer Tony De Sena by name –
except he mistakenly called Darrell the Head Writer. I was usually under
the radar, hunkered down writing material that wouldn’t be used, while the
other two were upstairs giving the advice that wouldn’t be taken.
Darrell turned on the car radio in late 2004 and heard Craig slamming
him by name on a talk show. Six years have passed – the guy holds onto a
grudge like it’s a winning lottery ticket. But then, look who’s talking.
Anyway it gives me special pleasure to tell the following story
because when its truth dawns on Craig he’ll have to reappraise one of the
few happy moments he recalls from the show.
Craig knew Samuel L. Jackson, and he arranged to have him drop by.
He wanted his superstar friend’s appearance to be a genuine unbooked
“surprise appearance”...
... except that Earvin found out Samuel was booked. Lon told him as
soon as he heard. It was up on the dry-erase board in the office. It was on
the show’s rundown sheet.
But Craig was so obviously hyped, so gigglingly worked-up over the
idea of pulling this ace out of his sleeve nobody could bring himself to tell
him Earvin knew. In a meeting with Lon, Darrell and Tony, Lon pushed for
over forty-five minutes to tell Magic – which, remember, he’d already done
Valuable Lessons
235
– and have him pretend it was a surprise for Jackson’s sake, and for the
audience. No, Craig insisted: Magic’s not that good an actor, nobody would
believe it.
Craig was relentless. Okay, so we went to Jeff, Gio and all the talent
bookers: “Samuel L. Jackson is officially a surprise.” We told Earvin:
Samuel Jackson? You had no idea. Earvin said, cool.
Craig received the show’s run-downs like everybody else, so we had
to issue a new one, replacing Mr. Jackson’s appearance with a comedy spot.
Which we then had to write. And which Darrell and Tony had to sit in
Earvin’s office and pretend to rehearse with Earvin and Craig. It was
probably the only spot we ever wrote that he didn’t complain about.
When the Surprise Guest walked out, Shoemaker just about shat fluffy
hotel towels with joy. He’s had that gratifying memory until now.
The funny thing is, he was convinced Earvin couldn’t act well enough
to fool an audience... but he fooled Craig.
The show ran a daily 9:00 a.m. production meeting. I was late to work one
day, listening to FM radio, and I heard our co-host badmouthing Magic and
the show to a couple of yock jocks at 9:15. I parked at Paramount, went
inside: “Is anyone listening to the radio?” The bit had ended; no one
believed me. The Producers had to call the station to confirm what I’d
heard. Craig was fired that day.
Gearing-up a new variety show for production is like assembling your
race car on the morning of the Indy 500 from parts out of the box.
Everything’s milled to the right tolerances because you bought the best stuff,
but there are so many parts and they have to work at such high speeds and
pressures there’s no guarantee the thing will even start, let alone run without
the wheels flying off.
We wrote a bit of narration for Michael Caine in Noises Off:
“A director on Opening Night is somewhat in the position of a
quadriplegic at dinner time. All he can really do is sit there
with his hands in his lap and hope the monkey they’ve spent
hundreds of hours training to take care of him shoves the hot
soup in his mouth and not in his eye.”
Consider a show whose host is a nice guy but not terribly quick on his feet,
(metaphorically speaking, since we had a guy who literally was quick on his
feet, but you see where I’m going). You can write and prepare and cushion
Valuable Lessons
236
and simplify all you like, but when the red light goes on you can’t stick your
hand up his ass and make him deliver the lines the way you wrote them.
We had a bit once under the heading of “Magic’s Opening
Comments,” so named because we didn’t want our host to have the pressure
or the expectations of doing a capital-M Monologue. The bit as written on
the cue cards:
“Been doing this show a couple weeks – a lot like playing
basketball. I walk out, there’s applause. I perform… and when
I walk off, people clap me on the back and say good job. But I
draw the line at showering with the cameramen. Anyway... now
here’s a man nobody wants to shower with… Craig
Shoemaker!”
Or something like that. Earvin got to this point in his Opening Comments
and decided to skip the first four sentences:
“We’ve got some great guests tonight, you’re gonna have a
good time. And now, here’s a man nobody wants to shower
with... Craig Shoemaker!”
Jesus, that still makes me laugh.
A good host keeps his antennae tingling, ready to hit curve balls (to
mix baseball with entomology) if things swerve off-course. Earvin had a
guest card one night that read like this:
MAGIC: What was it like growing up in Palm Springs?
FEMALE GUEST: (RAN WITH FAST CROWD, BEGAN DRINKING.
STILL TAKES IT A DAY AT A TIME)
MAGIC: So you’re an alcoholic.
FEMALE GUEST: (WILL DESCRIBE RECOVERY)
But the guest, forgetting what she’d said in the pre-interview, got sidetracked by a happy memory and Earvin was concentrating on his next
question, which resulted in this exchange:
MAGIC
You grew up in Palm Springs,
right? What was that like?
FEMALE GUEST
Valuable Lessons
237
It was great. Sunshine all the
time, you could golf every day.
love Palm Springs.
I
MAGIC
So you’re an alcoholic.
The monkey was ramming that soup in our eyes pretty bad.
To Earvin’s credit, hosting a talk show is like chatting with your
date’s parents while getting a hand job under the table. You’ve got cuecards waving in front of you, last-minute updated details being whispered
and shoved into your hands during commercial breaks, three or four cameras
with their little red lights blinking away, an audience reacting in their own
freakily unpredictable manner, and during all of this you’re in a suit under
20,000 watts of white light with a microphone either hanging over your head
or running up through your shirt, and you have to a) be completely in control
and b) present the appearance of having a friendly off-the-cuff chat with
some woman you never met until fifteen minutes ago, but whose name
you’ve probably typed into NakedCelebrities.com. It is a difficult job.
And in this case one of our executive producers was a guy whose
applicable experience involved negotiating sports contracts.
Lon Rosen called head writer Tony late one night with a typical
request: Oscar De La Hoya is on tomorrow, can you write a quick Cold
Open that a) Magic and Oscar can both do without memorizing anything b)
doesn’t need any elaborate props or costume, c) ideally can shoot in a
dressing room, d) times-out to forty-five seconds and e) lets Oscar and
Magic get a laugh.
Not the easiest thing to bang out in a couple of minutes but okay,
Tony’s a pro, he writes a bit in which the boxer pops his head into Magic’s
dressing room and asks what those four basketballs are in a display case on
the wall. Magic says oh that’s just a couple of things he’s saved, little
mementos of big wins, and he runs them down – the winning ball from the
game that clinched his third MVP in 1990, the ball from his winning state
championship game with Everett High School... Oscar says hey, I do kinda
the same thing! MAGIC: “Really?” Oscar reaches in his pocket and pulls
out a baggie full of teeth. “This is Pernell Whitaker, ‘97, Marco Rudolph,
‘92...”
Tony sends it upstairs. He gets a call from Lon: “What the hell are
you thinking?” Tony says, what do you mean? Lon screams, “Where the
fuck are we supposed to get a bag full of teeth?”
A discussion involving Chiclets followed.
Valuable Lessons
238
I’ve got to remind myself here that when idiots have control over reallife matters they can do real harm. A fire broke out in a department store in
Asunción, Paraguay in August 2004. To prevent people from looting, the
store’s owner and his son grabbed four security guards and sent them around
the building locking the doors. Over 430 people died. At least our execs’
dumb ideas didn’t kill anybody but when I read the fire story I absolutely
recognized the thinking: We’re in a lot of trouble? I know, let’s use our
great expertise to fix it!
We had a writer on the show who barely deserves the name Ernie
(plus there was a real Ernie on Magic to whom I should be clear I am not
referring here – real lack of forethought there, sorry Ernie), but I’ve started
this so I may as well stick to it. I don’t know whose lap he was paddling but
no matter how badly he behaved or how little work he did we couldn’t get
this Ernie fired. He was a friend of Craig’s and a fellow standup, which may
have initially conferred some invulnerability, but how he stayed after Craig
was gone only the angels know. Ernie didn’t write anything, Ernie didn’t
come to work until noon, Ernie mouthed off at me, at Darrell and at head
writer Tony De Sena. He bitched about the outgoing material while
contributing next to none of his own, and to top it off he’d somehow
managed to wangle a higher paycheck than the other staff writers, and a
longer term contract. It was as if he’d been hired and told, “Do what you
can to make everyone miserable and angry.” Variety show writers are
routinely expected to put out fifteen to twenty pages of material a day.
When Ernie was asked for his pages he’d say, “Nothing came to me today,”
or, once, ingeniously, “I did think of something... but the editor in me
wouldn’t let me write it down.” Instead of writing jokes, he would read
through the other writers’ material and insult it.
Ernie at one point when he should have been writing got up on a table
during auditions for an upcoming sketch and, with a lot of young girls
watching, did a strip-tease in front of the rolling camera, then jumped off the
table, fell, and pulled a ligament, after which if he showed up at all it was on
crutches, talking about suing Fox. The next piece of writing he submitted
was a note to our Exec Producers saying he felt a gag that Darrell and I had
managed to sneak past our inner editors the day before was lewd and
unprofessional.
Ernie called Tony – his boss – into his office and began screaming at
him, with the door open, about how nobody on this staff had his high
standards, as reflected I guess in his own creative parsimony. The first thing
that occurred to me was: he’s hoping Tony’ll sock him – if anyone was
going to, it would have been ‘Jersey Man’ De Sena – so he can sue and get
Valuable Lessons
239
off the show with a big nuisance settlement. But as Ernie began screaming
about “those two fucking dinosaurs in that office over there!” [us] I didn’t
hear the splat of fist on cheek. Ernie concluded by yelling, “Now get the
hell out of my office!!” Tony simply said, “No.” Left with nothing to slam,
Ernie hobbled out instead, to pick up his paycheck and continue snarling at
us each time he saw us.
Jeff and Gio and Lon wouldn’t fire Ernie. Tony appealed to the Fox
Legal Department. Their solution: type up a summary of Ernie’s behavior.
Tony delivered a twelve-page single-spaced memorandum of this
loudmouthed talentless goof-off’s behavior. They still wouldn’t let us dump
him.
There was a sub-Ernie, a friend of Ernie One, who also apparently felt
he was being paid to wander around the offices drinking coffee, being
generally louche and oh so ironically quasi-witty and reminiscing about the
funny sketch he’d written a couple of years before. When this sub-Ernie
was fired by The Powers for budgetary reasons and possibly to improve the
smell at Paramount, he went into my office and poured his coffee into my
filing cabinet and then over the photos of my son. All names upon request
with a SASE.
Three years later I mentioned Ernie One’s name to the writers on
Rude Awakening and one of them said she’d seen him hanging around the
Improv a few months earlier. She said, “I got the distinct impression he was
homeless.” I felt like running over in case he was still there. Apparently,
his time at The Magic Hour had been spent in a cocaine-fueled haze. (SubErnie, however, went on to Saturday Night Live, where at this writing he yet
resides.)
We wrote a lot of material for the show, none of which was used. We
made a lot of recommendations and warnings and none of them was heeded.
On Tape Night One I walked up to Lon backstage to ask a simple question
about the first spot. There was about ten minutes till Go. He stood there
with his P.L. headphones on, and he looked at me... and he didn’t have the
first clue who I was. Panic lit up his face like a pinball jackpot. I waved my
hand in front of his eyes. “Lon?” He said “uhhhhhhhhhh” and walked
away.
Tony De Sena later said, “Every single decision they made –
including hiring me – was wrong.” Tony has written for SNL, the Tonight
Show, Letterman, The Emmys, Greg Kinnear, and he says he’s never seen
anything like The Magic Hour for sheer disorganization and fucked-upness.
I could have said the same but I was on Thicke Of The Night.
Valuable Lessons
240
I didn’t hit Earvin up for a signed ball like nearly everyone else but I
did take home a few Magic Hour coffee mugs. I met a writer friend, Gary
Belkin, at the Moustache Café a few nights into the run and gave him one.
Gary looked around and hid it under the table.
A few years later I was eating with my girlfriend at a small café up in
Beverly Glen when Earvin and Cookie Johnson came in. It was just the four
of us in the restaurant. I angled myself so that Kim was between Earvin and
me and I ate hunched over. I mean... why bring all that up? ($503,000)
David Neuman, with whom we’d made Drexell’s Class in 1991-‘92, was an
executive at Disney in 1997 and brought us in to do two things – a script for
Homeboys From Outer Space and a blind pilot for $30,000, subject to be
determined.
Homeboys felt they were pretty solid without our assistance so we
awaited the assignment. It came in the form of a phone call asking if we’d
like to fly to Acapulco. Disney was about to lock a development deal with a
Mexican boy band called Mercurio, described to us as “a younger, hipper
Menudo.” They spoke passable English, they could act a little, they were
huge with Latin American pre-teens. They were playing a stadium in
Acapulco in three weeks and they’d like us to check them out and start
formulating ideas for a Monkees-type weekly comedy/music show.
I went out and bought a Mercurio CD. All I learned from listening to
it was the fact that in fifteen years in L.A. the only Spanish I’d picked up
was Cuidado: Piso Mojado = Caution: Wet Floor.
I scored some tourists’ guides to Acapulco and checked out the hotel
Disney had proposed putting us in. Very nice – every suite came with its
own hot tub on the balcony and an electric cart for driving around town. We
actually – rare for us – began to get excited. I think I might have even
bought a travel bag and some SPF 50.
Two weeks passed. The band’s manager called: they hadn’t been
able to lock their contract with Disney and they didn’t want to lay out for the
trip without a firm deal in place. We were going to miss the Acapulco gig.
But the group was performing a few weeks later in Guatemala, did we want
to book that instead?
Acapulco had summoned up images of cliff divers and margaritas,
swimming in the ocean and mowing down errant seabirds with a
complimentary electric cart. Guatemala elicited none of those associations.
We stalled.
But it didn’t matter because that gig came and went too. The next
phone call asked if we’d care to meet the boys at a venue in downtown
Valuable Lessons
241
Mexico City. At that moment in the hot summer of 1998 Popocatepetl was
erupting just outside Mexico City, tossing red-hot rocks up to a mile away
and spewing ash and dust over all twelve million miserable residents while
the Mexico City police and military fought it out in the streets for
domination of the corrupt drug-trade protection business. We passed.
Before our year expired, David Neuman left Disney to work at a (now
defunct) internet broadcast channel called Den.com. The Disney
development group never called, so we wrote this pilot for them about a
powerful female lawyer who ditches it all to go to Maine and be picturesque.
It didn’t have any boy singers in it but there were some lobsters. For all we
know Mercurio’s manager is still trying to lock their deal.
Along with Maine Attraction, we submitted Fanny And Alexander for
production consideration in lieu of writing for short musical Mexicans.
F+A, no relation to the hilarious Bergman film of the same name, was
inspired by stories we’d heard about working for difficult, abusive actresses,
namely Brett Butler and Roseanne. We reckoned it’d be funny to show the
behind-the-scenes of a daily Regis-and-Kelly type show in which Kelly was
a loud illiterate Southern drunk and Regis was essentially Richard E. Grant –
a sophisticated, somewhat fey educated Brit who’s stuck on the show, the
butt of every kind of wretched physical and verbal joke from his harpy of a
co-host.
In the pilot, Clancy Allan (recycling Teri Garr’s character’s name
from Death And Taxes), a starstruck young University Of Montana media
student, has come to Hollywood to get some stories for the school paper and
to photograph the school mascot, a stuffed buzzard, on the Walk Of Fame
star of the only celebrity ever to come from Butte. When she drops by the
show to interview Alex he passes out, drunk, at her feet. She runs into his
private bathroom to get wet towels as the Nathan-Lane-ish Benny Pollard
tiptoes in carrying some papers. Benny’s cry of alarm brings Clancy out of
the bathroom.
