Darrell Vickers – Kevin’s Castle Part One: I Nelvana Promised You a Rose Garden

I Nelvana Promised You a Rose Garden

Show business careers are all about ebb and flow. Minor ups and seemingly endless, bottomless, psyche-demolishing downs. As this story pops its initially happy head out of its comfy gopher hole, Andrew and I were flowing to beat the band. We were being paid a king’s ransom and change to consult on the cursed and doomed and damned Magic Hour when we received a call from CAA. A producer had just sold a pilot concept to the Disney Channel and they wanted Andrew and my humble self to develop it and, if it was picked up, to executive produce the pilot. Well, sure.

Darrell Vickers – Have Mercy Part IV – Show Them No Mercy!

As this happy-go-lucky little episode commences, Andrew and I were un-merrily scampering back to our very temporary offices on the Warner lot to begin unnecessary script rewrites while simultaneously searching for a new leading lady. Mr. Steinberg had wandered off in search of a phone to fire our old leading lady. We, by far, had the easier task. David said that Heather cried limpid, glistening, voluptuous tears that you could sell in any adult book store in America when she received the unfortunate news.

Darrell Vickers – Have Mercy Part Three: A Title or a Cry for Help?

 

Andrew and I now had our blindingly luminescent stars (Daniel Hugh Kelly and the ever-lovely Heather Locklear) and, thanks to Ellie Kanner, we also managed to accrue a rootin’-tootin’ supporting cast. Paxton Whitehead (Gilbert – the British concierge), Stuart Pankin (Bertrand – the French chef), Julie Payne (the maid) and a young Patrick Warburton as the muscle-bound bellboy were dreams to work with. Talented and cooperative? To quote the legendary Wally Shawn: “Inconceivable!”

Darrell Vickers – Have Mercy Part 2 – There Is No Easy Way from the Earth to the Stars

Back to the Future:

As Part Two of the Have Mercy saga commences, Larry Hagman was still tethered to our plucky little pilot. The outline had been okayed and fluffy-fluffy joy-joy was falling down upon the land like the screaming Wallendas, but now we had to actually write this sucker. All things being considered, pounding out 40-odd pages of funny shouldn’t really have been that much of a biggie. Andrew and I had written other pilots. Egad, we’d cranked out about a dozen of them in the previous year but there was something disquietingly different about this pile of paper and ink. Perhaps we were just tired from a non-stop year of wearing out typewriter ribbons. Perhaps it was little Davey mouth-breathing down our necks with his inane suggestions and dicta. For some reason, the all-important first major scene was not rolling out like Gene Simmons’ tongue at a Kiss concert.

Darrell Vickers – Have Mercy Part 1 – I Cheat the Hagman

Andrew Nicholls and I hardly had a moment to paint an old lady during the hustley-bustley year of 1991. We were as hot as Meg Ryan before she surgically turned her lips into sea-plane pontoons.

Darrell Vickers – Shut Up Kids Part 3 – Production Everything About it is Appealing!

Every young writer’s wet dream of dreams is to get a pilot picked up and have it coroneted as a network series. A Holy Grail filled with Hebrew National Hotdogs. It’s the equivalent of finding out your rich uncle died and left you his sex cult. It’s like going to the cupboard and discovering someone has eaten all your Fiber One cereal and all that’s left is Captain Crunch. Like finding out the doctor who gave you your last colonoscopy died very slowly in a car wreck. But it’s not all candy corn sprinkled with fructose. No siree Robert. By the time we reached the conclusion of this torturous, tortuous road, Andrew Nicholls and I looked worse than Nick Nolte’s mugshot.

Darrell Vickers – Shut Up Kids Part 2: Casting – A Little Dab’ll Do Ya

Very few execs dare to call themselves writers. Sitting alone in a room for hours on end, pounding out words that some future idiot will tear to pieces, is not a lot of fun. It is work of the dullest nature. Drudgery. For many, it is tedium beyond the endurance of saints.  Like having psychotic gnomes drilling birdhouse-sized holes into your cerebral cortex as you stare bleakly at a white computer screen that mocks your suffering. The abject blood-freezing fear of the untyped page has turned even the most talented of scribes to booze, drugs, bocce ball and eventually blessed death.

Darrell Vickers – Shut Up Kids

For the Want of a Horse

Andrew Nicholls and I were finishing up our last year of The Tonight Show and we were busier than Robert Downey Jr.’s lawyer in the ‘90s. Any reasonably priced writing assignment that didn’t involve a rapping kangaroo was graciously accepted.

Darrell Vickers – The Paul Sands of Iwo Jima

When the treacherous and unpredictable seas of art and commerce enervate even the most dauntless of our kind, itinerant scribes oft times find themselves in want of a home. A sufficiently peaceful harbor in which to moor their buffeted and battered vessels. ‘Tis then we weary wordsmiths seek out a major studio in hopes of procuring an overall deal.

Darrell Vickers: How I Went from a Suite at the Four Seasons to a Shitty, Bug Infested Apartment on Avenue Road in Three Easy Steps.

Andrew and I had died on gone to showbiz heaven. We’d somehow been hired to come in and help George Carlin put together a pilot he was writing and starring in for HBO. This was about as likely as John McCain quitting the Senate to teach Anger Management seminars.