Darrell Vickers – Oh, You’re Back

From California to Coventry

As Inquisitionally torturous as traversing the U.S. of A. by bus had been heading due west, at least our ultimate destination was the undisputed entertainment capital of the world. Andrew and I were now being forced to endure the very same 72 hour crucible, trapped inside an unhygienic, glaciated stink-pit, just to get back to Oshawa. Clearly, we were being subjected to unspeakably cruel and unrelenting retribution for the simple crime of intermittently enjoying ourselves.

Darrell Vickers – First Trip Part 2 – Making Up Reality

Andrew and I had been ensconced in the fire-hazard hills above the City of Angels for about a week and fortune had smiled down upon us like it thought we were somebody else. I’d shared a chat and a giggle with a half-naked woman, we’d eaten at The Sizzler and my apartment in Oshawa began to seem like a badly decorated, foul-smelling dream. By the time The Fifth Estate arrived, Nicholls & Vickers had become as Hollywood as a high colonic gift certificate.

Darrell Vickers – The First Visit: Part One – The Naked and the Red

Preface:

While I shall be highlighting some mildly unflattering aspects of Alan Thicke’s character in the peerlessly eloquent pages before you, I wish to take great pains to note that Alan recognized our talent more than any living soul in Canada. He thought enough of what Andrew and I had to offer to invite us down to L.A. and billet us in his guest house. Was he a tough boss to work for? PHEW! Read on. But he opened up vast new worlds for us and forever changed our lives and for that I will always be deeply grateful.

Darrell Vickers – A Trip to Not Very Bountiful

There were some mega, whopping and ultra ginormous Scooby-doings goin’ down at The Comedy Bank! Mr. Haley was practically vibrating when he called us. He’d just concluded a convivial chin-wag with THE Alan Thicke. Alan had read an article his mother had snipped from a local publication and wished to sample the wares of Graham’s stable of sardonic scribes. Al generously provided areas of his public persona that could be mined for levity and was anxious to see what the jolly jesters at the Bank would come up with. This was precisely the kind of phone call I’d been dreaming about since my parents replaced the crib in my nursery with a foosball table. In fact, I still have a birthmark in the shape of a left midfielder’s head.

Darrell Vickers – It’s Only Words: How Hollywood Made Me Thicke to My Thtomache

I became a professional scribe at the tender, pre-Tinder, age of 18. Since the halcyon days of my humble, date-free youth, words have fed my family and made it possible for me to accumulate a record collection that would sink most medium-size boats. While I have enjoyed an unreasonable amount of success through the decades, armed with only pen in hand and the dictionary in my head, in show business there is forever a micro-thin line between gainful employment and having to mug a giant-arrow-spinning condo clown for his Subway coupons. This is the harrowing, tongue-swallowing tale of how a couple of simple words almost cost me my entire Hollywood career, just as it was breaching the birth canal.

Darrell Vickers – Thicke of the Night Part III – Dark Fantasy

Very few enterprises begin their days with as much jocundity and hubris as Thicke of the Night at its inchoation. Fred Silverman’s latest blockbuster proclaimed itself to be a new and bold spring morning that would lead moribund late-night entertainment out of its dark and dreary winter. The talk show format had become stale and uninteresting. A pallid and tiresome visitor in the sexless bedrooms of America.

Darrell Vickers: Thicke of the Night Part Two – Location, Location, Location.

Part One can be found here.

When poised, teetering precariously on the very edge of a vast and black eternity, most of us will gaze back reflectively upon those pivotal moments in our brief time on this green Earth. The roads taken and the byways left untraveled. The friends made and the bastards who stole your girl. The victories briefly celebrated and the losses bitterly mourned and gone over and over and over again in your head until foul and ugly thoughts begin to rage like a demonic Jovian storm within you. Your cranial synapses start to explode like overcooked popcorn and all sense and reason is frantically cast aside as you are sucked down, flailing and screaming into a soul-shredding vortex of irreversible madness…but I digress.

Darrel Vickers:The Long and the Short of It

Andrew and I have had the honor of working for three legendary geniuses during our higgledy-piggledy writing career.  One was Johnny Carson.  The second was George Carlin.  This is the story of the third.

The Beginning….

Once upon a time, two young and impoverished Canadian writers were sitting in a cramped, cockroach infested apartment in Van Nuys (The Oshawa of L.A.) with no prospects and virtually no hope.  They had bravely ventured down to this mystical land of tinsel and broken dreams a scant six months earlier and were now facing the ominous fate of having to go back to Oshawa (the Oshawa of Oshawa)…and it was all their own fault!