TALES FROM THE SCRIPT: THE BEHIND-THE-CAMERA ADVENTURES OF A TV COMEDY WRITER (12 page)
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Authors: Gene Perret
The Carol Burnett Show
writing staff accepting their first Emmy Award
in 1974. L. to R. (back row” Barry Harman, Bill Richmond, Barry
Levinson, Arnie Kogen, Dick Clair, Roger Beatty. (front row) Gene
Perret, Ed Simmons, Jenna McMahon, Gary Belkin, Rudy DeLuca.
Back at the Burnett offices, we unwrapped our statues and admired them. i read the plaque at the bottom of my Emmy and noticed
that the word “writers” was misspelled. The engraving read, “wri ers.”
i told the group, “This is wild. On my plaque there’s no ‘t’ in the word
‘writers.’” Bill Richmond said, “Really? Both ‘t’s’ are there on mine.”
He was kidding, of course, but i wasn’t. i still cherish my misspelled Emmy statuette.
We repeated in 1974-1975 with most of the same team of writers, with the exception of Barry Harman, who had moved on to other
projects.
The previous year, when we came onstage at the Emmy Awards,
the camera had a close-up of me only once. While it was on me, i
covered my face with my hand, but during the awards for 1974-1975,
it looked like i had bribed the cameraman. no matter which camera
they used to shoot our group, i was facing it. i made up for the camera
time that i missed that first year.
The third season of our administration was also the year that
Saturday Night Live
premiered. it was an innovative show that generated
a lot of attention and won the writing award for Variety.
They won the following year, too.
We bounced back, though, at the 1977-78 awards telecast. Our
writing staff captured the Emmy on the last season of
The Carol Burnett Show
. The staff that year consisted of Ed Simmons, Roger Beatty,
Rick Hawkins, Liz Sage, Robert illes, James Stein, Franelle Silver,
The Carol Burnett Show
writing staff accepting their third Emmy
award in 1978. L. to R. (back row) Roger Beatty, Rick Hawkins,
Jenna McMahon, Bill Richmond, James, Stein. (front row)
Dick Clair, Larry Siegel, Franelle Silver, Robert Illes,
Gene Perret, Liz Sage, Ed Simmons.
Larry Siegel, Tim Conway, Dick Clair, Jenna McMahon, Bill Richmond, and i. Barry Harman, who had left our staff after the first season also captured an Emmy this year for writing an episode of
All in
the Family
.
That awards show was telecast from the Civic Auditorium in Pasadena. Ed Simmons and his wife, Bobbi, rented a limousine for the
affair and came to our house, near the Civic Auditorium, to dress. My
wife, Joanne, and i rode to the affair with them in the limo.
My kids and their friends all rode to the auditorium on their bikes
and got right up front. When our limo arrived, all of our kids and
their friends cheered like crazy when we got out of our limo. Hearing
that uproar, everyone else cheered like crazy, too. They didn’t know
who we were, but they knew that we must have been somebody special if that many youngsters knew us. Someone in the crowd finally
asked, “Who is that?”
My daughter proudly said, “That’s my daddy.”
The cheering stopped.
Unlike the first year we were nominated, we had no idea whether
we would win or not. However, Ed and i told our wives, “if we win,
we won’t be back in the audience.” We wanted them to allow us some
time to go through the press rooms, have a backstage drink, and then
meet the ladies outside, get our limo, and go to a nearby restaurant,
The Chronicle, for dinner.
We won and we met them outside, as planned.
We asked the attendant to call our limo from the parking garage,
and he did. no limo arrived. We asked him to call again. He did. no
limo arrived. He called again, but there was no response. He sent
someone to check on our limo.
Our limo and our limo driver had disappeared. We figured the
driver took one look at us, decided we didn’t have a chance of winning, so he took the limousine and went to visit his girlfriend or
something like that. We don’t know what happened, but we took a
cab to the restaurant and never saw the limousine again.
Writing Sitcom Episodes
Television can be an insecure business. i had studied and worked
hard to become a solid, one-line writer. Then, i had to learn the craft
of sketch writing. Both of those skills served me well in establishing
myself as an accomplished variety show writer. Then, variety shows
began to disappear from the tube.
On my first year in television, there were fourteen musical-variety
shows on the air:
The Andy Williams Show, The Carol Burnett Show, The
Dean Martin Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, Glen Campbell’s Goodtime
Hour, The Hollywood Palace, The Jackie Gleason Show, Jimmy Durante
Presents the Lennon Sisters Hour, The Kraft Music Hall, Laugh-In, The
Leslie Uggams Show, The Red Skelton Show, This Is Tom Jones,
and the
one i worked on,
The Jim Nabors Hour
. That meant that at least 140
comedy writers had employment.
in 1978 on the last year of
The Carol Burnett Show,
there were just
three other variety shows on the air:
Donny and Marie, The Red Foxx
Comedy Hour,
and
The Richard Pryor Show.
