Read TALES FROM THE SCRIPT: THE BEHIND-THE-CAMERA ADVENTURES OF A TV COMEDY WRITER Online
Authors: Gene Perret
Again, we were happy to do it.
We were never invited back to another one. The
big,
decisive
problem happened because of a Los Angeles Rams football game.
The Rams were playing an important game on Monday evening and it
was blacked out in the Los Angeles area. However, CBS was to show
the game on their feed.
i opted to have dinner and then come back to the office to watch
the game.
Sometime during the telecast, i went into the conference room
where we had a refrigerator with snacks and cold drinks. i thought i
was alone in the offices, but i wasn’t. Mickey Ross was conducting a
meeting in the conference room with the writing staff.
i said, “What the hell is going on?”
Mickey said, “We’re going over a few scripts that are in trouble.”
i said, “Without the producers and the head-writers?”
Mickey offered some sort of excuse for why it wasn’t necessary
that we be there.
i said, “Well, you can have all of your meetings without us from
now on because as of right now, we quit.”
i stormed out.
i went back to my office and called my partner, Bill Richmond. i
told him i had just resigned both of us from the show. With no hesitation, Bill said, “Whatever you do, i’m with you.”
The following morning, Don nicholl called us into a meeting in
the nRW office. Mickey and Bernie were there, too.
Don said, “What would it take to make you stay?”
i said, “nothing.”
i told Don about the writers meeting behind the producers back
and added, “You guys don’t need producers. You want to do everything yourself.”
We resisted any efforts to keep us on the show.
Then, i suppose once Don realized that we couldn’t be swayed, he
pointed out some of our flaws. He said, “You guys showed a lack of
communication on this show.”
i asked how he arrived at that decision.
He said, “Well, for one thing you never came to any of the
Wednesday note sessions.”
i screamed, “We were emphatically told not to attend.”
He said, “By whom?”
i said, “Your secretary.”
He said, “My God, don’t take orders from her.”
i said, “She represented herself as speaking on your behalf.”
He said, “That’s nonsense.”
“Besides,” i said, “our office is only twelve steps from your office.
if you wanted us at those Wednesday meetings, why didn’t you march
over to our office and tell us to be there? isn’t that really a lack of
communication?”
We cleared out our desks the same day and were gone.
We were signed as producers/head-writers of Tim Conway’s upcoming variety show almost before we left.
Even after
The Carol Burnett Show
went off the air, Joe Hamilton kept
his offices at CBS. They were down the corridor from our
Three’s
Company
suite. Occasionally, Bill Richmond and i stopped in to
say hello and a chat. One time, Tim Conway was visiting, too. Tim
hadn’t done any regular weekly shows since Carol went off the air.
Joe asked how we were doing on
Three’s Company.
At the time,
things were going well and i told him so. i especially praised the cast. i
said, “John Ritter is probably the best physical comedian in television.”
Conway started to cough at that remark. His phony cough was meant
to say, “Hey, how about me? i’m a physical comedian, too, you know.”
When i got the message, i immediately corrected me statement. i
said, “Oh, i’m sorry. i mean John Ritter is probably the best physical
comedian
working
in television.”
We didn’t know it at the time, but Tim and Joe were discussing the
chances of getting a Tim Conway variety show on the CBS schedule.
They were feeling us out to see if they might lure us away from
Three’s
Company
to produce and head the writing staff on Tim’s new show.
As things turned out, they didn’t have to entice us; we were going
to quit before the end of the current season anyway. When we did
Getting back into variety was like coming home after a long exile.
We were coming back to a form of writing that we enjoyed, to a production company where we knew and liked the people we would be
working with. We were even coming back to our old offices.
Most of all, we were getting out of sitcom writing. neither Bill
Richmond nor i enjoyed writing sitcoms . . . for several reasons. it
meant writing for a limited amount of characters. Even on gang
shows like
Welcome Back, Kotter,
there were only so many characters
we could write for and only so many different stories that we could
do. After a while, the writing, the plots, the jokes became monotonous. in variety, we could create different characters each week. if
we liked a certain character, we could reprise it. if we tired of it after
several versions, we could retire that character. Each week’s writing
had a newness to it that was invigorating for the creative staff.
The stories after a sitcom had been on the air for awhile tended to
become frivolous. Of course, the sketches in variety are trivial, also,
but everyone knows and admits that. in sitcoms, people sometimes
felt that the stories were high drama with profound meaning. They
weren’t. They couldn’t be in a half-hour’s time.
Once on
Three’s Company
we were running down some ideas for
possible physical bits in one of the shows. Bill and i suggested that Jack
could accidentally slam the front door as he was passing by for whatever
reason. Mickey Ross, who thought everything was a dramatic highpoint
and that his silly sitcom would outlive Shakespeare’s plays, said, “i know
this apartment very well. That front door would never do that.”
