When dealing with a humor-challenged performer such as Magic Johnson, you craft material that involves him peripherally but passes on all the heavy lifting to a rib-tickling professional. It’s a comedic slight of hand. Basically, Mr. Johnson set up the jokes and Barry would bring home the side-splitting bacon. It gave the illusion that Magic was a part of frivolity unbound without actually requiring him to personally reduce the audience to spit-spraying bucket-chuckling gibbons.
For all the excitement and laugh-a-minute hijinks that ultimately end up on the small-but-getting-larger-every-day screen, animation is a fairly dull medium to write for but you sure can’t beat the commute. You lucubrate in the bosom of your own homestead, tenaciously hack your way through the occasional set of nettlesome network notes and when it’s all done and dusted, you press a couple of keys on your computer and send it off to anywhere in the world. A life of toiling in animation is totally absent the non-stop madcap Joy Circus that you get sucked into when manning the helm of a Hollywood set. It does not require dealing with studios and networks both asking you to do the impossible as a million unforeseen crises swirl around you like pissed-off bees. It is blissfully free of discontented actors unable to remember the simplest sequence of dialogue. You are spared having to wait endless hunger-filled hours for that intern to bring back food from Jerry’s Deli while you “amp the stakes” at the end of Act One.
A Huge Amount of Castle Hassle
As we touched down in Toronto to start production, the weather was absolutely insulting. It was bitterly cold with this bizarre form of precipitation that refused to go away, even after it had fallen from the sky. It just lay around on the streets and people’s lawns like a drunken uncle and got in everyone’s way. Not the triumphant return to our beloved homeland that we had anticipated.
Alas, naughty Mister Winter was going to be the least of our problems.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
There was probably a time when one release would not have meant as much to me as it does today. I worked in the record business for so many years I became jaded, the major labels releasing numerous albums each month and the independents trying to squeeze the few that they had through the stampede. I never really cared about the really big ones— it is a part of me I have had since I was very young, this aversion to the stars— and have learned only within the past ten to fifteen years to really appreciate the significance of the lesser-knowns. I get tired of all the pissing and moaning about how the “new” music biz has watered down the quality of music and allowed the less talented to record massive amounts of lesser works. As if they were lesser.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 