Last week’s column generated some positive feedback, and I appreciate those who took the time to get in touch with me. As a writer, I want to inform people and let them know that they are not alone and that there are resources and opinions available to assist them in resolving the situation that they are dealing with. I will be doing more writing about toxic people, but this week I will write about something a little more pleasant, a bit easier to read.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 