BENNY
He was like this! I didn't touch
him! Wait! Are you the murderer?
(hands up)
He deserved it! I’ll never say
anything!
BENNY PULLS OFF HIS GLASSES AND SQUINTS.
BENNY
Valuable Lessons
242
Without these, I can't
out a face! Are you a
woman? No, don't tell
leave me with my grief
faulty memory!
even make
man or a
me! Just
and my
CLANCY
No, I'm just Clancy Allen -- I was
interviewing him when he passed
out.
BENNY PUTS HIS GLASSES BACK ON AND SHAKES HER HAND.
BENNY
A reporter! Hi, Benny Pollard,
Alex’s agent. I can assure you,
he is never like this.
CLANCY
I think he'd been drinking.
BENNY
No! Alcohol? Something must be
bothering Alex to make him imbibe
to excess! Are you with Variety
or The Reporter?
CLANCY
I'm a second-year student at the
Montana School of Media at Butte.
I was interviewing him for a class
project when BENNY
So Clancy, you wanna be in
showbiz?
CLANCY
What? Yes, of course, eventually.
I mean, I've done some local TV...
BENNY
You've done television already?
I’m impressed!
CLANCY
It was just closed-circuit campus
Valuable Lessons
243
news...
BENNY
You've done college news? That's
where Dan Rather started! Don't
you know this town's crying out
for people like you?
CLANCY
Really? But I thought it was
tough breaking into showbiz.
BENNY
Who told you that?
CLANCY
Everybody.
BENNY
Not if you've gone to school for
it! In fact, there's a job
opening right here.
CLANCY
Oh, you don't mean --
Where?
Why not?
you.
BENNY
He's met you, he likes
CLANCY
How do you know?
BENNY
Would he drink himself unconscious
in front of someone he didn't
trust? I know him. You're hired!
CLANCY SINKS INTO A CHAIR.
Wow.
CLANCY
This is like a dream.
BENNY
Isn't it?
ON THE FLOOR, ALEX GROANS, WHICH LIGHTS A FIRE UNDER BENNY.
HE
Valuable Lessons
244
THRUSTS THE PAPERS HE WAS CARRYING UNDER CLANCY'S NOSE.
BENNY
Time to start your career!
these.
Sign
CLANCY
I've got to get an apartment! And
pots and pans, and a stereo. I
should call my Mom!
ALEX GROANS AGAIN.
BENNY RUSHES.
BENNY
No time. Let her see your name on
the credits, it'll be a wonderful
surprise. Sign.
CLANCY TAKES THE PAPERS.
CLANCY
"Alex Pryce." Isn't that's where
he's supposed to sign?
BENNY
He's unconscious, this is an
emergency.
CLANCY
This is a contract for five years.
BENNY
Five glorious secure years on the
third-highest-rated show in
syndicated TV.
(hands her the pen)
Pryce with a Y.
CLANCY
Five years is a big commitment.
BENNY
It's big money. Alex has to be
rich; he's gonna need somebody
else's liver some day. They
aren't cheap, ask David Crosby.
Valuable Lessons
245
CLANCY
Why hasn't he signed it himself?
BENNY
Good question. You've got a
delving mind, I can see why you're
a reporter.
CLANCY
Well, why?
BENNY
Because he was holding out for
absolute top dollar, and it took
me till today to sweat it out of
‘em. Look at all those zeros.
BENNY TAKES A CALCULATED RISK AND SHOWS CLANCY THE CONTRACT.
Holy cow.
dollars.
CLANCY
Ninety thousand
BENNY
A year. That's why they call me
The Shark.
They do?
with me?
CLANCY
Are you being honest
BENNY
Clancy! People in California
don't lie to people they just met!
You've studied show business in
Montana, you understand this
stuff. Sign.
She does, and off we go. We never heard back from Disney.
By early 1999 we were working at Showtime on Rude Awakening.
This series had the brilliant Lynn Redgrave in a supporting role with
Sherilyn Fenn, playing an unrepentant and a recovering alcoholic,
respectively. We wrote three episodes. The highlight: creating the part of
Nobby Clegg, a recovering alcoholic rock star, played by Roger Daltry.
The pilot script, by Claudia Lonow, was the funniest we read that
year. But the acting and broad proscenium staging eroded the casual self-
Valuable Lessons
246
destructive POV that made the lead character so sweet and amusing on the
page. I still think if Claudia, who once played a role on Knot’s Landing, had
played Billie and it had been shot entirely hand-held by a drunk it could
have been a hit. Claude has a young-Louise-Lasser smart, self-defeating
droopiness about her that’s very endearing.
The series was also dumbed-down from Claudia’s original vision,
even though she co-showran. Mandalay Television produced, with Joe Voci
supervising, and Joe isn’t reluctant to go over the top so I don’t know what
happened. My suspicion puts the blame on the old culprit, Room Writing. It
was four funny girls this time instead of eight funny guys, but the same
principle applies – if to a man with a hammer every problem is a nail, then to
a room of gag writers every line is naught but the absence of a “better” joke.
Clever witty stuff would have come off best as Billie Frank faced her
demons, but the old setup-gag-setup-gag rhythm prevailed. Lynn Redgrave
came off the best, as a way-over-the-top unrepentantly alcoholic mother,
verging into AbFab territory.
We visited the set only once, to meet Daltry. Okay, also to see the
topless women we’d written into a green room scene. We later developed a
pitch for a one-hour series with Roger called The Roadie Monologues. He
was to have played a dissipated rocker named Mick Street who’s on tour
with four key roadies who cause more damage than the band before moving
on. It could have been called Sex, And Then Another City. A lot of
meetings; no sale. I think the goat-fucking scene in the two-hour pilot might
have had something to do with that.
Rude Awakening went down after three valiant seasons. ($67,583)
Bob’s Birthday was an Oscar-winning motion picture short by David
Fine and Alison Snowden, who also provided the perfectly-pitched voice of
cheery, sensible London housewife and chiropodist Margaret. The short was
turned into an animated TV series in 1998. We got a call during their
second season: David and Alison needed help.
Not that they wanted help. The line producer had told the couple that
making an animated series required planning and sticking to a schedule, to
which David had replied, “Why can’t we just work at our own pace and give
episodes to you as we finish them?”
A cartoon series costs very little in the scripting stage. God knows
writers can be induced to assemble and polish scenarios involving funny
cartoon ants or vegetables or shirt buttons for next to nothing, and you can
keep paying them as long and as slowly as you like.
But the moment the trigger is pulled for series production the costs
start piling up and, as with motion pictures, they’re costs per week.
Valuable Lessons
247
Storyboard artists dedicated to your series are hired: art directors, voice
directors, a casting director, script coordinator, office staff, recording studio
and engineers, editors, Sound Effects artists. Equipment and office space
are rented. A $1,500-a-week show has just become a $50,000 a week show.
You can’t tell an Animation Director, “We need you for two weeks, then we
won’t need you for a while, then we need you for another two weeks.” You
hire these people with six-month contracts. When voice recording begins,
finished half-hour scripts have to be arriving at the rate of one every seven
days.
Half-way through the second season of Bob And Margaret, David and
Alison had written two episodes. The execs charitably opined that the duo
were overwhelmed, trying to do all the writing themselves. Their awardwinning twelve-minute short had taken them two and a half years. Okay, it
was charming and funny but... two and a half years.
We wrote thirty story ideas and emailed them to Toronto. A few
weeks later we received a phone call: we’d like to fly you up to Toronto to
meet with David and Alison. The Sutton Place Hotel, next week.
Up we went. We were given the first day to acclimate and told to
meet everyone at the studio at 10:00 a.m. on the second day.
We each received phone calls the next morning at nine: don’t come
today. David and Alison aren’t here. We’re not absolutely sure but they
seem to be in Ottawa. No, we don’t know why. Come tomorrow at 10:00.
At 10:00 a.m. the next day, our return tickets in our pockets, we
arrived in the production conference room and took our seats. At 1:00 p.m.,
David and Alison stepped in. They only had half an hour. They’d skimmed
the ideas we sent; they didn’t like any of them. Was there anything else
before we left?
The line producer spoke up: surely um there’s something here;
they’re written enough outlines for a third season, that is, if you ever get
through the second.
No. Sorry. The endings are all wrong. Bob and/or Margaret
wouldn’t say stuff like this.
We flew home. The line producer called us in L.A. with a suggestion:
what if we wrote four “branching” stories? Start the story off, then at the
first Act Break indicate three possible ways it could go from there, and then
write, I don’t know... nine possible endings for each one?
Now we felt guilty about the First Class flights and the luxury hotel.
So we did seven stories as suggested. Because of the almost interactive
expansion of the plots, each small notion ran four or five pages.
Valuable Lessons
248
We were paid $10,000 per story. At least one of them that we know
of got produced: Margaret picks up the wrong holiday snaps at the
druggist’s; photos of neighbors indulging in an orgy. The neighbor calls: I
seem to have picked up your photos by mistake, is it all right if my husband
and I drop by with your photos and some wine and we... “swap?” A sturdy
sitcom setup, fleshed out to script by David Cole and Valri Bromfield.
The series ended after Season Three. David and Alison ended some
time before that.
Back in the States, comedian Anthony Clarke was set up as the voice
of Don The Guy, based on the distraught, scribblish drawings of Quigmans
cartoonist Buddy Hickerson. Don The Guy was just... a guy. He got up, he
did stuff, he went to bed. We wrote a series bible and a few pilot stories for
Nelvana and pitched the show around town with Anthony and his manager
but nobody bit and that was that. Shortly thereafter Anthony landed Yes
Dear, after which, if anyone had pressed it, I’m sure the property would
have been inspected with fresh interest, but they didn’t and it wasn’t.
($4,000)
The Mommies were a two-woman comedy team who had a sitcom in
the early nineties. In 1999 they conceived and brought to Nelvana a cute
animation idea called Good Mommy, Bad Mommy, about the best and the
worst mother in the world living side-by-side on a cul-de-sac in middle
America. We wrote a mini-bible and a few sample episode stories and fired
them off, but the idea shared with The Girls Of St. Trinians an underlying
gleeful malice that was hard to see meshing with American TV sensibilities.
It would probably have turned into Good Mommy, Better Mommy, the same
way Men Behaving Badly became, in American hands, Men Acting Goofy.
(The Britcom One Foot In The Grave was fed through the
Americanizer at the same time as M.B.B. and came out as Cosby. The same
pilot story was used, but in the original the pet turtle the star is supposed to
be taking care of falls into a fire and is roasted. In the pilot of Cosby, it’s
saved. Which is funnier, really?)
The exec at Nelvana who oversaw the pitch was black. I became
uncomfortable by proxy at the Mommies repeatedly referring to one of the
kids in the series as a “Wigger.” At one point I interrupted, “I believe the
politically correct term is Wegro.” They stared at me. The show didn’t go.
($4,000)
In early 2000 Darrell and I found ourselves discussing the worst and
funniest situation a human being could find himself in, and one of the
candidates became the title of our next spec sitcom script, Divorced On
Mars.
Valuable Lessons
249
We decided right off the top that it didn’t sound American so we
wrote it in the British style; Red Dwarf, AbFab, lots of screaming, limbripping aliens, and a willful teenage daughter.
The lead character was the plucky, feeble-fisted barrister Nigel
Mainstuff, who, after a disastrous divorce, takes the only job he can get,
Public Defender on Mars. Imagine Chris Kattan starring in Total Recall.
Nigel books a Business Class trip for himself and his pre-teen daughter
Windy. There’s a stop-off on Neptune so he pays for full Cryo-Suspension
for the five-year trip.
But a bigwig boards at the last minute and bumps Nigel and Windy
out of Full Cryo. Nigel wakes up on Mars five years older, with a buxom,
rebellious, sexually adventurous teenage daughter jammed into the clothes
of an eleven-year-old. And his troubles are just beginning as Windy almost
immediately makes the Mars-trendy decision to have her face shellacked.
Nigel’s assigned a “Protector” – a Scot named Bunny Prock (we pictured
Billy Connelly) whose job it is to keep the Public Defender alive until he can
get to court every day.
WINDY (O.S.)
Daddy?
NIGEL BRIGHTENS AND GRABS BUNNY'S ARM.
NIGEL
It's Windy! She's come to see her
dear old dad's first day on the
job. Winders, darling, where are
you?
HE TURNS AROUND. WINDY HAS HER FACE FROZEN IN A HORRIBLE
SNARLING EXPRESSION AND SHINY WITH DRIED SHELLAC. HER
EXPRESSION DOESN'T CHANGE WHEN SHE SPEAKS.
NIGEL
Oh my God!
WINDY
Daddy, I'm not sure I like it.
NIGEL
Is this... how it's supposed to
look?
WINDY
Valuable Lessons
250
Not really. I worked up a really
good dead bored look while he was
heating the shellac, but then I
sneezed.
NIGEL
It's... not really so bad, is it
Bunny?
BUNNY
She looks like a pig giving birth
to a horse.
The script had fans – Jeff Sagansky at CBS said it was one of his faves – but
the understanding was clearly that it wasn’t headed for TV in the States any
time soon.
In 2000 we showed the script to Nova Scotia’s Salter St. Productions,
run by brothers Michael and Paul Donovan, the producers of Bowling For
Columbine. They optioned it for a year ($8,000) but nothing came of it.
Dav Pilkey has a series of popular children’s books call The Dumb
Bunnies. It was briefly a kids’ TV series on CBS Saturday mornings but it
came and went at a bunny-hop. We wrote a half-hour pilot episode and were
asked, essentially, to dumb it down. Nobody saw the irony in this. Other
writers did the series. I never saw it, but I have to admit now that I think
about it, I’m intrigued by the thought of what animation writers – people
who can’t even spell “its” – consider dumb. ($10,000)
At the same time, Howie Mandel had created the character of a
helium-voiced, insanely positive North Pole character named Ernest The Elf.
We know Jim Staahl, who wrote on Howie’s World, and who said working
with Mr. Mandel was a dream. We met with the Glove-Headed One and
talked it through, then wrote an outline.
Nelvana had notes: what if we added a girl who was the President’s
daughter and she goes on a shopping spree and... Ernest has to save her! We
re-wrote it along those lines. You know; whatever. What if we added a
talking longboat as his best Nordic friend? Sure. What if Ernest has no
arms and has to pick things up with his mouth and that makes him mumble a
lot? Great.
Howie didn’t like what resulted, which saved us all a lot of profitable
($8,000) self-loathing. We did later take the name of the Bad Guy’s evil
apprentice, the egg-sucking weasel Blunk, and use it on Disney’s W.I.T.C.H.
Valuable Lessons
251
Cartoonist Ronald Searle enlisted in the British Army in 1939 as an
Architectural Draftsman and had the bad luck to be in Singapore when it
surrendered to the Japanese. He was among the POWs who built the railway
from Ban Pong to Burma, under circumstances harrowingly depicted in
Bridge On The River Kwai. Despite beatings, malaria, beri beri and a
guard’s pickaxe stuck in his back, he never stopped sketching. A collection
of his war drawings was exhibited after his return to England. Not making
much money from his straight art, Searle switched to cartooning and
published his first Girls Of St. Trinian’s book, Hooray For St. Trinian’s in
1948.
