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 – Your Package Has Arrived

When The Tonight Show was cantering through its year-long goodbye victory lap, Andrew Nicholls and I were far from coasting to the finish line, sipping jumbo daiquiris and hoovering astonishing powders out of topless starlets’ Miu Miu pumps. While Johnny was retiring to enjoy his riches, Malibu estate, yacht and the loving arms and legs of his young 4^th wife, Andrew and I had accumulated families that required regular feedings.