That’s a lot of gag-writers
looking for work.
working on
The Carol Burnett Show
. We decided that it would be wise
145
to begin to build credits in sitcom writing so that we’d have some
credibility when Burnett went off the air.
We began promoting ourselves for story sessions and we had
good luck. The producing team of Bernie Kukoff and Jeff Harris were
looking for stories for their show,
Joe and Sons
, starring Richard Castellano. We pitched them a tale about the young kid, the “Son” of
Joe and Sons
, minding a plant for his friend who was going on vacation. The friend treated the plant like a pet, but when Joe saw it in
the house, he mistook it for marijuana. That was the basic plot. The
producers bought it and gave us the assignment.
We began to learn the idiosyncrasies of sitcom writing and dealing with producers and networks. in our first draft, we had Joe take
one tiny leaf from the plant and taste it, supposedly testing to see if it
was contraband or not. The producers objected. “The friend treats
this plant like a beloved pet,” they said. “We can’t mutilate it that way.”
We thought that was a bit silly, but it was their game, so we played
by their rules. We rewrote the script and deleted the part where Joe
tore off one tiny leaf.
We got paid for our work, and then we went back to our work
on
The Carol Burnett Show
. When our
Joe and Sons
episode aired, we
were stunned. Jerry Stiller co-starred on the show as Joe’s best friend.
After the in-house rewrite that was approved by the same producers,
Jerry Stiller was holding the beloved plant when a policeman came to
the door regarding another matter. The Stiller character panicked and
ate the entire plant . . . the
entire plant.
We did land a second assignment with
Joe and Sons
. i forget the
basic premise, but after writing most of the script, we were stuck for
an ending. We had sort of painted ourselves into a corner and were
having trouble resolving the plot.
One evening, when the Burnett workday ended, Bill and i resolved to stay at the office and finalize the last few pages of that
Joe and
Sons
script. We wanted to end it, get it sent off to Kukoff and Harris,
and get paid. We also wanted to find out how the story ended. Until
then, we had no idea.
So we put away our work on
The Carol Burnett Show
, and put a
blank page into the typewriter. Almost as soon as the page was positioned, we got a call from Kukoff and Harris. “Put whatever you’ve
got into an envelope and get it to us immediately,” they said.
“That’s all right. We’ve been cancelled. Get us whatever pages
you have and we’ll issue you a check in payment.”
We sent the unfinished manuscript up to their office and will
never know how the story ended.
it did end in a paycheck, though.
Mort Lochman, a former Bob Hope writer-producer, was producing
All in the Family
. Their offices were down the corridor from our
Burnett cubicles. We passed in the hallways often. Mort asked Bill
Richmond and i to come up with some stories for
All in the Family.
We agreed to a pitch session and spent an afternoon and an evening
working on possible story lines. When we had about five or six that we
felt we could write, we called and set up an appointment with Mort.
We came up with another devious scheme, though. We wrote
each of the premises on a single index card and planted them in different pockets. At the pitch session with Mort and Milt Josefsberg,
another former Hope writer, we started verbalizing our story lines.
The first concerned the birthday of Archie Bunker’s grandson. We
had Archie buying the youngster a toy gun. Meathead, Archie’s sonin-law and the kid’s father, objected to that. He had bought the young
boy a doll. The basic conflict was about whether or not the kid should
have a manly toy like a gun or a sissy toy like a doll.
Mort and Milt were intrigued by that tale and seemed inclined to
buy it. However, like all good producers, they said, “What else have
you got?”
We said, “That’s it.”
They said, “You come to a pitch session with only one story?”
We said, “Yeah.”
Then, we took the index card out of our pocket and showed it to
them. it had only the one story line written on it.
They said, “You guys have courage, but we’ll buy it.”
We got the sale.
if we had gone in with the other story lines we had conceived,
they probably would have been torn. “Do i like the first story or the
third one? Of course, that last one you pitched wasn’t bad, either.”
They would have wavered back and forth among several of them and
the meeting might have ended with them wanting to mull it over. We
would have left with no sale and chances were that they would have
never made a decision nor called with a final sale.
We wrote the story about the birthday and the toy gun versus the
doll. They probably had some notes and we did a rewrite. Mort loved
the script. Each time we passed in the corridor after that, he said,
“You guys gotta come up with a new script for us.”
it just so happened that we were tied up on Carol Burnett’s show
and couldn’t find the time to come up with a new script. We kept
putting him off.
nevertheless, he kept asking. “When are you guys coming in for
another story meeting?”