Trinians is a hellish girls’ school, an academic Alcatraz under a
command both despotic and inept, with students who rival their jailers for
nastiness and cunning. Right there you have all the makings of a terrific
series... if you didn’t have to lollop in great buckets of heart. I’m almost
glad our two pilot episodes were silently scrapped ($20,000) because
something with this pedigree would have been no fun at all to feed into the
Notes Thresher.
Twelve years after we wrote it, we finally cashed in on one of my
favorite unfilmed scripts in 2000. During the Writers Guild strike of 1988,
marooned from the Carson show, we decided to write a couple of specs that
we could later sell to make back the money we were losing. Everyone was
predicting the strike would only go a month (it lasted five) so we wrote
quickly, doing a sitcom (Death And Taxes) and then a two-hour film, Jetlag,
about a fast-talking super-optimistic divorcee who, after going bankrupt, and
in a moment of inebriated inspiration, takes the million dollars he owes his
former business partner, who also happens to be his ex-wife, and uses it to
buy a pair of unlimited, unexpiring First Class plane tickets. He takes these
leather-bound magic beans to England to surprise her, suggesting against all
common sense and in spite of the presence of her new fiancé that they go
into business together as International Couriers.
The inspiration had come from a friend of Darrell’s wife, Judith,
whose boss received just such a pair of tickets, at roughly $500,000 each, as
a corporate perk. You can’t sell them, you can’t return them, you can only
use them. Provided the airline doesn’t go bankrupt, you have free meals in
their First Class Lounges for life. If they do go bankrupt, you have a cool
story to tell.
After a few years we had another look and wrote a TV series bible for
Jetlag and eighteen episode outlines. Sundry husband-and-wife acting
teams became attached, then unattached by foreign distributors’ uninterest.
Actor Michael Damien tried to option it from France, but insisted the lead
Valuable Lessons
252
character needed to be “more manly” for the European market, at which we
passed. In 2000 the script was optioned by Canada’s Vidatron, which later
become Peace Arch, which later became bankrupt. SCTV’s Dave Thomas
read it, came on to produce and direct, and later helped us develop Jetlag
with Salter Street Productions, but we couldn’t get it to the runway no how.
($24,000)
LESSON: Don’t date your cover pages.
“KEVIN’S CASTLE”
In 1998, Tennessee TV producer Steven Land sold the Disney Channel on
the idea of a sitcom about a boy inheriting a castle. We met with Steven and
talked it through, wrote a few character and story ideas, and eventually, with
Steven and Disney, developed a mini-bible for a series.
The series began with Kevin and his mom going on a three-week
vacation, and returning to find a 200,000-square-foot castle complete with
dungeons and forests where their house used to be. Apparently he’s sixtyeighth in line for the Kingdom of Subservia (national anthem borrowed from
Diplomatic Immunity) and when all the other nobles were killed in an
uprising the castle staff decided to leg it for pastures less bloody and, with
100,000 manservants, transported the entire castle and its grounds, prisoners
and moat creature to The New World.
Gary Marsh decided to make a pilot. Disney needed a production
company – whom did we recommend?
We were doing a lot of work for Toronto’s Nelvana Entertainment. I
noted that they’d done live-action kid series before: The Hardy Boys, Nancy
Drew. They also produced the Alec Baldwin-Nicole Kidman film Malice,
with script by a young Aaron Sorkin. We could shoot with cheaper
Canadian dollars, which was appealing.
So Nelvana were brought on board the show... much, as we later had
reason to ruminate, as the Alien was brought on board the Nostromo.
We started casting in L.A., Toronto, Montreal and New York. If the
show was going to work we needed a terrific Kevin, a thirteen-year-old boy
with a gleam in his eye, whose head was bubbling with magic and dreams
and whom the audience would want to have a castle. We did some live
casting, watched a lot of tapes, and everyone submitted their picks.
Valuable Lessons
253
Disney chose a Kevin and sent us the name. I went back to my
casting list to see what I’d written for this actor. It said “Bully.” Darrell had
written “Nah.” We cued-up the audition tape. The kid actor was tall,
towheaded, handsome in a weird Nordic kind of way, kind of dim-looking.
He reminded me of children who long ago had pushed me into bushes.
Looking at him, I didn’t find myself wishing that he had a castle. He had no
great acting chops but he was Disney’s pick and we had some other solid
and funny supporting cast members so we prepared to go to work and prop
him up.
Robby Benson was hired to direct. Robby is intense and had been a
child actor, so again… hooray for our side.
We flew up to Toronto for a pre-production meeting. We sat around a
table with the heads of all the departments – hair, sets, props, costume,
special effects – and ran through the script from top to bottom, going over it
line by line, making sure everyone knew what we expected, and asking
questions to get it clear in our own heads how the stuff we’d written was
going to be brought to life. If it says in the script “A FLAME SHOOTS UP
AND KEVIN JUMPS BACK,” you want to know is it a real flame or a post
effect, if it’s real do we have a fire permit, how close will Kevin be, will his
clothes need to be treated, will there be a Child Safety person on set, will
someone check that the actor doesn’t have a fear of fire, and so on. Then
you move on to the next unknown:
- Will the chairs in the fight scene be breakaway or do we fake the
impacts; if they’re breakaway how many doubles do we have?
- Will all our sets be standing, or will we have to shoot and strike one
to make room on the stage for another, in which case are there coverage
scenes we can shoot during load-in so as not to lose time?
- In the scene where we’re supposed to see the actor’s breath, how
will we get that effect?
- Where it says the Lord Protector rides into the kitchen piggyback
atop the manservant: has someone made sure the actor on the bottom
doesn’t have a back problem?
Basically, a production meeting is ten people who’ve seen a lot of
things go disastrously wrong gathering in one spot to fool themselves that
this time they’ve anticipated everything.
I’ve sat in a few production meetings, but in this one something was
wrong and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I’d ask a question and there was
an uncertainty in the air, like everyone wanted to tell me something but
couldn’t. They looked at each other before answering. Looking back, I
realize everyone in the room knew something I didn’t. What they knew was
Valuable Lessons
254
that this was a Potemkin meeting, put together largely for show to delude us
into thinking we had any say over the outcome. Because nothing that we
decided mattered if a short firm blonde woman named Marianne didn’t
approve every detail.
It was January of 2000. Nelvana may have done live-action in the
past but they hadn’t done it recently. They were a successful animation
house with a lot of series, maybe twenty-five, in production, under the
suzerainty of three or four Supervising Producers whose job it was to cut
through the clutter and make sure the scripts kept pouring in and the
drawings of talking bears kept pouring out. Marianne was one of these
Supervisors. In her world the writers handed in their scripts, and that was it.
She never heard from them again; I doubt she met most of them. When
those scripts arrived they could be re-written by the actors or directors or
their assistants, who, until the Writers Guild of Canada gained animation
jurisdiction in November of 1999, could even replace the original writers’
names with their own. Budgets were monitored closely, successful routines
were established, and over the course of six months and at the eventual cost
of about $250,000, a finished episode resulted.
We were spending four times that much, and in a couple of weeks.
What had apparently been decided was that there was no way all of these
decisions were going to be handed to a couple of guys from Los Angeles
they barely knew, even if we did have sitcom experience and even if we had
created the series and brought it to them.
So the crew members or department heads might nod to us and say,
“Sure Andrew and Darrell, I’ll get right on that!,” but each decision at every
step was going to be run past Marianne. We might walk the costume rack
and say, this one and this one and this one... but they wouldn’t be fitted to
the actors until Marianne had walked the rack after us.
But Marianne was busy – she had eight other series involving
comically talking wildlife to supervise. So unknown to us as filming got
closer, “I’m working on that” actually meant “I’m waiting for Marianne to
get back to me and tell me if that’s okay.”
Our line producer didn’t make a move without consulting her
Supervising producer. No matter what we asked to have done, Henri had
been told to nod politely, say you betcha, and call Marianne.
I hope one of the impressions the rest of this book has been able to
convey is that this is not a workable method for shooting a television show.
Writers are allowed to showrun sitcoms not because folks love us all to
crazy, but because we’re the only ones who have the calculus of the series in
our heads. Passing a prop fridge being installed on a kitchen set, only the
Valuable Lessons
255
head writer knows that the entire front has to be magnetic for a gag in
Episode Two, the interior has to be able to hold a grown man for the first
Act Break of Episode Six, and we need an ice-cube dispenser in the door
that can be rigged to dispense other objects, for a running series gag
involving the cute five-year-old. Every department and its decisions have to
be run past the head writer because he or she is the only one who can see all
the way to the far shore that is the end of the season.
But not if Nelvana could help it. At the end of our four-day visit, as
we left to catch a plane, Marianne shook my hand and said, “Well, thanks
for your input.” (Italics mine... but I caught a fair bit of airborne italic as she
said it.) We had four more weeks before we returned to shoot the pilot but I
should have paid closer attention to the attitude behind, and the implication
of those words.
I’d read about situations where a person is supposedly in charge of an
enterprise but none of his orders were being followed. “Indecent Exposure,”
David McClintick’s book about the David Begelman check forgery fiasco at
Columbia, describes how Alan Hirschfield had his knees cut out from under
him by his fellow executives for his insistence that Begelman’s crimes be
punished and not rewarded. It’s an uncomfortable and frustrating situation
to be in. The first time it bit us in the ass was the night before shooting,
when we found out Marianne hadn’t signed the lead actress we’d cast, Deb
O’Dell. She’d forgotten. While Deb’s agent quite rightly drilled a new
venthole in the show’s budget we got down to business.
Marianne was a corporate survivor, fluent in the language. She’d tell
us one thing, then in a meeting in front of other executives, with us in the
room, say the opposite. It’s rare you run into this kind of thing in person;
it’s intimidating to watch. Steven Land, Darrell, Robby Benson and I
sometimes stared with our mouths open. But you work with people like this
too, right?
Besides his thuggish appearance and the fact that he was taller than
the actress playing his mother, our Kevin had meager acting talents and
seemed to have a mild case of ADD. We occasionally caught Robby
holding the kid’s face in his hands to force him to make eye contact and
listen. This is a director’s nightmare. If you have an actor with skills that
don’t quite match the gig you can work around them, you can find
metaphors that put into the performer’s head what you want – you can trick
them into creating the character you need. But if the actor just blissfully
doesn’t get it, you have to tow him word by word, gesture by gesture,
through the episode. You’re not so much directing a performance as making
sure you have all the jigsaw pieces that can later be assembled to create the
Valuable Lessons
256
appearance of one. Nevertheless, Robby shot a lot of film and was confident
at the end that it was all in the can, somewhere.
Marianne and the editors did their own rough cut of the episode. It
was sent to Robby and he gave extensive notes. This kind of thing:
“As Mom and Kevin approach the car we obviously use the jib,
as is, but just before Kevin’s line ‘Push’ we should go to the jib
(T.C. 10:25:29) and see Eddie’s entrance through the first part
of his line. It’s a more elegant way to introduce him than
popping back from flat master to slightly left flat master….”
This went on for seven pages. The next cut came back: about four of
Robby’s notes were taken. As a result, a lot of terrible performances,
including mispronunciations of words, had been left in.
Apparently one of Nelvana’s owners, who hadn’t seen us shooting –
who for all we knew hadn’t read the script – stopped by the editing room one
day and, inspired, started to re-cut it himself. Robby’s notes were ignored,
our subsequent notes were given a nod and then ignored. We never got to
cut our own show. Disney’s Gary Marsh was dumbstruck – were they
complete imbeciles? Nelvana wasn’t giving the director a cut? They
weren’t giving the show’s creators their cut? At that point, there didn’t
seem to be any reason to consider picking up Kevin’s Castle. What would
Disney get if they did? Our promise that we’d try to persuade some woman
who wouldn’t return our calls to do a better job?
The same kind of sandbagging had apparently been going on
throughout the company – when Marianne left Nelvana some years later a
round-robin of rejoicing emails circulated all over Toronto. Old friends
found each other; new acquaintances were made. Ding Dong.
A year or so later we realized Nelvana had never signed their contract
with us for the show. The amount we’d negotiated for Executive Producing
was $50,000, which was largely moot because we were on an overall with
the company and were receiving weekly checks against which this amount
would simply be noted on paper in the event of us earning-out.
But the pay was significant because a fixed percentage of it had to be
paid by the company as Pension and Health contributions to the Writers
Guild. And when those payments came in they were calculated on a lesser
amount – $35,000. We called our agent and asked for a copy of the deal.
Michael said he uhhh didn’t have one. But his recollection, he said, was that
we were getting – what was it Nelvana said? – $35,000?
Valuable Lessons
257
We keep all of our emails, so we were able to prove pretty quickly
that this wasn’t the case – we had a week’s worth of back-and-forths with
Michael discussing the higher number. After we pointed this out and
forwarded him copies, Michael stopped calling us back. We haven’t spoken
to him since. Nelvana was his client, too – the smaller client always gets the
tail pipe and the hose.
LESSON: Get it on paper.
Nelvana sold Kevin’s Castle to the Canadian Family Channel, which,
without any rights to the material, aired it anyway, in September of 2001, to
help qualify for their Canadian Content quota. The cut they aired, with our
names on it, was the abomination Nelvana had edited themselves. We wrote
to the CRTC – the FCC of Canada – and protested. They said, well, there’s
not much we can do. Have you thought of hiring a lawyer? We called some
Toronto lawyers. They said, you haven’t suffered a material loss, oh and we
do a lot of work for Nelvana so we can’t represent you. The Writers Guild
of Canada was similarly unhelpful, besides which I’m sure they had bigger
problems.
The net effect of all this for me was the realization that it doesn’t
matter if you sign your contracts in television. Whatever your employer
wants to do with your work, they will do. Whatever they want to pay, they
will pay. If (as at Fox with Drexell’s Class) they decide to withhold
significant amounts of your pay for nine months, they’ll do it. Everyone in
this business realizes they’re lucky to be working, and they’ll push that
realization to the wall. Are you going to go to the press about how you were
shorted on the $50,000 you got for a month’s work? Journalists hate TV
writers. They make a tenth of our money, and they can spell.
These are inequities the Guilds were formed to deal with. But their
sole power is to threaten to withhold the services of their members, which
they’re only going to do if an industry-wide issue is on the table. Getting
our pension money for a show about a kid with a moat in his front yard
wasn’t one of them.
We diverted ourselves with a concept called Me And My Shadow
created in 2000 by Nelvana animator Larry Jacobs, in which a small girl had
a misbehaving shadow. Handed that sentence, we wrote a few dozen pages
of character-and-setting description, dialogue and sample pilot stories, and
tossed it to the Fates. There was no successful children’s book series or toy
line to back it up so the Fates kept it. ($4,000)
Valuable Lessons
258
“PELSWICK”
When this series was on the air I used to pick up Nickelodeon Magazine for
my son and look inside for some mention of it. I belatedly realized that in
our post-FIN/SYN vertically-integrated corporate entertainment world
Viacom wasn’t about to waste page space advertising the product of a
competitor for syndication revenue.
When we were first handed the art for Pelswick we saw a twelve-yearold boy in a wheelchair and a tall guy with a bushy white beard who could
disappear and had magical powers. And we were given an earlier writer’s
script that (all together now) “didn’t work.” We quickly did a new pass and
the show got up and running. We went to a meeting to discuss what we’d
written and someone said, “We thought you did a good job writing for God.”
“GOD? The guy with the beard’s supposed to be GOD?”
“You didn’t know that?”
“You’ve got a show with a motherless crippled kid and his best friend
is God?”
They didn’t see the problem with that.