Each character in a sitcom eventually thinks that he or she is the
star of the show. On
Welcome Back, Kotter
, for instance, Gabe Kaplan
felt that the show centered around Kotter. it didn’t. it featured the
Sweathogs. However, each Sweathog felt he was the main Sweathog.
He wasn’t. it was true on every show. Each person in the cast wanted
the funniest lines, the smartest come backs, and for the plot to revolve
around him or her.
Sooner or later, the actors appropriated their character. “i know
what that character would say or do because i created that character.”
That attitude was especially irritating to writers because the only true
creators are the writers. To create by definition means to “bring into
being from nothing
.
” The writer was the only person in television,
movies, or the theatre who started from nothing. The pages were
blank until the writer got an idea and typed it onto the page.
From that point on, everyone was adapting. The actor molded
the character that the writer created. The director added form to the
scenario and the dialogue that the writer created. Everyone after the
writer had a script to go on.
So it was annoying when performers claimed ownership of a
character.
in their defense, they were talented people who breathed life into
words that writers gave them, but they didn’t create characters; they
interpreted them.
For all those reasons, we were glad to get away from writing situation comedies.
We wanted to pattern Tim’s show after the popular Marty Feldman variety show and the Benny Hill shows. We wanted to have a lot
of activity on the screen to keep the hour moving and exciting. So we
did a lot of short bits and runners and shot most of them on location.
it was fun, but it was also troublesome.
We shot a series of golfing gags at Griffith Park. Bill and i wanted
to be on camera, and as producers, we could hire ourselves to be on
camera, so we did. We were in the first line of spectators watching the
action on the green as Tim Conway was putting. However, it began to
drizzle, and then it began to pour. We got soaked. However, we continued shooting anytime there was even a slight break in the deluge.
Soon, Bill and i wanted to get ourselves off camera. it was much
more pleasant to send other people out to be extras in the scene while
we remained comfortably in our trailer. You would think as producers who could put themselves on camera, we would have taken ourselves off camera, but we couldn’t because we were in the first shot
and the following ones had to match. So each time the rain let up, we
had to march out and be in the same spot for each shot.
Sometimes we paid a price to satisfy our egos.
We shot at the beach. We shot at a vacant bank and department
store in South Pasadena. We shot in the center of Los Angeles where
many of the silent movie comedies were filmed.
We even shot in the CBS parking lot. The premise of that bit was
that Tim was backing his car out and was doing such a bad job of it
that he had traffic totally stalled in the lot. People started to honk
their horns. Tim then began to conduct all the horn blowers. He led
them as a conductor would lead an orchestra, and indeed, the random
horn blowing became a symphony.
The soundman on the show did a masterful job. He recorded
many different car horns, then categorized them as to what musical
note they were, then he arranged them so that they played a tune. it
was very skillful and turned out to be a unique, funny sketch.
Of course, we also did the sketches, runners, and bits in the studio, too. Some of the people in the cast were from radio. They had a
very successful advertising business and were a big success in radio.
They wrote their own radio commercials, so they wanted to write
some sketches, too.
One of them came in one day with a sketch idea. She read it to
us, and every so often she said, “Put something funny in here.” After a
while, we stopped her and said, “You know, the ‘put something funny
in here’ is the real writing. if you want to do a sketch for the show, you
put the ‘something funny’ in and then show it to us.”
Our primary goal was to get Tim Conway renewed. He had
starred in several variety shows and sitcoms, but none had been
picked up for the second year. He was on
McHale’s Navy
for many
seasons, but it wasn’t his show. The gag around town was that they
should have Tim Conway star in the Vietnam War. That way, it would
be over in 13 weeks. it was such a running gag that Tim had a personalized license plate that read, “13 WKS.”
We got off to a good start. We had a good writing staff, Tim had
a lot of input, and the short gags and runners worked nicely. We were
very proud of our inaugural show. After the taping, we ran into a
CBS executive, who said to Bill Richmond and me, “You know what’s
wrong with this show? Some parts of it are funnier than others.”
We said, “That’s a shame. We tried to keep them all the same
amount of funny.”
it was a dumb, but typical statement. We couldn’t always have
the same level of intensity in humor—in fact, in anything. Even if we
could accomplish that, it would have been self-defeating because it
would have made the humor monotonous. The glory of humor was
that the laughter erupted in certain spots. The artistry of it was in
designing those ideas that lead up to the big laughs. That executive
missed the point entirely.
One drawback on the show was that the production staff and the
crew were all professionals from
The Carol Burnett Show,
but the cast
wasn’t. The magic that happened or evolved on her show wasn’t happening on his. The performers were good, but as a unit, they didn’t have
what Carol’s cast had. That caused us some problems as producers.