Then we watched the episode of
All in the Family
that we had written, only to find that
one line in the script was ours.
The next time Mort asked us for a new script, we said, “Just use
the one we gave you before.”
it was neither uncommon nor illogical for a producer to love a
script so much and yet change every line of it before taping. Stories
have a certain feel, and that was what Mort liked about our script.
The story worked. However, a script went through many changes
from first draft to taping. it was read by all the performers and they
made notes and offered suggestions. They slightly changed lines to
suit their speech patterns, and some wanted a certain joke improved
or changed. Then, they had a table reading and many people offered
notes and suggestions. During rehearsals, stage business was altered
and lines were changed. All those changes were gradual and didn’t really change the story. Yet, when the script was finalized, it was totally
different from the original. So, it is conceivable that they would have
liked our work and yet changed it drastically.
All those adventures were diversions. Our main work was on
The
Carol Burnett Show.”
The episodic writing we did was an investment in
our future. it was almost a sideline for us. We knew that the Burnett show
would end and we’d be thrust into sitcom work in earnest. We learned
there were many more heartbreaks when we worked on it full time.
Welcome Back, Kotter
After Carol Burnett retired her show, we were out of work. it didn’t
take long to get our next assignment, though. Bill Richmond and i
agreed to produce
Welcome Back, Kotter.
Ed Simmons was influential
in landing us the job. Ed was hired as the new executive producer
of the show. Well, he wasn’t really the executive producer because
Jimmy Komack, who originated the show, held that title, and he
wasn’t the producer because Ed insisted that Bill and i be brought
on as producers. Ed was in limbo. He asked the Writers Guild if he
could simply list himself as “Boss” on the credits. They refused. To
this day, i don’t know what title he finally wound up with. it must be
on the credits.
Rick Hawkins and Liz Sage also came along with Ed, Bill, and i
from
The Carol Burnett Show.
it seemed like the ideal job because the show was relatively successful and we had a nucleus of writers that we knew, liked, and had
worked with before. After about five weeks on the job, we all resigned.
There had been problems on the show in previous seasons. Gabe
Kaplan, the star of the show, didn’t care for Jimmy Komack. Marcia
Strassman, who played Mrs. Kotter on the sitcom, didn’t get along
with Gabe. Komack wasn’t crazy about Kaplan. There were several
feuds going on. However, our writing and producing staff honestly
came onto the show with an open mind. We wanted to write well and
make the show even better than it was before. We weren’t aware of
the specifics of the feuds and we didn’t want to know the details. We
wanted to deal with everyone as fairly as we could and not take sides.
Jimmy Komack was pretty above board when we came onto the show.
He didn’t bad mouth anyone and didn’t share any of his likes or dislikes
with us. He treated us simply as writers and producers. Fair enough.
Gabe didn’t have the same attitude. He assumed that because
Komack hired us, we were on Komack’s side. He was wrong, but it
never stopped him from acting on his belief.
We first met Gabe at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills. Komack
scheduled a luncheon meeting with Gabe, Ed Simmons, Bill Richmond, and i. it was a “get acquainted—let’s find out where we all
stand” kind of luncheon. Since Jimmy, Ed, Bill, and i worked in the
same office, we went to the luncheon meeting together. Gabe arrived
later and alone. The first thing he said as he sat down was, “You used
my name on the reservation to get a better table, huh?”
i suppose whoever made the reservation did, but it’s still an arrogant way to greet the new staff. Gabe was petulant from the beginning.
i don’t remember anything of substance coming out of that meeting
because Kaplan didn’t want to hear it. He had his feud. in his mind, he
knew we were Komack’s lackeys. He wanted to be irritated.
When we got into production, he became even more troublesome.
We wrote the shows, rewrote them, rehearsed them for a few days,
and then Gabe showed up on Wednesday (sometimes Thursday) and
found fault with everything—the premise, the plot, the scenes, and
the individual jokes. We had no objection to him voicing his opinions.
it was basically his show and he was the one who had to stand on camera and recite the lines. He was entitled to request changes.
Our objection was with the timing of Gabe’s complaints. it took
time to make changes, especially basic alterations to the story line.
We didn’t mind changing a few lines of dialogue, adding a new and
better joke, or even rewriting portions of scenes. All television writers are used to working late into the night and coming up with new
dialogue and funnier jokes. We even put in late hours making considerable scene changes, but it was totally unreasonable to ask for a
major rewrite starting with plot point number one just one or two
days before the taping. Good writing can’t be done that quickly, nor
can the cast rehearse the new teleplay well enough to give a credible
performance on tape day.