Nickelodeon wanted a distinctive voice for the part of Mr. Jimmy, as
God had been named. A deep, world-weary voice that would add both star
value to the show and a funny ironic comment on the whole Supreme Being
thing. Early suggestions included Keith Richards, Iggy Pop and Tom Waits.
We ended up with David Arquette.
Santayana said fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you
have forgotten your aim. The proper behavior, I feel, after realizing you
can’t get the big star you want for the sixth lead is to forget about casting a
star for the sixth lead. But in this case, and in many others, the original
inclination somehow hangs in there like a herpes sore.
The early development of Pelswick was incredibly annoying: make
the show more realistic but make sure that elderly characters like GramGram are always cool and hip: (p. 23 Gram-Gram: “acquire this land... for
a song” – please change ‘for a song’ to something more kid-accessible.
Perhaps, ‘reeeeeeeealll cheap.”) Pelswick’s father is a university professor
but don’t have him say anything intellectual that wouldn’t be “kid-relatable.”
Children in testing seem to love the stone-dumb friend Goon but please
avoid making fun of the stupid. Please make the other best friend ethnic.
No toilet jokes, even though kids love them. Please add some X Games
because kids like those. Please build up the character of Pelswick’s
Valuable Lessons
259
antagonistic female classmate Julie. And please give Julie a funny black
friend. Please enlarge Julie’s and Sandra’s roles in the series...
Note that if you follow all of these notes to the letter, you get Jimmy
Neutron, and his friends Carl, Sheen, Cindy and Libby.
This was the series where we got the note, “Today, there are not too
many kids walking around with a book. I think we could make this more hip
and current to place a computer in his hands…” (In the next paragraph they
noted that a character’s line was a “non-sequetor.” Apparently books hadn’t
been all that hip when they were growing up either.)
And: “p. 32 – [Pelswick’s line] ‘the library... is a great place’ –
makes him seem too geeky.”
And: “Pg 5 Pelswick’s line ‘you’re kinda literal-minded about
things...’ Is this kid-accessible enough?”
And: “[teacher] Mrs. Doorhammers [sic] language should be more
kid-accessible -- replace ‘Explain to us why we have to be skeptical... ‘ / and
‘could we steer the discussion towards...’”
And: “p. 2 – Pelswick – instead of “i don’t want to waste a precious
second of it’ – how bout ‘I don’t want to waste a second of it” (don’t want P
to sound like too much of an eggehad) [sic]”
In one episode we had a character open a refrigerator containing some
curdled milk. The “smell” of the milk formed into a fist and punched him in
the nose. This was removed for fear of imitative milk-smell violence.
We got so fed up with the notes from the CBC, we hid a coded message in
the show, a tiny futile act of defiance. If you write down the first letter of
the first spoken word in each episode of Season Two of Pelswick they spell
SUCKMYDICKCBC. Oh come on, it’s harmless venting. ($390,000)
LESSON: Every show, no matter how crummy or annoying, could be
the break that will lead you, down the road, to another crummy
annoying show.
Pipe Dreams was a quickie re-write for $7,500 of a script originally
penned by Salter Street’s Michael Donovan, in, he claimed, a weekend. We
did a pass and sent it back up to Nova Scotia. It was shot in January of
2000. It wasn’t picked up. Michael told us later he used very little of our
material but, “one of your lines, I forget which one, did get a big laugh.”
Michael’s premise was that two people, a man and a woman, are
killed in a car accident in a small fishing community and return as ghosts to
keep an eye on their widowed spouses. We made it meaner and more
Valuable Lessons
260
blasphemous. We made the people in the tiny community drunken inbred
idiots. And we had the ghost couple return, not to make sure their exspouses were doing okay, but to try to split them up and keep them when at
all possible from being happy, in order to foil God’s plan for them and stay
out of Heaven, which they find tedious. (We also had actress Luba Goy in
hell, having slit her wrists to avoid having to do one more season of “that
goddamn Air Farce.” We’d felt that way about the hacky perennial
Canadian comedy series for twenty years and felt it was about time someone
said it.)
Four years later, we re-read our version and found it pretty amusante.
We figured if Salter Street used so little of our material, maybe we could
change the location and character names and re-tool it into a whole new pilot
script. As a precaution we re-titled it Lying To God and gave it to a former
employee of Salter Street Productions who read it and told us, “... this is
basically the script they shot.” We have put it aside.
Still, I can’t really believe that all that anti-East-Coast-Canadian, antiCatholic stuff actually got onto TV. Canadians love to make fun of
Americans – it’s the unofficial theme of Canadian TV comedy – but turning
that spite back onto them is like standing up at a political rally and yelling,
“Hey, our side does some dumb things too!” They don’t want to hear it. So
whose side you on anyway? You wanna be a ‘merican, go the heck down
there. So while you have (some) genuine political television self-satire in
the U.S., you really have none in Canada. They’ve got This Hour Has 22
Minutes and Made In Canada and Red Green, but it’s all about as pointed as
a high school end-of-the-year stage show that dares to declare the math
teacher is a tough marker and the cafeteria food isn’t very good. The biggest
laughs will always come from insulting the other school’s basketball team.
--------------Where It Went
THE DIVORCE: If you’re about to divorce for the first time
and want to save money, settle early, that’s all there is to it.
Family lawyers’ bills get to where they are because newlyseparated couples want the world to know, or at least a judge
and the twenty people in the courtroom to know, how badly
they’ve been treated – thus all the interrogatories and
depositions and MSCs and Forensic Accountants. But
honestly? Nobody cares if she deliberately crashed your car, or
if he threw out your baby pictures or (as a character does in one
of our spec scripts) erected a billboard on the outskirts of town
Valuable Lessons
261
reading Good Riddance Daphne, You Lying, Cheating Whore.
Nobody will ever care. Settle early.
$50,000
ALIMONY & CHILD SUPPORT: My alimony was fixed in
2000 by a computer program appropriately called the
Dissomaster. I was on a studio overall deal, my income over
the previous three years had averaged $400,000, so the support
payments came out high. Four months later that deal expired
and I was back to freelancing. In 2003 I netted something like
$60,000 and paid $80,000 in alimony – I was making sitcom
payments on an animation income. After eBaying everything I
owned and borrowing from the WGA Credit Union and VISA I
was able to get back to Court in 2003 and lower my support,
but the damage had been done. My net worth went negative in
2003.
$360,000
One of the more laborious pilot processes I ever underwent, Quads!, a Flashanimated show was nevertheless on the air within six months of the pilot
order. Based on characters created by quadriplegic artist John Callahan, it
eventually ran two seasons, but we’d piloted John’s show Pelswick at the
same time and chose to stick with that one rather than deal with the financial
partners on this one, more about whom below. Todd Thicke took over
Quads!
The situation in which main character Reilly found himself paralleled
that of his creator: crippled in an auto accident, full of self-pity, he was in
the middle of drinking himself to death when he unexpectedly came into
some money and found a tentative reason to live. In John’s case the money
came from the sale of his caustic, bizarre and politically incorrect cartoons to
Playboy, Penthouse, the New Yorker and eventually a line of greeting cards
and t-shirts. In Reilly’s case, he won a windfall insurance payoff from the
driver who hit him and, with a handful of handicapped friends, moved in
next door to the guy, in Beverly Hills.
The other characters were Reilly’s housemates – a blind black man
who isn’t musical, a guy with hooks for hands, a head on a skateboard, and
something we called The Bucket Of Mrs. Walsh. Reilly had an ultra-PC
girlfriend, Franny.
Valuable Lessons
262
Our working title was Paralyzed For Life. Dan Ackroyd provided the
voice-over for the short reel that was used to sell the show. An Australian
network bought it, cutting a deal whereby in return for their money they’d
get to contribute a specified number of unusable scripts.
Darrell and I wrote twenty-three drafts of the pilot, including four
completely different concepts for the show. The series’ full title was John
Callahan’s Quads! so John was given creative say over the story setup and
the characters, and every time he changed his mind or had an additional idea
it had to be incorporated. He’s soft-spoken but he’s insistently soft-spoken
and there was no talking him out of anything. When you’re a panel
cartoonist, if you get an idea for a great visual or a one-liner, three-quarters
of your work is done. (In John’s case, let’s say one quarter.) You draw it up
and it stands by itself. Scripts don’t work that way. If the brilliant and
funny idea that strikes you happens to be one that fits into your story, bueno.
If not, you have to discard it. Not John; everything went in. If he thought of
a one-liner that required Reilly’s feminist girlfriend to have a son, we had to
add a son. John has a classic cartoon of a guy retrieving a cat with a snorkel
from his apartment toilet tank and saying, “It’s okay Fluffy, the landlord’s
gone.” I love that drawing but we had to add a cat and a landlord to get it
into the pilot. By the end of the process we had one guy in a wheelchair
surrounded by twenty now redundant walking one-liner setups, wandering
around the script like a bunch of lost actors backstage after each delivering
their single line.
We kept faxing and emailing new stories but getting no reaction.
(One I particularly liked had the quadriplegics running with the bulls in
Pamplona.) After three series premises had been tried and deemed
inadequate, John announced one day he had a whole new concept for the
series – throw everything out! He faxed us a few barely-legible pages of
torturously hand-written notes: here’s your story!
We phoned Toper Taylor and told him we didn’t think this latest
direction was going to be any more workable than what had gone before –
there were too many characters and a story that wasn’t a story, it went
nowhere at all and took a long time doing it. Toper, tired of all this, said just
write what he wants. So we saluted the phone and did so.
A few weeks later we were summoned to the company’s Wilshire
Blvd. office and noticed Ed. Weinberger (Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi) sitting in
the lobby. When we went into Toper’s office, he followed. Toper had
brought Ed-period in to tell us what was wrong with the pilot. Ed-period
said we had too many characters and a story that didn't go anywhere. We
said we agreed. After that things went a lot more smoothly.
Valuable Lessons
263
The mandatory Australian scripts turned out to be a problem. Theirs
is a humor tradition rich in scatology. The Canadians found themselves
sending notes like this gem: “We’d like the comedy to arise more from
Reilly’s personality and living situation, rather than from people drinking
large buckets of poo.”
On another occasion Darrell skimmed the notes for an Aussie writer’s
second draft and found the request, “Line 137 is too offensive. Please
change it back to Blow Me.”
Anyway, after breaking and assigning seven story ideas we were out
of there and onto Pelswick. The crude and rude Quads! aired for two
seasons late at night on Teletoon in Canada. It was advertised on beer
coasters in Canadian bars, a clever gimmick for getting a show’s title on
front of a few hundred thousand people who won’t remember it the next
morning. There was talk of it airing on Bravo. I never saw it, but then I
never saw Frasier either. ($50,000)
LESSON: If it was fun they wouldn’t pay you.
Working on both Pelswick and Quads! simultaneously in the summer
of 2000 wasn’t as tricky as it sounds. We’d write a script in four or five
days and hand it in to the CBC and Nickelodeon and it sometimes didn’t
come back with their comments for two or three weeks. It took them longer
to read it than it took us to write it.
So we had time on our hands. When a friend in Germany, Armin
Völckers, said that a friend of his in Ireland was at her wit’s end with an
animated series she was producing for Sweden, we said sure, pass our names
along from L.A. to Munich to Galway to Stockholm.
In the early nineties, as network audiences dwindled and costs rose,
studios who used to deficit-finance everything they made found themselves
pushed increasingly into front-end cooperation with foreign countries – at
first Canada and Britain, then Australia and France, then Germany, China,
Scandinavia, Japan. The writers of animated shows are today routinely told
“no visible signage” because their programs have up-front partners whose
audiences don’t read English.
We found ourselves writing, under the nom de plume Terence Page,
Happylife’s The World Of Tosh, Swedish title Sune (pron: SOOV-nuh) Och
Hans Värld, based on the books by Sören Olsson and Anders Jacobsson.
Writing and Executive Producing those twenty-six while doing the same on
Pelswick was actually “en lätt sak” – a piece of cake. The only
Valuable Lessons
264
accommodation we made to the increased workload was starting at 9:00 a.m.
instead of 10:00 and taking a later dinner.
We amused ourselves by repeatedly insulting the Finns in storylines.
But oh those stories. Sweden is a socialized society. Bully for them, but
we’d never appreciated the degree to which the average person there takes
pride in the elimination from their country of all social evils, the odd
sidewalk Prime-Minister shooting aside. Most comedy relies on foibles;
flaws in the individual and in society. In a perfect world people wouldn’t
have these flaws and there’d be no need for humor... which as far as I can
see is pretty well the way they have things set up in Sweden.
Every joke and scene we submitted ran the risk of insulting our
employers by implying that they hadn’t achieved the pinnacle of human
perfection. The notes often took this form: Can you make this scene
funnier? Oh and by the way we have no need for charity drives in Sweden,
and there are no beggars here, plus a wife would not worry about her
husband losing his job because she earns just as much as him, and we don’t
joke about being overworked because everyone has eight weeks of paid
vacation a year and fifty-two weeks of paid maternity leave (forty weeks
paternity leave) and we don’t find nudity something to snicker at, it’s just a
fact of life and we walk around nude in front of each other all the time.
We had an odd pair of notes right off the bat: early in the first episode
Tosh’s mother is preparing a meal and carries the chicken she’s washing to
the front door, where she falls into a frustrating argument with her motherin-law. Our directions had her strangling the dead chicken as she got
angrier. We later learned the Swedes thought we’d intended this to be a live
chicken, which they had no problem with the character throttling to death on
her doorstep. But in the same episode she wasn’t allowed to dry off her
soaked husband with a hair dryer, “for imitability reasons.” We argued – it’s
a hair dryer, that’s what it’s for, that’s its sole function. But – till ingen nytta
– to no avail. Somebody give me a chicken. ($476,100)
One episode of this series, scripted by Andy Guerdat and Steve
Sullivan, was the Swedish entry in the 2003 Animation On The Bay Festival
in Positano, Italy. Of the two American entries, one was a Jimmy Neutron
we’d written. One of the judges that year was Disney Channel President
Gary Marsh. The winner was an episode of Disney’s Kim Possible.
LESSON: There are no pretzels, fire hydrants or ceiling fans in
Sweden.
Valuable Lessons
265
------------------Where It Went
CREDIT CARD INTEREST: Never ran a credit card debt,
myself; American Express only, paid off every month. When I
obtained my personal records post-divorce I discovered
$250,000 in credit card payments in 1998-‘99 alone – $13,800 a
month – which kinda helps explain why I lost the house. At
least seven of those card applications, the ones the companies
would actually send me, had my signature forged on them by
The Bride. Granted, that wasn’t all interest – a lot of it was
AMEX – but with $1.6 million in payments from 1995 (the
earliest year for which I was able, Ethan Hunt-like, to find
records) through 1999, and with most credit cards charging
20%, I’ve got to figure I paid those happy enablers of
conspicuous consumption roughly:
$40,000
Do your kids have any Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius DVDs or merchandise?
I wrote eleven episodes of this popular Nickelodeon 3-D animated show,
14% of the series. According to Writer’s Guild business analyst Chuck
Slocum, every episode of Jimmy Neutron will gross Nickelodeon in the
vicinity of $30 million.
I netted about $975 an episode.
That’s for an outline, sometimes two; then two or three drafts, and
yes, that’s in total, no residuals, no repeat money, nothing for the DVDs,
nothing extra, ever. The rate for a team, as for a single writer, is $3,000.
Split that and subtract your agent’s 10% and you’ve got $1,350 before taxes.
The person who picked the glue to stick the decal on the Jimmy Neutron
Frisbee made more than that. My son called me one day from Cairo to say,
“They’ve got a Jimmy Neutron DVD in the stores here – there’s ten episodes
on it and five of them are yours.”