Before one musical number, we spoke to the female performer
and told her to relax and do that bit as herself. it was a song that was
reminiscent of Carol Burnett, but we didn’t want her to do a caricature of Carol. We encouraged her to bring her own style to the song.
She rushed into her trailer in tears, feeling that we had accused her
of not being as good as Carol, but we had done no such thing. We could
have; she wasn’t Carol. We simply didn’t want her to try to be Carol.
Another cast member sometimes disrupted the sketches by adlibbing in the middle of them. He’d “break the fourth wall.” if something unexpected happened, that performer stepped out of character
and either joked to other cast members or to the audience.
Bill and i had a talk with him and asked him to refrain from doing
that. He got very upset at us, saying, “Harvey Korman did that all the
time on
The Carol Burnett Show
and nobody ever got upset with him.”
He had a point, but then the reality hit us—Harvey always adlibbed
in character. That’s what made the difference. if Harvey was playing a
gangster and a picture unexpectedly fell off the wall, Harvey would do
a joke, but as a gangster. if he was playing a werewolf and somebody
missed a cue, Harvey would chastise him or her as a werewolf. He
never came out of character. i’m not sure, though, that the other actor
ever really accepted our explanation.
Tim’s show was never quite the same as the old Carol Burnett
show, but it was good television entertainment, and we did get Tim
Conway partly renewed. CBS picked the show up for the next season,
but as a half-hour show instead of a full-hour show.
The network thinking was that
The Carol Burnett Show
was
trimmed down to a half-hour and sold into syndication and it was
doing well. They thought a half-hour of Tim Conway comedy would
be tighter and funnier than the hour show.
Again, executive thinking, like the guy who thought all comedy
should be the same amount of funny. Those executives thought that
since Carol’s show condensed nicely to a half-hour, then Tim’s would
be more effective in the half-hour format. The difference was that Carol’s was trimmed down after it was in the can. it was Monday morning
quarterbacking. Once the show was shot, we knew where the funniest
pieces were. We could trim down to them and make the show more
compact and even funnier than the original. We couldn’t pick out the
best of a show that hadn’t been taped yet. Comedy was guesswork and
we were only guessing at which the funniest half-hour was.
nevertheless, the network cut the show back to a half-hour.
Then, the problem was that they wanted all of us working on the show
to reduce our salaries proportionally. They wanted us to work at half
of what we had signed on for. Again, the executive logic was that if a
show was only half of what it was before, we only had to work half as
hard. not so. in fact, we probably had to work harder to deliver a fair
amount of laughs in a smaller amount of time.
Someone asked Mark Twain to give a talk once and asked how long
it would take him to prepare. He asked, “How long do i have to speak?”
They asked why that mattered. Twain said (and i’m paraphrasing), “if
you want me to talk for an hour, i can have it ready in an hour. if you
want me to speak for ten minutes, i’ll need a week to prepare.”
Bill and i refused the salary cut. We had a contract. if the network wanted the show, they’d have to honor that contract. The contract also called for us to get an increase for the second season.
Joe Hamilton was somewhat shocked. He said he didn’t care
about the money because it was not his money, but the network’s. it
wouldn’t cost him or save him anything regardless of what we agreed
to with the network. However, he did say, “Look, if you do this for
them, they’ll owe you a favor.”
i objected to that. Again, it was that same erroneous executive logic.
i asked Joe, “When do we collect the favor?”
He didn’t know what i meant.
i said, “if we do a great job this second season and make this show
a hit, they’ll want us no matter what. Hiring us then, is not a favor,
but if we screw it up and destroy the show, they won’t give us another
chance. They’d replace us in an instant.” i didn’t say it, but i thought,
they’d probably use the money they’re saving on our salaries to get new
producers.
So again i asked, “When do we collect on the favor?”
Joe had no answer for that because there was no answer. Getting
an iOU from a network was like having Jack the Ripper walk us home
at night.
We held our ground. The only compromise we made was that we
agreed to forego our increase. However, losing a 10 percent increase
was preferable to losing 50 percent of our salary.
Towards the end of the second season of the Conway show, i had
symptoms and a stress test that showed cardio-vascular problems. i
had open-heart surgery before the season ended.
The production crew sent a large frog made of green candy to the
hospital after the surgery. The card read, “Don’t croak.”
Effectively, i was off the show for the last several weeks of production and it looked like that would be the last year of the show. Cancellation seemed to be a definite possibility. i was not supposed to go
back to work, but i did get an okay to be there for the last rehearsal of
the season and the writers meeting that followed.
i was the running straight gag for the meeting. Tim said, “i don’t
know, this sketch seems to be dying—whoops—sorry, Gene.” “i
don’t want to make too many changes because it would cut the heart
out of the sketch—whoops—no offense, Gene.”
i outlived the show. it was dropped at the end of that second
season.