VALUABLE LESSONS - Nicholls + Vickers

Valuable Lessons 151
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