They hadn’t told us it was out; they didn’t even send us a copy.
Working in animation, you’re digging your own grave. Even if you
excel and impress, all you earn is the right to write another script for $975,
and you can’t write them back-to-back, the assignments don’t come up that
quickly and there aren’t that many to go around. You could be a regular
Jimmy freelance writer and net $3,900 a year. This is why, in Los Angeles,
where the median home price hit $455,000 in the summer of 2004, the
people who write the cartoons your kids watch in their houses all live in
small apartments. And many of those pro-family pro-child messages are put
Valuable Lessons
266
out by Nickelodeon, whose toys (you’ve bought them) are manufactured by
companies like JAKKS Pacific that refuse to sign the international treaty
against child labor and forced labor. “Made In China” – ever see that?
Nickelodeon also shifted the writers on Jimmy Neutron off the Nickelodeon
payroll, eliminating health insurance coverage for the writers' children, after
they requested union representation.
Anyway. After we’d written nine, and received rave cast and exec
reviews on each – we were in fact offered the sequel to the film, see below –
we thought, well, these seem like reasonable people, let’s ask for a token
raise. We told C.A.A. to ask for $3,100 per episode. They asked.
Nickelodeon said no. We did two more anyway.
Animation is covered by the Writers Guild of America MBA
(Minimum Basic Agreement) but the studios multilaterally ignore those
provisions. Each parcels-out its animated shows to subsidiary prodcos, who
are given the episodic budgets to dole out as per people’s deals... so
Nickelodeon can semi-legitimately claim it knows nothing of people
working non-union, since DNA Animation in Texas is where the Jimmy
Neutron writers’ paychecks technically come from. Likewise on W.I.T.C.H.,
our checks came not from Disney but from SIP Animation in Paris. No
health coverage, no pension.
Ever been to Disneyland or Disney World? Parking is $8, seven days
a week. A parking space at Disneyland earns $240 a month. Five thousand
parking spaces were eliminated to build Californialand but a new 10,000space structure was opened to house the overflow. There are 20,167 parking
spaces at Disneyland – figuring half occupancy that tarmac takes in twentynine million dollars a year of your money, for the right to leave your car
while you go inside to spend more money. That’d buy health coverage for
several thousand employees.
DNA’s CG work is brilliant; John Davis is a cool guy and an
animation whiz. The Jimmy cast was great. They were out of jobs by
August of ’04 because the studios, expecting a filing from the writers with
the National Labor Relations Board on every animated show, try to wrap
them all up in four or five seasons, the approximate time it takes the NLRB
to get its paperwork together.
They don’t need more episodes anyway. They know kids will watch
the same ones over and over, here as in Cairo.
When Paramount Pictures approached us to write the movie sequel,
Jimmy TV series Exec Prod Steve Oedekerk told us, “A year from now
you’ll be the hottest screenwriters in town.” We were pretty jaded but the
Valuable Lessons
267
prospect of moving out of television into film sparked a frisson of poorlyinvested hope.
We came up with a story, Jimmy Through The Center Of The Earth.
In the first film he’d gone into space, so we thought a trip through the
Earth’s core, encountering alien beings and the like, in order to join a class
trip in China before his absence was noticed and his Geography score
downgraded would make a cool sequel.
Sherry Lansing was reportedly afraid that our story might impinge on
Paramount’s feature The Core, scheduled for release that summer. I saw
The Core. There was no impingage except for the fact that both involved
damage and then repair to the core of the Earth, which even our story, a
children’s cartoon, had trouble making believable.
We came up with half a dozen more detailed stories and emailed them
in. More meetings, more conference calls. One day the phone calls stopped.
Our emails to Paramount were no longer returned. To this day nobody, not
Steve, not Paramount or Nickelodeon, has called us to say the movie’s not
going. Out here you die like an arctic wolf, licking your ass, alone.
($75,000)
TV needs another reality series like Joel Grey needs another rehearsal
of Cabaret. The Cube began as a dream I had about being chloroformed and
kidnapped. I woke up in an all-white windowless room with five or six
other people of all ages and occupations and we were made to understand
that we had something in common – something presumably to do with the
person who’d abducted us – and that when, or if, we figured it out we’d be
released. Kind of like The Prisoner without the Welsh scenery and that big
floating gum wad.
You make enemies in any business and you’re not always sure who
they are, nor are the people who’ve wronged you in one way or another
always aware of it. That feeling of being lost or trapped among enemies
unknown may have been behind the dream. Personally, I’d love to be
dragged into a situation like this, minus the chloroform. The idea of talking
to five other people and trying to figure out what we had in common, under
time pressure, eliminating possibilities as we go, zeroing in on our
similarities; that appeals to me. “Where’d you grow up? Do you have any
allergies? Have you ever been arrested? Did you ever create a horrible
series for UPN?”
I’d described it to Darrell in the 1980s as a possible feature idea but
when the reality TV craze hit in the late nineties I suggested one day that we
pitch it as the only non-demeaning “unscripted” show on TV. It wasn’t
about separating people or eliminating them or scrambling to the top of a
Valuable Lessons
268
literal or figurative heap of them or eating bugshit. It was about finding
something that united six seemingly unrelated people. Commonality instead
of differences.
Some of the game possibilities I’d suggested: the only six people to
rent a certain obscure movie from Blockbuster last year. Six people with
consecutive Social Security numbers. The six people who were in the
Emergency Room of a certain hospital on New Year’s Eve five years ago.
Everyone to whom we pitched this idea – prodcos and networks – has
liked it. Triage Entertainment optioned it and we pitched it around town
with them. The WB Network bit in early 2002 and built an enormous
plexiglass cube at a studio on Sunset, seventy-five feet on a side, to shoot it
in. By this time, because of fears that the game was too hard, the “one
amazing thing in common” had become three pretty pedestrian things – you
all had braces, visited the White House and saw a dead body! There was a
handsome host inside with the contestants, dry ice smoke, music, an
applauding audience... basically everything but jugglers and U2. The
contestants, kept apart before the show, weren’t allowed to speak to each
other for more than fifteen seconds in two “Spill” segments. The result bore
about the same relation to my original idea as Shrek 2 did to William Steig’s
drawings. But you never say no to a paycheck.
The changes had been made mostly because of producability
concerns. Despite the impression most reality shows attempt to create, of a
wild free-for-all atmosphere, every tiny thing in them is scripted, timed and
staged in excruciating detail, or else you might not be able to get a camera or
a boom mike on the person who’s about to speak – or you end up with too
much material, or too little, or too many dramatic “moments” crammed
together, or too few. Or your First Act is longer than your Second, there’s
no obvious “cue” for audience applause, there aren’t enough laughs, the host
is caught off-guard or doesn’t have a ready quip at his disposal. To allay
these fears, every episode of reality TV that I’ve been involved in has been
scripted up the woo-hoo, at least as much as any variety show or telethon.
The Canadian sci-fi film The Cube (impressively shot for C$600,000)
came out in 1997, but I hadn’t heard of it until after we’d pitched and sold
this. Research And Legal found the title too close for comfort and made us
change ours to Into The Cube.
A major concern among our producers was that contestants would
speak at the same time and overlap, which was sort of what I thought would
be the fun of it; they’d have to get organized and efficient fast, or lose. I
mean, they sometimes overlap on Big Brother and Road Rules and Survivor
don’t they? They’d have to cooperate, argue, expose secret details about
Valuable Lessons
269
themselves and their history that were dead ends game-wise but would make
for funny and surprising TV.
The WB saw what they’d ordered and passed.
A year later, MTV optioned the format and we shot it again, this time
on a game show-type set with six chairs and a host... but with a cheering
audience, booming music, frantic graphics and, oddly, since there was no
cube, the same title. Again, the contestants weren’t allowed to speak except
in brief precalculated slots. I futilely re-pitched the original idea – drop
them all someplace disorienting and let them try to figure it out! – but
nobody would hear of it.
MTV wanted young contestants – no one over twenty-three – which
limited the three things they could potentially have in common. Uhhh,
we’re all pierced and we like sex and music? Ding ding ding!
Our host was a likeable Pittsburgh deejay named Chris Line, chosen
by MTV President Brian Graden himself. Chris had done some local MTV
veejaying back home; he had the looks and raspy voice but little TV
experience. And one sensed Chris hadn’t exactly struggled to choose
between deejaying and higher education. One of the things our test
episode’s contestants had in common was that they were all bright
scholarship students. They ate our host alive. He tried zinging them with
feeble “Ayyyyyy!”-type putdowns and they racquetballed him
contemptuously to the back wall. Chris tended to say “Nothin’ wrong with
that!” when he was nervous. During the taping he said it a lot. He said it
after one contestant admitted he’d spent time in a Mexican jail. I paced
backstage with my hand clasped over my face, looking like John Hurt in
Alien.
Nevertheless, after what felt like a year of editing we had a pilot that
tested through the roof. The MTV execs watching the playback at ASI
Audience Research said they could only recall one pilot on their network
that had tested higher and that was Jackass. A few weeks later, MTV
President Brian Graden officially passed on The Cube.
He said it looked too much like a game show. ($14,252.00)
In 2003 we wrote three episodes of The Fairly OddParents, for
$9,000. I haven’t seen any of them but the writing experience was very nice.
Series Creator Butch Hartman ran the table with standup Steve Marmel, the
only time I’d ever seen a daytime animated show with a writers’ table. Like
most shows with a table, it ran at about one-third the speed of sitting down
and writing the script yourself, but with a lot more ass jokes.
Sometimes, hearing that I don’t watch TV, people will ask how it’s
possible to write for it. Neither Darrell nor I knew OddParents when we
Valuable Lessons
270
were offered the assignment based on our Jimmy Neutron scripts. We
watched two sample episode tapes and met with the staff for ninety minutes
to beat out the story, asking questions about character names and
backstories, then wrote our first episode (“Vicky Loses Her Icky”) in two
days. They liked it and it was shot / drawn close to as-written after the staff
added some good jokes and changed the setting of the last scene. A
pleasant experience. Snap up those DVDs, folks, Viacom needs the money.
In mid-2002 we met DIC President Andy Heyward in PAX President Jeff
Sagansky’s office. This was the first time we’d seen Jeff since he called us
into his office at CBS in July of 1993 to complain about Charlie Kaufman’s
script for The Trouble With Larry.
Eight years on, it was all bonhomie and I-know-these-guys kidding.
We’d had a deal six months earlier with Fred Silverman to write a
suspense/crime pilot for Bruce McGill. Bruce, a terrific supporting actor,
was preceded into one meeting by his agent, who, salivating at the thought
of moving her dependable always-working B-guy into prime-time lead actor
territory, said with a straight face and forced reserve, “Bruce has been very
happy playing supporting roles for ten or fifteen years, but he’s decided...
(big sincerity push)... that now it’s time for him to be a star.” Give me a
fucking break. EVERY actor thinks it’s time ALL THE TIME for him to be
a star.
Anyway that project fell through but it was tied to PAX and that took
us to Jeff’s office high atop the PAX Tower. He introduced us to animation
powerhouse Andy, who clinched the deal for an Inspector Gadget liveaction one-hour series co-funded by France, and got us started on a pilot.
Development execs Phil Harnage and Eric Lewald walked us through it and
the result was pretty damn strange but Jeff left PAX shortly thereafter and
Andy, we heard, wasn’t much of a reader, so there’s a second draft about a
guy with metal legs still sitting on his desk somewhere. ($36,000)
“ROCKETSHIP BEDROOM”
I pitched the basic idea of Rocketship to two Disney development execs, Lee
Gaither and Kevin Plunkett, around 1999, at the tail end of another,
unsuccessful, pitch. Cody was then seven, scared of the dark, and hard to
keep in his bedroom at night. Lee and Kevin were eying the door when I
suggested a show in which a boy discovered that his A-frame rooftop
Valuable Lessons
271
bedroom was actually a rocketship that could take off from the top of his
house at night for adventures with two young neighbor friends. Wouldn’t a
show like that appeal to kids? They could imagine their windows and doors
locking, and themselves, not alone and scared in a big room, but at the
controls of a superpowerful flying machine with death rays and beamingdown powers.
Lee and Kevin said that Disney’s research showed “parents have to be
prominent” in a classic child adventure. They had to come along for the
ride. I ventured that I thought that was the exact opposite of what kids
wanted. Children want their fantasies to empower them; they want to leave
their parents behind... thus Alice In Wonderland; thus Treasure Island, The
Narnia Chronicles, Harry Potter, Madeline, Little Mermaid, Peter Pan,
Tintin, Eloise, Pinnochio, Peter Rabbit, Cinderella, A Stitch In Time, Lord
Of The Rings, The Wizard Of Oz, Hansel and Gretel... I sat there and
rhymed them off. I said, in fact, I couldn’t think of a single classic
children’s tale other than Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in which a parent did
accompany intrepid youngsters on their adventure. Okay there was an adult
in Mary Poppins, but she was a stranger.
They replied, “Well... that’s what our research shows.”
Which shows you how false and self-serving Disney research is.
Several years deeper into our delightful experience with animation we
found ourselves with some time to kill and decided to write and produce
something for ourselves. I wrote a quick character bible for Rocketship in
2002 while Darrell was on vacation, then he and I did a few drafts of a halfhour script and looked around for casting. Character actor Eddie Deezen has
been a comedy god for us ever since I Wanna Hold Your Hand (if you can
watch him in that without smiling your soul is dead), and we’d written a part
for him, so we were insanely happy when he said he’d do it. We actually
went around telling people “We got Eddie Deezen! We’re gonna meet
Eddie Deezen!” Most people said, “Who?” We put a limo in his deal. The
Gods don’t drive.
Our friends Jan Rabson and Cindy Akers own L.A.’s Voicetrax West
Studios; they cast the rest of the voices (three of which multitalented Pixar
voice regular Jan did himself), handled the SAG/AFTRA paperwork,
produced, and gave us a deal on studio time. Ginny McSwain directed with
her customary brisk pace and impeccable comic brio. The delightful Nika
Futterman starred as Burnaby Fludge.
We got a nice recording, all puffed out with whacks, bonks, plinks
and the traditional armamentarium of cartoon sound effects and sent it to
prolific comic artist Bob Staake, whom we’d known since he caricatured us
Valuable Lessons
272
unflatteringly a decade before for Writer’s Digest. Bob created the
characters (which you can see on his website, www.bobstaake.com) and
made 300+ drawings, which Darrell assembled in PowerPoint and matched
to the audio. Total cost: about seven grand, and we had a twenty-twominute pilot. We burned it onto CD-ROMs and gave them to our agent.
Nickelodeon passed, the Cartoon Network passed. When your agent
tells you this, you don’t know whether they saw it and passed, saw part of it
and passed, heard about it and passed, heard the title and passed... you’re not
there. And it’s rude to ask. “Well did you show it to them?” Ask this too
many times and you don’t have an agent. They have their pride.
Enter The Disney Channel again. Gary Marsh liked the script and the
reel and put it into development at the Channel.
We were back where we’d started. Disney testing said there had to be
parents front and center, and a strong female, preferably a Hispanic female,
in a lead role. We didn’t have a strong Hispanic female in the script. We
did have an older (adopted) Asian sister, named Yachiyo after the brand of
quartz clock I was looking at when I created her. The gag in the bible had
been: “Burbany’s parents adopted Yachiyo when they thought they couldn’t
have children, but then they found out they were doing it wrong.”
“Can the older sister come on the rocketship with him?”
