Darrell Vickers – Ted Zeigler Part 8 – Lights, Camera, Radio!

Andrew and I had found our tiny acorn. A funny-dressed, putty-foreheaded, professional goof who living in a rundown bungalow he bought off Cher’s mother. Eventually, this eccentric acorn would grow to make us two of the most envied writers in Hollywood. But, as today’s story begins, our little seed was hosting a CBC Radio pilot for us for a lousy six hundred bucks.

Darrell Vickers – Ted Zeigler Part Three: Hollywood!

By the 1960s-killing-year of 1970, Ted had decided to seek fame and fortune in a place where a vast majority of people with that very same dream end up as drug addicts, prostitutes and off-ramp pre-loved churro vendors. But having streets paved with the shattered souls of generations of the young and hopeful did not make him any less amorous for the glamorous, so he loaded up the truck and he moved to Beverly.

Darrell Vickers – Ted Zeigler Part One – The Mistake That Made Our Career

           

Pre-Preface:

            A massive Thank You! to Bob Zeigler and Shallyn Shilton for their incalculable help piecing together this epic tale of a timeless man.

            Preface:

            Andrew and I were done like the crossword on a Goodwill Partridge Family album. Finished like Pee Wee Herman in a porn theater. Completely Ka-Fucking-Put! With one asinine decision, we’d transformed ourselves into Mason Reese plus Donny Most with a soupcon of Randy Quaid thrown in for good measure. Who else but insane, loony dunderheads would quit “Thicke of the Night” with no prospects, almost no contacts and very little money to tide them over? And tide us over ‘til when? Who was going to hire a couple of career-destroying, anonymous Canadian fuckups who’d only been in town for ten minutes? Yes, Nicholls & Vickers were well and truly Fatty Arbuckled and it was their own damn fault. We were subsisting in a cockroach-infested apartment in a hostile foreign land and the concierge thought we were gay. Luckily (and this is luck bordering on divine intervention), a complete misunderstanding was about to land us a half-blind manager with a brain tumor. And that one mistake would eventually lead us to four Emmy nominations and becoming two of the most envied writers in Hollywood.