VALUABLE LESSONS - Nicholls + Vickers

Valuable Lessons 1 

VALUABLE 

LESSONS 

How I Made (And Lost) Seven Million Dollars 

Writing For Over A Hundred Shows You Never Heard Of 

ANDREW NICHOLLS


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


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


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


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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’s- 

Visiting-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


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.


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


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?


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


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.


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.


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


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.


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


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


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


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


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.


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


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,


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.”)


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).


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.


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:


“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.


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


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.


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


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.


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.”


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 = mc 2 ,” 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.


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.


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.


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


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;


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?”


- “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


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!,


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).


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 out- 

SATS a self-educated guy who grew up on a farm. (The Simpsons is a


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


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


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


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


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?”


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?


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,


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.


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


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.


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


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 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. 

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. 

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 

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. 

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 

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. 

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 

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!” 

“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? 

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.


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. 

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 

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 given 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 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 

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 64 th 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... 

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 64 th 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 

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 

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 

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 bumper-


stickers said at the time, to “Let The Eastern Bastards Freeze In The Dark.” 

It was a rich time for satire North of the 49th. 

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 

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. 

(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 

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.) 

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? 

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 

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 seventy-


seven-hour Greyhound ride home and returned, hallucinating, to Toronto. In 

September, BCTV sent us the $750. 

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 5 th Street bus station, grabbed a Rent-A- 

Wreck 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 

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 

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: 

B.C Man. Alta. Sask. Ont. Que. N.S. .... 

Brand A 3.1 4.7 2.2 2.0 11.1 9.8 4.0 

Brand B 5.4 3.1 2.8 1.7 12.7 8.2 2.9 

Brand C 1.1 3.8 3.8 0.9 9.1 8.5 3.3 

Brand D 2.6 0.3 4.0 2.0 7.7 3.9 1.8


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


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


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.


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


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


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.


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


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


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


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


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-


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?


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


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.


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


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


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!”


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


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? 

Yes. 

(THE PATIENT DOES) 

PATIENT 

DOCTOR 

You must be a big disappointment 

to them. Touch your clavicle. 

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)


PATIENT 

What are they? 

(HANDS OVER A SLIP OF PAPER) 

DOCTOR 

Slippers - that floor’s a real 

toe-freezer. And if you need me, 

call this number. 

“Seven”? 

PATIENT 

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


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...”


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.


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


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


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


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-


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


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


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.


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


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?


... and his ex wives. 

BEVERLY 

They were in the circus. The 

problem was, there were never two 

circuses in town at the same time. 

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.


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.


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


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. Don’t 

know why) 

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.)


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 2 nd 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?


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.


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


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


(YELLS TO THE BUILDING:) 

How did you know 

Mickey's plan wouldn't go? 

JOHNNY 

His getaway car. It's a Hyundai. 

JOHNNY 

Mick! Throw your weapon out 

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.”


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...”)


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. A PLATE. 

JOHNNY ENTERS TO PODIUM.) 

JOHNNY 

The complete history of the world and two Eggo waffles, 

in four minutes. 

(JOHNNY POPS TOASTER DOWN)


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


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,


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. JOHNNY SPEEDS UP:) 

Kaiser sore, World at War,


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


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


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-


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


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? You look 

like someone’s maid. 

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)


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 – ?”


“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


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


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)


“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,


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.


You, sir? 

Hitler. 

WILLIE 

OTIS 

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) 

OTIS 

Get up! 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.


NICOLE 

I'm standin' here with a taste of 

nothing you big fat swindler! 

(NICOLE BEGINS KICKING OTIS. SHE APPEALS TO THE ADULTS WHO LOOK 

AT HER IN HORROR) 

NICOLE 

C'mon, I'm just a kid! Help me 

kick him! 

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.”


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.


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) 

OTIS 

Savings. 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


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


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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


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 250,000,000 th 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)


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)


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”


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


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


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,


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. 

(SHE SHAKES STINGLEY'S HAND) 

CLANCY 

Oh, my name's Clancy. Clancy 

Allen. 

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.


(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.


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?


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.


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.


(SFX: KNOCK ON DOOR) 

HARVEY 

Excuse me. That's probably a more 

competent agent. Com-ing! 

(HE TURNS THE DOORKNOB WITH THE TISSUE. A ROOM SERVICE BOY IS 

THERE WITH A CAN) 

HARVEY 

I ordered tea. This is Raid. 

ROOM SERVICE 

You used the bed yet? 

No. 

HARVEY 

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


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


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


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


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


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?


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.


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. 


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)


Do we have a golf tee so he can 

sit down? 


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? 


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


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.”


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


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)


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


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


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.


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.


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.”


(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 Done- 

Away-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


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


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.


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


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 123 rd 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:


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”


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


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


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.


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.


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


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. Robert checks up on his daughter at a rap concert 

2. Robert gets in a fight with his sister’s abusive boyfriend 

3. Robert thinks his brother stole his VCR, but makes a mistake 

4. 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.


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.


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


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.”


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


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


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


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) 

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. 

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. 

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 

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 

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, 

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, 

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 

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


He hurls it at the wall. 

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... 


... 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. 


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-Riding- 

Hood-eating, un-cuddly truth. We 

don't want reality, Hingle. 

HINGLE 

You're telling me, sir. 

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 

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? 

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 

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 Witt- 

Thomas-Harris after a few episodes had already been shot. (Notably, W-T- 

H 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 

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 

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 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 

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 

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 African- 

Canadian, 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. 

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 

– 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 

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 

It was great. Sunshine all the 

time, you could golf every day. I 

love Palm Springs. 

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. 

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 

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. (Sub- 

Ernie, 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. 

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 

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 

Without these, I can't even make 

out a face! Are you a man or a 

woman? No, don't tell me! Just 

leave me with my grief and my 

faulty memory!


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 

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 

Where? Oh, you don't mean -- 

BENNY 

Why not? He's met you, he likes 

you. 

CLANCY 

How do you know? 

CLANCY SINKS INTO A CHAIR. 

BENNY 

Would he drink himself unconscious 

in front of someone he didn't 

trust? I know him. You're hired! 

CLANCY 

Wow. This is like a dream. 

Isn't it? 

BENNY 

ON THE FLOOR, ALEX GROANS, WHICH LIGHTS A FIRE UNDER BENNY. HE 

THRUSTS THE PAPERS HE WAS CARRYING UNDER CLANCY'S NOSE. 

BENNY 

Time to start your career! Sign 

these.


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. 

CLANCY TAKES THE PAPERS. 

BENNY 

No time. Let her see your name on 

the credits, it'll be a wonderful 

surprise. Sign. 

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. 

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. 

CLANCY 

Holy cow. Ninety thousand 

dollars. 

BENNY 

A year. That's why they call me 

The Shark. 

CLANCY 

They do? Are you being honest 

with me? 

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 selfdestructive 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Daddy? 

WINDY (O.S.) 

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 

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. 

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 

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. 

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 

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 

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 

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? 

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) 

“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 Gram- 

Gram 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 

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 

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, anti- 

Catholic 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 

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. 

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. 

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 

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. 

------------------- 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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. 

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! 

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 

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) 

. 

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 

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? 

I quit. 

LOCAL 

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 

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 Anti- 

Family 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. 

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. 

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: 

They retreat. 

DRAKE 

Caleb! She’ll bring everyone down 

if we don’t retreat! 

CALEB 

Okay, give the order to retreat. 

DRAKE 

(giving the order) 

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 

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. 

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? 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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. 

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

VALUABLE LESSONS - Nicholls + Vickers

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