This was The Surprise.
On the way to a first meeting to discuss a sold project, or heading to
the first rehearsal or production meeting, I often ask Darrell, “So, what do
you think The Surprise’ll be?”
In an enterprise as complicated as making a half-hour show, with all
that can go wrong, there are many small accommodations that have to be
made for reasons of budget and time – lots of small annoyances that chip
away at your original vision – but there’s usually only one Big Surprise, one
that rocks you back on your heels.
With Rocketship Bedroom, the network, which had bought a show
about three tiny kids escaping adult supervision by soaring into the night sky
to battle aliens, now wanted the kids to take an adult with them, preferably
an Hispanic adult.
Okay, we should have remembered what happened at the original
pitch. But Lee and Kevin had been gone for years. Anyway, it wasn’t the
only change: Disney wanted a fifteen-minute episode instead of a thirty, and
they wanted to push the entire First Act of the demo reel into the Main Title
sequence.
In our self-produced First Act, we see the Fludge family discover the
A-frame “top floor of a house” sitting like a crashed plane in a Yucca tree in
Valuable Lessons
273
the desert. They’ve been thinking of putting on another floor anyway; they
tie it to their car roof and cart it home. Burnaby beats out his sister for the
new bedroom, then, on his first night in the new room, with his neighbor/pal
Eddie and Eddie’s little sister, he pushes a secret button and his new room
converts into a super duper hi-tech rocketship command room complete with
a snooty robotic assistant and they blast into space.
That’s a lot to squeeze into a forty-five-second song but we did it. We
fought off the suggestion about taking the sister along by (awkwardly)
expanding her role on Earth.
But the story was already pretty tight at 22:30. We’d told Voicetrax
West to edit it at a snappy pace. After we heard the finished track, I asked
Darrell what he thought. He said “Sounds like they threw the actors out of a
plane and told them they couldn’t open their chutes until they’d finished.”
We actually went back and put a little more air into it, something we’d never
done before or since.
This twenty-two-minute story we now had to squeeze into twelve
minutes. But this was our Dream Animation Project so we did. Everyone at
the Channel seemed happy with the results.
Enter Surprise Two, and the one that killed the show. What we hadn’t
realized was that we’d made a tactical error in going directly to the Disney
Channel, the major supplier for which is Disney Television Animation
(TVA), a mile away in Burbank.
When we’d first met with the Channel and asked who they wanted to
animate this if it went, one suggestion from high up had been: anyone but
TVA. Now, apparently, they were going to get a look at the finished script
and offer their input. This seemed a little like dog-wagging to us, but what
the hey, everyone at the Channel liked it, and they were the buyers, right?
Something to keep in mind here: we’d done other projects at Disney.
The average time to close the deal on these has been six months. The
development time at Disney TV Animation on the most recent one – from
initial pitch to approved script – was another seven months. That means
writing a bible, then re-writing it per TVA’s notes another four or five times.
Then submitting premises, letting them pick one, and rewriting it. Then
outlines; four or five of them. And then actual drafts. On the show I’m
thinking of, we did nine. By the time we reached the last three drafts we
were sitting around a table with twelve people, half of whom had comments
and at least three of whom we didn’t know and never saw again.
That was what we’d skipped by going directly to the Channel. This
was the process we had cheated all of the TVA people from participating in.
Valuable Lessons
274
The first joint meeting said it all. The enthusiastic Channel folks sat
with us around a table with a single emissary from Animation. “So... what
did you think of the Opening Sequence?”
“Ehn.”
“How about the plot?”
“Felt a little Brand X to me.” (“Brand X” seems to be how Disney
employees are obliged to refer to Nickelodeon while on Disney premises.)
“The characters?”
“We’re having some problems with them.”
And that was it. Rocketship Bedroom was dead, thank you for
coming, do you need your parking validated? And, as with most of the other
projects mentioned in this book, nobody ever called us to tell us so.
($50,000)
2003’s Strange Days At Blake Holsey High also aired on NBC under the title
Black Hole High, where it had an educational mandate to teach Science,
insofar as that commendable requisite wasn’t incompatible with a three-act
story in which everything Turned Out All Right and everyone learned
something encouraging. I doubt they ever did an episode on Gödel’s
Incompleteness Theorem. The process was short and sweet: one outline,
first draft, second draft, Polish, and we were done, just as the WGA’s
Minimum Basic Agreement (and that of Canada’s WGC) demands.
Payment was prompt and in full. This happens about as often as the Pope
spends Christmas Day skiing.
Our episode was filmed somewhere near Toronto and supposedly
came off well. It had something to do with sponges taking over a school, a
plot circumscribed somewhat by the traditional limiting caveat of
supernatural comedies – nobody else must know anything weird is going on
– so we couldn’t fill the halls with sponges, which would have been cool. It
was sponges because the show had an educational mandate; some facts had
to be shoehorned into every episode. You can always tell one of these
shows from the dialogue:
BOB
Cherie, why’s everyone running?
CHERIE
The lab’s exploding, due to the
combustibility of anhydrous sodium
and an acetic solution!
Valuable Lessons
275
The plotlines of these shows inevitably dispense with scientific rigor at some
point just before the first Act Break, so the pre-teen audience learns that
sponges are multicellular creatures which reproduce asexually... then they
learn that when they’re exposed to black hole radiation they begin eerily
piling up like soggy Tetris blocks. A lot of educational consultants work on
these shows, but nobody who really cares about kids learning things does.
The showrunner, writer-director Jeff King, was smart and friendly and was
interested in a few more of our story ideas, so the series was cancelled
shortly after. ($10,952)
The Last Girls could actually have been pretty good. Piodor Gustaffson of
Stockholm’s Happylife Animation had the idea for a show about four young
girls – an artist, a model, a student and a radical socialist – on the loose in
Paris, sharing an apartment and trying to keep their heads above eau. He
sent us a pretty detailed character breakdown and a weblink to a sample clip.
The characters and props were to have been animated, over real
photographed backgrounds. So if, for example, Kate had to enter the grand
ballroom of the Louis Cinq Hotel and slip on the rug, the photographer in
Paris would have had to lock a camera on the ballroom door, shoot it closed,
then a few frames with it progressively opening, and then a few frames with
the rug messed up. The animated material would later be superimposed over
these plates.
We wrote a half-hour pilot ($15,000) but the primary buyer at the time
didn’t bite. The script was enthusiastically received at several subsequent
European MIP conventions and there was a serious bid in 2004 from a
company that had a novel platform for exploiting it: network for sevenminute episodes, then an additional and much racier behind-the-scenes two
minutes to be broadcast on the new 3GHz European cell phones.
We wrote a few stories. They came back: “Too racy. Make it more
like Sex And The City.”
We often get confounding notes like this from other countries. How
can it be more like S.I.T.C. but not racy? And they said they “want to get the
teen audience, so make it more like Friends.” That show, in its last season,
had a viewership with an average age of thirty-eight. Teens were watching
One Tree Hill and Jenna Lewis’s honeymoon video.
We eventually passed, because the money wasn’t great and at that
time, having slid from the Tonight Show to sitcoms to animation to
children’s animation, we didn’t think we could face ourselves if we woke up
one day writing jokes for cell phones. That’s the kind of thing that goes at
the top of the suicide note. A few months earlier we’d received an offer
Valuable Lessons
276
from Evan Baily at Classic Media to work on a kids’ show about fitness,
created by an actor/fitness guru in Reykjavik. Darrell asked what exactly
this would entail and Evan said, “Uhhhh running a table in Iceland.”
Remember Fezzig’s line to The Giant in The Princess Bride? “You
want me to take you back where I found you? Unemployed?? In
GREENLAND??” Running a table in Iceland sounded like that. Writing
for cell phones in Sweden was maybe worse. Not to say we wouldn’t have
considered it if they’d called at the right time.
Bob Higgins had been our agent’s assistant; the guy who answers his
phone, books his lunches and tells people oh too bad you just missed him.
Then he was an agent himself, then he was working at Nelvana, then
Columbia Television, and in 2003 he was the development head of Classic
Media, which owns such comic book titles as Little Lulu, Rocky And
Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales, Richie Rich, Casper and Wendy, and
Underdog.
And Mr. Magoo. Bob called us about writing a half-hour live-action
version of this property and we met him in the restaurant of an L.A. hotel.
One of the first things Bob told us was, “Magoo can’t be short-sighted.”
Presumably in other meetings going on around town Casper couldn’t be
dead and Richie Rich couldn’t be conspicuously wealthy. (Tonight Show
writer Tom Finnigan once wrote a PC-mocking gag in which Santa’s helpers
announce they don’t want to be called elves any more, they want to be
known as Pointy Americans.)
We wrote a single-camera film pilot cautiously circumventing the
touchy myopia issue. We did it in the Police Squad/Airplane style, with
Magoo as the world’s worst detective and his nephew Chuck learning the
tradecraft. The script has some of my favorite meaningless lines. A small
sampling:
SECRETARY
There’s a Mrs. Pantoulias to see
you.
MAGOO
Is she in the Appointment Book?
SECRETARY
No she’s in a chair by the window.
.
(CHUCK AND MAGOO FOLLOW THE SUSPECT IN THEIR CAR)
Valuable Lessons
277
CHUCK
Is this procedure standard?
MAGOO
No, this Chrysler automatic.
.
(CHUCK LIES IN A FULL-BODY CAST IN THE HOSPITAL)
CHUCK
Will I still get a bonus?
MAGOO
Don’t worry, the doctor assures me
you’ll be perfectly normal in
every way.
There was also a bit in which Magoo filled Chuck in on the six basic rules of
the P.I., which included “Never stick any part of your body in a machine that
ends with ulverizer,” and “If you’re not prepared to fire into a crowd of
innocent people you’ll never get really good theater tickets.”
Bob loved it. Bob raved over it. Bob left Classic Media and moved
to Cartoon Network. ($10,000)
Peter Keleghan is a winning comic actor. He’d done the voice of the
father on Ned’s Newt and his timing and delivery on every line were
impeccable – he’s a writer’s dream. Peter’s well known in Canada for his
roles on The Newsroom and Made In Canada, and in 2003 the CBC offered
him a six-episode commitment for a series and the production deal went to
Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films.
We’d written No Place Like Hume on spec the previous summer.
We’d had the title and the rough story for eighteen years, but we’d never had
the time to flesh it out. A long-divorced multi-millionaire loose-cannon
businessman in his mid forties is watching the news from his office while
shaving between meetings when his jaw drops. They’re talking about the
small East coast town of Hume – the town of his birth – and apparently it’s
dying. The fish dried up years ago, it’s too far off the main highway for
tourism, and there’s never been any local industry.
An overpowering pang of homesickness almost strikes him to the
ground. He decides to sell his business on the spot, pull his two teen
daughters out of their remote private boarding school, and return to the town
of his birth to revitalize Hume with his business know-how, his money, and
Valuable Lessons
278
the sheer power of his personality. He buys every building on the main
drag, flies to the coast, buys a Land Rover and drives “home.” The series
shows him battling the female no-growth Mayor and the complete torpor of
the local population, who don’t particularly want their hometown turned into
a hub of industry. Eric Lewis starts by interviewing each of the locals in the
Town Hall to find out their skills:
ERIC
What do you do for a living?
LOCAL
I’m retired.
ERIC
That’s wonderful. What did you do
before you retired?
LOCAL
I quit.
ERIC
And before that?
LOCAL
I punched the foreman.
ERIC
The foreman where?
LOCAL
(INDICATES NECK)
Right about here. Went down like
a sack of crap.
We had a week free from notes on other series in 2002 and we wrote a onehour pilot, trying to give it a Northern Exposure feel. We sent it to our
agents at C.A.A. Two of them called us and said, essentially, “You guys are
half-hour writers, we can’t sell this.” They also asked us to please not write
anything like it again.
Thus discouraged we put it away. But in 2003 we emailed the script
to Shaftesbury, and not only did they like it they passed it to Peter who
decided it was the project he wanted to do for his CBC commitment. We
did a few small rewrites for him and for the company. A few months later it
became clear that the network preferred another project. Shaftesbury
Valuable Lessons
279
phoned us in November of 2004, three days before the option expired, to
renew it – apparently ABC Family now liked the script. If you’re interested,
try us in November, ‘05. ($6,436.56)
“W.I.T.C.H.”
In 2001 Michael Eisner spent $5.3 billion to buy the Fox Family channel for
Disney. According to a June 15, 2004 story in the L.A. Times by Meg
James and Sallie Hofmeister it was a troubled financial asset from the getgo. Eisner changed the channel’s name to ABC Family, then later decided
to change it to something more boy-friendly and hip like XYZ (TV Trivia:
anything with an X in it is hip), unaware that a carrying clause with the
affiliated cable-operators left over from the channel’s creation in 1977 by
evangelist Pat Robertson was that the network must always have the word
Family in its title. (Darrell suggested a way around this: “Call it the AntiFamily Channel.”)
Another gut blow came to Eisner’s plan to “repurpose” (repeat) ABC
shows on the new channel as free programming. He and his minions were
unaware that this would involve re-paying actors and other creatives for the
second use, and that the cost and contractual delay of doing this would be
prohibitive. Other ABC fare that might have swelled ABC Family’s ratings
– Spin City, The Practice – had already been promised elsewhere in primary
syndication deals.
In February of 2004 a programming compromise was attempted. The
early mornings on ABC Family and the evenings on Toon Disney would be
given over to something called the JETIX block. It had an X in it; they were
ready to go. This was boy-focused programming, an alternative to all the
Lizzie McGuires and Kim Possibles on The Channel. We’ll let JETIX sit
there for a moment.
In 2001, Disney Publishing Italy launched a new fantasy comic book /
magazine called W.I.T.C.H. – the most successful children’s magazine
launch in history. By 2003 W.I.T.C.H. was selling a million copies a month.
In the spring of that year The Disney Channel began developing a series
based on the comic, which centered on six girls, the initials of five of whom
gave the franchise its name. Those five had magical powers (except we
couldn’t say the word magic because of fears Disney would be seen as
promoting Satanism) vested in them to help them protect The Veil, basically
the hymen between Good and Evil. It kept poppin’ open and they kept
sealin’ it up again.
Valuable Lessons
280
Testing on the pilot was moot; this was going to be a major Disney
property that needed proper handling. The toys had already been made.
Enter yours truly and partner, in September of ‘03. The animation house
would be SIP, in France. Primary markets would be Italy, France, Fox UK
and the Disney Channel, so guidance would be arriving from all four
entities.
We went to the twenty-first floor in Burbank to ask and answer some
questions. I was primarily worried about the fire. In the comics the girls
control the elements and one of them, Taranee, has power over fire and
flames. We’ve never had much luck with fire on children’s TV. Standards
And Practices routinely nixes it. We were told, “Don’t worry about it; this
series is very important to us... we’re going to tell them it’s an integral part
of the show and it’s not coming out no matter what.” Of course by Episode
Four it had come out, and for the last twenty-two segments Taranee used her
supermystical power largely to light dark stairways – she’d gone from being
a cool superhero to a flashlight.
(Another concern of mine in that meeting had been the name of the
empowering crystal in the comics: the Heart Of Kandrakar. I pointed out
that a lot of people were dying in and around Kandahar, Afghanistan,
especially during the construction of the new Kabul-to-Kandahar highway. I
thought it might be politic to change this name before we began. The
suggestion fell by the wayside. When we were ten episodes in, we received
a note: due to the similarity of Kandahar and Kandrakar, and since recent
unsettling events in the news, the name of the stone would henceforth be
changed... to Candrakar.)
We wrote a pilot and a rough bible and flew to Paris to meet the
animators, the Italians, the French, and director Marc Gordon-Bates, a key
animator on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The supernatural logic behind
some elements of the series was a bit fuzzy to us and this meeting didn’t do
much to clear it up, but we’d already got the job and we ripped into the
twenty-six-episode initial order. Disney exec Jillianne Reinseth, a godsend,
had been with the show for a year already and was along to clear the tracks
of any dead cows lying ahead of us. Channel exec Adam Bonnett urged us
from the beginning to realize that, all the mystical mumbo-jumbo of the
comics aside, and all the millions of devoted sighing girl-readers
notwithstanding, for TV this needed to be a comedy. A week’s testing in
Phoenix on a pre-existing rough Leica reel, which we also attended, had
revealed what young girls wanted: cute boys, more jokes. We brushed up
on our mall-speak and, like, had at it.
Valuable Lessons
281
After we and a few talented freelancers had seven or eight episodes
written and four or five more outlined, we were called to a meeting at The
Channel. Mr. Eisner had suddenly decided this show was needed on Toon
Disney and on JETIX. We’d never heard of JETIX. What exactly would
that entail?
It entailed taking a show starring six girls and tailoring it to appeal to
young boys.
There’s a truism in pre-teen programming that girls will watch shows
starring boys but boys God love ‘em do not reciprocate. We’ve sat in the
testing rooms and watched small gangs of insolent ten-year-old thugstas
being asked about their favorite shows. (They separate the girls from the
boys. Apparently if you put even one girl at a table of pre-adolescent males
it turns into a sitcom writing room.) If you mention Kim Possible or Lizzie
McGuire to a roomful of boys they all act like they’re going to puke.
So the notes became stuff like, “We’re seeing too much of the girls
here,” or “Scene feels very girly,” or “Do you have to start the show with the
girls?” This show was ABOUT the girls and the network got nervous
whenever they were on-screen.
So we played-up the action, the handsome male rebel and the comedic
sidekick creature we’d added, and hoped for the best.
The notes were the usual stuff. See if you can follow this. In Episode
Twenty-Three there’s a battle between the rebels and the evil Phobos and his
Guards. The rebels are losing badly because Phobos’s super-powerful sister
has been duped into joining the fight and is wiping out the good guys.
Drake, a Captain of the rebels, runs to their leader and says, “Caleb! She’ll
bring everyone down if we don’t retreat!” Caleb sadly sizes up the situation
and says, “Give the order.” Drake runs off. Here’s the note:
Pg. 33, line 196: Caleb “Give the order.” He should clarify
what that order is (ie: retreat).
We were back in Make Everything As Obvious As Possible Land, and
solutions like this:
DRAKE
Caleb! She’ll bring everyone down
if we don’t retreat!
CALEB
Okay, give the order to retreat.
Valuable Lessons
282
DRAKE
(giving the order)
Retreat!!
They retreat.
We got notes in violation of basic principles of dramatic editing:
p. 20: “Taranee says, ‘Wait! Look!’... and then we see Tynar striding
through the crowd. Shouldn’t we see him first?”
Because kids won’t wait three-thirtieths of a second to find out what a
character who just pointed and said “Look!” is talking about. We were told
several times when we’d written a cliffhanger spanning a commercial break
that kids would be confused because they didn’t know what was going to
happen after the commercial.
I’m going to risk being tedious here because I think this is important.
This is not a few examples on one show. This is every line in every scene in
every kids’ show I’ve worked on, and on the shows my writer friends work
on. They mush this stuff up before ladling it into your kids’ heads because
they think they’re stupid and have no attention span. This is, obviously, a
self-fulfilling prophecy. As vapid as much pre-teen content is anyway,
watching it after it’s been pureed like this gives the brain nothing at all to
chew on. It’s water, leached of all nutritional content – homeopathic
entertainment.
Here are some of the things the sight or mention of which were
forbidden on W.I.T.C.H.:
Magic or spells or charms. Witches or wizards. References to
anyone’s weight. Killing bugs or rats. Physical blows in fight scenes.
The words ‘kill,’ ‘dead,’ or ‘death.’ Calling anyone ‘nuts’ or ‘crazy’
or ‘insane’ – mentioning a ‘nuthouse,’ ‘bughouse,’ etc. Bodily
function humor. Any mention of kidnapping or abduction. Bras, or
training bras, or underwear. Anyone riding a bike, skateboard, car,
raft, boat, even in a mythical realm, without appropriate modern
safety gear. Mentioning or seeing alcohol, cigarettes or coffee.
Adoption. The phrase ‘Oh my God!’ Hell, or the Devil.
But go ahead, knock yourself out. The kidnapping/abduction/adoption
prohibition was tricky because the setup of the entire first season was that a
nanny fearing for the life of the infant female heir to the Meridian throne had
Valuable Lessons
283
brought her to Earth twelve years ago to be raised by a couple posing as her
parents. And good guys/gals were routinely grabbed from behind by
monsters and taken to the other world. If that isn’t kidnapping what is it?
We had a character joke, when she discovers her new powers, “Hey!
Do we have the power to get out of Geography?” The note came: we
cannot denigrate education, please revise.
For the first episode, originally scheduled to air on Hallowe’en,
Disney wouldn’t let us stage a powers-practicing scene in a graveyard in the
daytime (too scary) or at an abandoned construction site (too dangerous).
We couldn’t have Will, thirteen, walk down a “dark alley.” We couldn’t
have Irma briefly covered with dirt, “for safety reasons.”
“At this age, kids can’t leave school for lunch.” This one note pushed
all outside-school meetings between the girls to After School, needlessly
adding story days. We pointed out that on the Disney Channel show Recess
much younger kids leave the school grounds all the time without permission,
during the school day. Didn’t matter.
Some other gems:
- “The cartoon bear [on a show they’re watching] standing over a
dynamite plunger causes concern. The action is dangerous and
imitable.” [HOW?]
- “S&P just chimed in on this board and gave a note that we can't
have lids on any of the dumpsters for safety reasons.” [Think about
this. The way we draw dumpsters in a cartoon has zero effect on the
way dumpsters are built in real life. So this note is for what? It’s to
avoid endangering any cartoon children who come across the
dumpsters we left behind after our scene moves on.]
- “p. 15: Taranee's line [in a bat cave], "Bring it on, Stellaluna"
should be revised to something a kid would understand. Remember,
this is for 6 to 11 year olds and even most adults wouldn't understand
this reference.” [Jannell Cannon’s “Stellaluna” = American
Bookseller Book Of The Year Award, Publisher’s Weekly Children’s
Bestseller, Reading Rainbow Feature Book, California Young Reader
Medal. Over two million copies sold.]
We had an episode in which a commuter train was hurtling towards a trestle
that a killer plant sent from the Metaworld was in the process of destroying.
In the writer’s first draft, the heroines of W.I.T.C.H. flew off to repair the
tracks. A note came from S+P: they couldn’t countenance a scene in which
children were shown going near train tracks. Better, I assume, to let
everyone on the train plunge to their deaths.
Valuable Lessons
284
For the second year, Disney elected to tone down the humor (what
humor?) and go for a “darker, more fantasy-driven approach.” Other writers
were brought in. Then, as we wrapped up, Disney and SIP announced they
wouldn’t be paying us all of the money they owed right away. We had
missed a clause in the forty-page contract which said we’d be compensated
“over the production period,” a window not technically closed until the last
sneer was inked and colored on the last animated villain. So we would be
receiving the final $97,500 spread out over six months, in payments that
wouldn’t begin until three months after our job was finished.
W.I.T.C.H. was the first non-comedy I’d ever written. It had light
moments, but then so did The Sorrow And The Pity. The cast was terrific,
the storyboard art amazing; I was glad for the experience. ($496,500)
LESSON: some of the worst rewrites of your material will be done by
you.
----------------Where It Went
TRAVEL: I went to the U.K. in 1990 with my brother and
visited England, Wales and Scotland with a side-trip to Paris.
In 1991 I did England and Scotland again with The Bride. In
1995 I spent three weeks with the family driving to various
small luxury hotels in California. Between 1996 and 1999 I
went on three train trips: Santa Fe, Portland, and Florida. Las
Vegas twice. Other than the obligatory Disneyland outings by
car with a begging child, that’s it.
$35,000
There are seven shows spread throughout this book bearing titles punctuated
with an exclamation mark, and for some reason every one of them is
Canadian. What national yearning for attention does this bespeak? Vince
Commisso, a friend of ours and fellow Nelvana alumnus, formed a company
called 9-Storey which developed a cartoon called Futz! about a little guy
who fouls up everything he touches. He needed sample scripts to help sell
the show – we wrote two of them. ($6,186.51)
The idea for Super Cooper came to a friend of ours, Steve Billnitzer:
how about if a middle-school girl has super powers, but she gets a different
one each day and she never knows what it’ll be? And what if some of them
are completely insane?
Valuable Lessons
285
The Disney Channel liked it and asked if we could work with Steve.
Since they had just passed on Rocketship Bedroom (q.v.) and the notes from
four countries on W.I.T.C.H. were becoming a Vietnam-style quagmire, we
had the time. There followed the usual six months of contractual haggling,
after which we got precisely the same terms we get on every show that
C.A.A. spends six months negotiating. We then, with Steve, wrote ten drafts
of a series bible and seven drafts of the pilot.
Steve, Darrell and I have the same attitude towards humor: fuck ‘em
if they can’t recognize a joke. We put in silly stupid gags and a lot of
random stuff that just flat-out amused us. You know, like the jokes in
Spongebob Squarepants, on that other network where they actually try to
entertain kids instead of preaching to them. After the first draft was turned
in, the bombs began to fall. In the very first phone call: “This is a good
start... I think one of the first things we need to talk about is where we’re
going to put the message.”
The Message. Why does a children’s show have to have a message?
They don’t work. If they worked, every kid who watches television would
be respectful, honest, considerate and sharing. I’ve met them; they’re not.
Nobody in the history of television viewing has ever modified their behavior
or personality because of a lesson learned by a character in a sitcom or
animated program. So why, when original stories are hard enough to write
to begin with, must we continue to make them harder by having these poor
fictional drawings, in their brief flicker of life, suffer through crises that test
and anguish them? Why can’t they just have funny experiences?
So we put a message in. It was about sharing.
We looked at literally thousands of artists’ samples before TVA head
Barry Blumberg walked in one day and said, “That one.” And we proposed
several ways of writing the story before Barry said at a conference table one
day, “Here’s your story. In Act One...”
We hired singer-songwriter Amy Correia to write and sing the theme
song. Pete Michels directed the witty animation, based on Keith Knight’s
lovely and goofy character designs.
Late in the testing at Burbank’s ASI, as I wandered from the boys’
testing room to the girls’ room, I heard the interlocutor ask the boys, “What
could we do to improve this series?” One of the ten-year-old boys spoke up:
“Have her fight bad guys and kill ‘em!” The other young Byrons loudly
agreed. Of course, this was the superhero convention that our concept was
supposedly turning on its head. But when I got the thanks-but-no-thanks
call, this turned out to have been the major quibble during the testing with
ten-to-twelve-year-olds in Berlin, Munich and London. I don’t know if it
Valuable Lessons
286
arose spontaneously like radon or if, cued by Burbank Billy, the execs were
nudged in that direction and followed it up with leading questions, but they
wanted Cooper to fight evildoers. This thought had never arisen at the
network or studio: every note was aimed at making Cooper’s family life
richer, her friendships more rewarding, her morals firmer, her actions more
believable. At least a month was spent by director Pete Michels trying to
make her nose cuter. There were hour-long meetings about her hair.
Could we have changed Super Cooper to a show in which a twelveyear-old girl fights evildoers using different super powers every day? Yes
Ma’am. Is that the way children’s television works? No it isn’t. They buy
it, they “fix” it, you make it, and then the testing needle writes and, having
writ, moves on. Fifty adults birth a show then toss it to young Billy Mumy
and cringe while they wait to see who’s going to be sent to the cornfield.
A lot of money could be saved if some children were brought into the
meetings when the story was being written. “Hey kids, do you want a
Message here, or something funny?” Will they ever do it that way? No they
will not. Because that would bypass all the bullshit, and that’s all that some
people have to sell. Am I bitter? No I am not. As I write this, Steve,
Darrell and I have begun re-developing this pilot for a live-action series in
the Sabrina mold, also at Disney. From the ashes of the old the wheat
springs high. ($24,333.26)
Did I mention I loathe reality shows? In 2004 we pitched around a
show called Employee Of The Month. When UPN exec Chris Sloane liked
the idea it was called Take This Job And Shove It. He indicated to us and
reality guru Bruce Nash that his boss, Doug Herzog, was keen on the idea.
We all filed into Herzog’s office one day – me, Darrell, Bruce, Doug, Chris
and various other execs from UPN and from Nash Entertainment – and the
meeting began thusly:
DOUG HERZOG
First off, this idea, Take This
Job And Shove It... I’ve gotta
tell you, I still don’t like it.
Three-second pause.
Andrew claps his hands together.
ME
Well! That’s all we had, so...
goodbye!
Darrell and I got up and left. The pitch had lasted ten seconds. God, I wish more
Valuable Lessons
287
of them were like that.
Lone Eagle Entertainment’s Michael Geddes, who produced Canada’s
Popstars, liked the idea, changed it to The Temp, and when we received the
contracts – twenty signatures on twelve documents; literally a hundred times
the thickness of the show proposal – it had become pluralized. (Several
months later it popped up on Global’s website as The Office Temps, possibly
re-renamed to trade on the popularity of BBC’s The Office. I suppose I
should be grateful it wasn’t The Pirates Of The Caribbean Temps. I don’t
know why, but almost everything we’ve created has been re-named by
others: from Father Knows Nothing to The Parent ‘Hood. From Shut Up,
Kids to Drexell’s Class. My First Husband became The Trouble With Larry
and the title I wanted for It Had To Be You was Marry Me Anyway – she
was a lady, he was a carpenter... a coincidental fortuity that eluded others.
From The Cube... to Into The Cube. Paralyzed For Life became Quads!
Am I deluded or were the original titles better?)
I initially described this reality show idea as “Survivor, but the
contestants don’t know they’re on it.” I proposed hiring four or five people
for what they thought was an out-of-the-city office gig and putting them
through hell for several weeks with insane co-workers and unreasonable job
demands. We’d hire folks with a history of quitting under stress, and
whoever was left at the end would split the Employee Of The Month bonus
check in a sealed envelope thumb-tacked to the office bulletin board. We’d
tell them the bonus was for “a hundred” but it would actually be for a
hundred grand.
In the description of potential employee-annoying job details we used
a few things that had actually happened to us. Like the time we came to
work at Thicke Of The Night and found other people at our desks and our
typewriters gone; we’d been moved into the men’s washroom and our
typewriters plugged in over the sinks. Or the time in the eighties when our
boss’s alcoholic mother hit us up for the very last $20 we had to our names –
which we gave her because we were afraid to offend her and lose our jobs.
Lone Eagle did away with the bonus check idea and shortened each
duped staff’s gig from one week to one sixty-minute show, shot in four days.
They also removed the idea of seeing who’d quit. The fear had always been
that all of the employees would riot at their maltreatment and we’d be left
with no show. So instead of our original idea of people voting themselves
off the island, it was now Candid Camera in an office. And rather than take
to heart our suggestion that it be taped far from showbiz to reduce the
possibility of smart-ass civilians catching on, they shot it one block away
Valuable Lessons
288
from CITY-TV on Queen Street in Toronto. This is why we’re listed as
“Consultants.” ($50,000)
LESSON: Don’t tell anyone you have a show on the air until you’ve
seen the actual show they’re going to put on the air.
-----------------Where It Went
DRUGS AND WHORES: I’ve worked in Hollywood for a
long time and I’ve only seen cocaine once. Marijuana?
Haven’t had any since 1982 unless you count secondhand, and
the guitarist never pays anyway. I know a few people who’ve
blown everything on coke but that particular drain didn’t take
any of my pelf. Smack? Crack? Laudanum? Victorian ether
mamas? Not to my recollection. As Lou sang, guess I’ve lead
a sheltered life. So, just prescription meds.
$6,000
A Tosh Christmas was to have been an animated feature based on the TV
series that we wrote for Swedish television (see World Of Tosh). There was
an existing script but the owners of the franchise didn’t like it and contracted
with us to do a rewrite, then another draft, then a polish. Two plane tickets
to Stockholm were included in the deal. ($30,000)
We did the re-write, four weeks of work, based on a lengthy email
delineation of what the script needed, and handed it in. We left in a few of
the original lines and a few of the scenes, and the basic story: girl-mad Tosh
directs a disastrous school Christmas play. The first bank wire arrived – it
was for only $5,000, half the promised amount. The reason given: “We felt
your draft was more of a polish.” What? We emailed them the WGA’s
definition of a polish. They responded with a list of things they wanted
changed in the draft that we hadn’t touched. We responded with a copy of
their original email in which none of these things was mentioned. They paid
the other five grand.
And on it went. As of this writing the last email we received
suggested they wanted to change the entire story... they were no longer sure
a school Christmas play was “the story we want to tell.” Like Pons and
Fleischmann, the 1989 discoverers of cold fusion, we have not yet been to
Stockholm.
Another film idea, A Year Off, we gave to C.A.A. in 1993 – for a
gimmick, we also wrote the theatrical trailer – but they never set us up
Valuable Lessons
289
anywhere to pitch it. In 2003 our German friend Armin Völckers said he
knew of an Austrian company looking for low-budget high-concept adult
romance ideas. We sent him this, he pitched it, they loved it, we wrote an
outline in English and received in return a contract in German. DOR Films
wouldn’t tell us even approximately what it said and they stubbornly refused
to translate it – a Munichian Standoff. C.A.A. didn’t have an expert in
German contract law but eventually, after many weeks, Armin’s sister
rendered it into American quasi-legalese for us and we said what the hell, it
couldn’t be any less advantageous to us than the American contracts we
routinely sign, so we inked it, got our $4,000, and wrote a thirty-page
treatment. As of this writing that’s as far as it’s gone, but we’re told the mill
of Viennese features grinds slow and exceedingly kleine.
Meanwhile, at Classic Media, Bob Higgins’ vacated seat was filled by
Evan Baily, with whom we’d worked on Nick’s Pelswick. Evan was
developing a new version of George Of The Jungle, written by a couple
whose prime (and first) credit – Futurama – was hipper than our 150+
credits, which is why they got the showrunner gig and we ended up fixing
their scripts. Glad to help; that’s what we’re here for.
AND SO...
Were they all funny, all deserving of a prime time chance? Of course not.
A lot of them, my own ideas included, deserved to die like runway toads.
Friends still ask why I don’t watch television. I ask them why they
think Ellen Ripley doesn’t walk into big caves full of alien eggs on her days
off.
I once heard one of our secretaries, Sheila, herself a standup comic, on
the phone to a friend describing why she disliked some program she’d
watched the night before. She fumbled for a while, trying to articulate her
antipathy, and eventually hit on the crux: “It reeked of writers.”
That’s it, exactly. It didn’t sound like people talking, it sounded like
writers trying to top each other, the standups trying to work in bits of their
act, the staccato ping-pong verbal dueling of overproud semiliterate hacks.
I’ve taken too many notes, paced around too many writing rooms,
stood on too many stages and inside too many control rooms. I’ve spent too
much time sitting in post-production booths arguing with studio suits over
whether the audience will understand the word “forthright” or know that
Belize is a country. When I watch TV now, I don’t see the scene, I see it
being written. I hear all the little compromises and arguments that led to
Valuable Lessons
290
what has been settled for. I see the wording the actor has requested that
gives her a bigger laugh but weakens the scene. I see the framing the
director’s been forced into because the star wouldn’t stick around for the
other actors’ retakes. I see the Sweetener auditioning the three levels of
“awwww!” he can stick over the shot where the puppy puts its head in the
kid’s lap. I see the studio and network executives watching from fifteen feet
away in their folding chairs, lips pursed in simulacra of thought, scripts
curled, pencils ready. I hear the sighs of talented but spirit-broken people
resigned to suppressing all their instincts as they cut and destroy.
Bismarck is supposed to have said, “Those who love the law or
sausage should never watch either being made.” Let’s add sitcoms to that.
Pick any five-second Family Kitchen scene from any all-but-forgotten tenyear-old comedy episode and if you were to able to see it hologrammatically
entire, its interdependent parts, all the input that formed it, floating like the
exploded diagram of a plastic model car, you’d find it massively
overcomplicated, fraught with interference based on foolishness and
mistaken assumptions. Studios complain about the cost of making shows
but fully a quarter of the load they’re bearing is the scrap metal welded on
the frame which everyone but they can see is only making the thing heavier,
less aerodynamic; impractically and fatally clumsy and unfunny.
---------------Where It Went – Omnium Gatherum:
OTHER MEDICAL: $70,000
BABYSITTING: $100,000
THE BRIDE’S FAILED BUSINESSES: A landscaping
company, a clothing company, an archaeology education.
$70,000
MY APARTMENT RENT: since January, 2000: $70,000
ART: I own eight paintings and five autographs, purchased
pre-marriage. $10,000
HOUSEKEEPING: when I had one. $80,000
CHARITY, GIFTS: $150,000
UTILITIES, CELL PHONE, INSURANCE: $100,000
Total income = $14,726,172.13
My share = $7,363,086.06
Total expenditures = $7,240,656
The close match between these two tallies surprised me. I kept no running count
Valuable Lessons
291
as I guessed at my expenses and searched old bankbooks and tax returns for
earnings. Where’s the other $122,430? Pffft.
No question, I screwed up. They teach you in school how to handle
money but they never tell you how to handle a lot of it. In Oshawa that’s
probably a wise decision, though for me it’s no excuse.
It’s funny though that the two biggest mistakes I made, manifestly the
roots of my ruination (and no small amount of urination), were acquiring a
house and a wife, the supposed bedrock of the American Family and the
subject of 90% of the television comedy I’ve spent my life writing.
Here’s my current theory. Several hours into a divorce deposition,
during a break in the questioning, The Bride’s attorney asked me, “Off the
record, why didn’t you leave her years ago?”
This was the same thing virtually all of my friends had asked when I
first emailed them that I had a new address with more numbers in it. It was
the same question my lawyer had posed when I presented him with the
essentials of the situation. And now here was The Bride’s attorney asking
why I hadn’t objected earlier to the way I was being treated.
I mumbled something about commitment and there being a child
involved, but I didn’t have a ready answer, not even one that made sense to
me. But a few days later, as I was writing the twentieth draft of the pilot
script for Quads! I glimpsed something.
I didn’t take action against my she of troubles because a working TV
writer spends all of his or her time satisfying the whims of the stupid and
unreasonable, inexorably eroding his capacity to determine when his own
sensibilities have been offended. They don’t pay you to have sensibilities,
they pay you to write rubbish, and then to fix the rubbish they made you
write yesterday. Eventually you just go where you’re kicked. Here I was in
my twenty-fifth year of working nine to five incorporating notes like “Our
audience won’t know the meaning of the word Shun, please replace with
something more kid-friendly.” And, “Please replace Voltaire with a more
contemporary satirist who suffered for his or her art, like Chris Rock.” (both
verbatim from Nickelodeon’s Pelswick)
I had lost the capacity to determine how far I can be pushed. If a
bully bothers you once, you fight back. But if he shoves you in the chest ten
hours a day for twenty years, backing you up and up and up, at what point
do you decide enough’s enough? When you’ve been shoved 10,000 times?
10,001? Where exactly is that line in the sand? I always wrote what I was
asked to write. I suggested to a sympathetic exec one day, “The only way to
use this draft (another writer’s opus) as the basis for a better script would be
Valuable Lessons
292
to turn it over and write a new draft on the back.” He nodded, “I know. But
we already paid for it.”
Same thing with the marriage. But by the time I realized that I was
eight years in.
BUT IT’LL ALL WORK OUT
You just need a little faith. Treat others as you would be treated. Everyone
means well. Hope is rewarded. You shouldn’t cheat. Money isn’t
important. Love conquers all. Liars are found out. Good people prosper.
These are the valuable lessons that have remained in my writing when
all my more personal and honest observations were acid-etched away to
reveal the network- and studio-approved substrate. Is there anything I can
learn from these bromides that Americans seem to feel are so important they
need to pop them like pills every weeknight from 8:00 to 10:00?
Faith? I haven’t much use for it. Bertrand Russell, author Sam Harris
and others have correctly observed that faith is a belief in something which
cannot be shaken by solid evidence to the contrary. I like evidence,
argument, hypothesis. Without inquiry we’d all be getting bowl haircuts and
living in an Umberto Eco novel. Let’s put faith aside for those moments
when we’re trapped under a collapsed building and need to make it through
the night with nothing to drink but rat pee.
Treating others fairly? Nothing wrong with that. But give a studio
the rights in perpetuity to an inch and they’ll force-majeure you out of your
rights to a mile.
When Shaw said all men mean well, he was thinking of Torquemada,
not Gandhi. It’s a comment on self-justification, and a poor guide to what
one should expect.
Is hope rewarded? Not disproportionately, certainly not to an extent
that makes the observation meaningful. In Michael Frayn’s screenplay for
Clockwise a schoolgirl tells the demoralized and exhausted Mr. Stimpson
(John Cleese) as he sits collapsed on the roadside, lost on the way to
Norwich, not to despair. He replies, with incredulous anguish, that the
despair he can handle, “It’s the hope!”
You shouldn’t cheat, of course. But I’ve learned it’s just as important
to put measures in place to ensure you’re not being cheated.
What can you buy with money? Food, clothing, housing; all nonessentials, unless you like eating indoors with pants on. Johnny Carson said
the best thing about having money is, it keeps you from worrying about
Valuable Lessons
293
money. (Darrell says money allows you to become the asshole you always
were but couldn’t afford to be. He is occasionally proof that the money is
not an essential part of this.)
Amor vincit omnia they say, or said. I suppose everyone has to form
their own judgment about that. I rank love up there with truth, about which I
believe John Stuart Mill said something like:
It is a piece of idle sentimentality to suppose that truth, merely as
truth, has any power, denied to error, of prevailing against the
dungeon and the stake.
He meant, I think, it’s a great signpost but a lousy candle. Just so with love.
Liars and good people? I’ve seen them both and the liars have the
nicer houses. Sure sometimes they get their comeuppance, but it’s rarely
severe enough to even things out. That’s why hell was invented – it’s not in
our nature to easily accept that bad people live it up at our expense and die
unpunished. If they’re not tortured in front of our eyes... well, they must be
tortured elsewhere; that’s the only way the whole thing makes sense.
Darrell took his car to be repaired the other day and got speaking to
the garage mechanic. It turned out the guy used to be an entertainment
lawyer. He’d worked for Paramount; made the big money. But his family
owned this garage and now he was working here, up to his elbows in
grease.*
“So why’d you quit?” Darrell asked.
He’d developed a stock answer: “Because I got tired of being a
prick.”
I can guarantee you that pretty well all of that prickishness was
focused on taking money, hope and happiness from the people who write
and perform the television you and your family watch, and giving it to the
people who help dumb it down.
*(And probably in dire need of Swarfega.)
OKAY, WHAT’S YOUR BRILLIANT SOLUTION?
Network Executives: hire unemployed writers in their forties to run your
development departments – people who know how a story fits together and
how to give advice that’s constructive and not subtractive. After they turn
Valuable Lessons
294
thirty-five they’re not working anyway, and writers, though you hate it, are
the people who best know how to fix a script. If you’re afraid they’ll hire all
their unemployed friends, restrict the hiring to others.
If you’ve got a time slot that’s dying season after season, put
something wild in there and leave it alone to see if it catches on. If not, give
it a year or two anyway. Cheers ended its first season in seventy-eighth
place.
Quit fussing over every tiny technical detail. Paddy Chayefsky’s The
Hospital is a classic comedy even though there’s a boom mike that spends so
much time on camera it should get billing. Quit with the demi-hemi-quaver
frame editing, you’re making a sitcom about two guys and some breasts, not
an orbital gravitometer.
Stop sucking up to stars. We don’t watch TV for stars, we go to the
movies for that, and if they’ve fallen from film into television it’s probably
because we’ve gotten tired of paying to look at them anyway. And for god’s
sake take all these producing/directing deals off them and give them back to
the people who know how to make shows.
Dial the laugh tracks back, they’re getting out of hand. I understand
you need sweetening to feather-in all those pickups that were shot after the
audience went home, but you’re setting standards you can’t live up to and
making people forget what real laughter, the emotional coin of the realm,
sounds like.
Admit that you use testing to bolster your own opinions and that when
it contradicts them you ignore it. And instead of routinely ordering test
audiences to turn the dial up when they “like” what or who is on the screen,
tell them to position it according to how well they feel they’re being
entertained, or how much they’re enjoying themselves. Jerks can be
entertaining too.
Kids TV Execs: spend some time with children and stop cutting out
everything you think they won’t understand. You have a responsibility to
put at least one thing into every show that nobody will understand. Send
them to the dictionary, it’ll do them some good. And do a little testing on
yourselves: watch how children react when they’re not told exactly what
just happened, or exactly what’s coming up. See them try to figure it out,
thereby becoming more involved in the show, not less, something they’ve
known in the theater for 2,500 years.
America: educate your children better. Even if you’re going to be a
nation of Wal-Mart employees you still need clerks who, when I ask for a
horticulture book, know that has something to do with gardening. Six
percent of your fellow citizens don’t believe NASA put a man on the moon.
Valuable Lessons
295
In California seventh grade in 2004 my son was taking math that my fellow
nineteen-sixties Canadians and I took in Grade 4. How the hell did this
happen? I once had a K-Mart employee who was individually ringing up
140 hula hoops for me (don’t ask) reach hoop number sixty and say,
“Halfway there!” I feel more than a little responsible for this state of affairs
– I’ve spent my life basically entertaining my peers, who partied through
two years of college and are unfamiliar with anything not shown on TV;
whose ignorance not only results from my work, it annually shrinks and
impoverishes the marketplace for it.
Use bigger words around them; make a game of it. I just got a peevish
note from a Current Executive saying that a character in a script whom I had
saying something “chidingly” was way out of line in such a serious situation
for “joking like this.” I cannot spend half of every day calling up my
twenty-five-year-old bosses and giving them elementary English lessons.
Oh and turn off the music while they’re studying. Most white kids
can’t even dance to music, let alone do homework to it.
When you rent a movie for the family, once a month make it a
documentary. Sure the little ones will whine, but they complain when you
tell them to quit shoving their sister’s head in the pool skimmer too. Maybe
they won’t end up as college professors, but there’ll be fewer waitresses
asking me why I want the rest of the newspaper when the Sports section’s
right there on top hon.
I’ll let you know if I notice any difference.
Andrew Nicholls
April 1, 2005
Studio City, CA