As readers of these pages know, I love the Smothers Brothers. In fact, one of the very first record albums I owned as a kid was the Smothers Brothers’ own first album, live At The Purple Onion. This is a very good report about them today on, of all places, CBS which famously fired them in 1969. (Though it’s less remembered that CBS re-hired them for another variety show in 1988.) This piece comes from CBS Sunday Morning that was aired this past Sunday – it’s an update of a story they ran last year, which I posted at the time.
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Yesterday, when embedding the latest Naked Lunch podcast -- in which hosts Phil Rosenthal and David Wild talk about both being in the Writers Guild, their time walking on the current picket line and how their careers in writing got them to this point -- I mentioned that this especially resonated with me because I'd met Rosenthal during the 2007-8 WGA strike in the picket line at Fox Studios. As I noted, Everybody Loves Raymond was on the air at the time, and one of the several columns I was writing for the WGA website was called "E-mail Interviews." I would email a set of core questions about writing to the person being interviewed -- occasionally expanding with a few questions more specific to the writer. (My reasoning for keeping the questions largely the same was that 1) it was about the process of writing, and those basic questions didn't change, 2) it wasn't the questions that were important, but rather how each individual writer answered about how they wrote. And perhaps more importantly, 3) being on the editorial board for the then-new WGA website, I wanted to build content and so was writing three columns, all of which were volunteer, and it just made things oh-so much easier...) The writers could then respond at their own pace when they had the time, and send their answers back along with a page from one of their scripts, ideally with edit notes written on it, and a photo. What I recall is how gracious Phil was when asked to participate, despite having been accosted on the picket line, and also how entertaining his E-mail Interview answers were. Both qualities that subsequently became apparent in his documentary series, Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix. (For the record, it began life on PBS as I'll Have What Phil's Having.) I've tracked down the interview, and here it is. Originally posted in 2008, as best as I can recall. E-mail Interview with Phil Rosenthal Edited by Robert J. Elisberg Phil Rosenthal is the creator and executive producer of the series, Everyone Loves Raymond. He began his career as a staff writer on the series, A Family for Joe, which starred Robert Mitchum (a show for which Rosenthal self-effacingly quotes NBC president Brandon Tartikoff saying, “It should be cut up into guitar picks".) He followed this with Baby Talk and The Man in the Family, both created/developed by ed. weinberger. Alan Kirschenbaum's Down the Shore came next, followed by three seasons on Coach. In addition to his TV work, Rosenthal was also director and co-writer of the now-famous "The Final Days" comedy short film which starred President Bill Clinton, made for the 2000 White House Correspondent's dinner. It can be seen online here. >WGA: Were there any movies, TV shows or books that first got you interested in writing? PR: My earliest influences were The Honeymooners and The Jackie Gleason Show. Gleason and Art Carney got me interested in comedy at about age 4, and I wanted to do what they did. That was the same year Mary Poppins came out, and I wanted to marry Julie Andrews. When I was 15, I saw Jaws and was knocked out by the power a movie could have. Other sitcoms I loved growing up were Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, All In The Family, The Odd Couple, Taxi, and Soap. I was acting in Neil Simon plays from age 14, and when I saw Woody Allen's Love and Death at 16, I wanted to be him. When I saw Annie Hall the next year, and saw all the trouble he had with women, I realized I was him. >WGA: When you write, how do you generally work? PR: When writing alone, I like bed. I've got a Mac Powerbook, and one of those little desktops-over-a-beanbag things from restoration hardware. >WGA: Is there a specific time you prefer to write? PR: I feel a little less like an old man in the morning. >WGA: Do you have any specific kind of music playing or prefer silence? PR: Quiet is nice. >WGA: Are you a good procrastinator? PR: The best. I'm the world's laziest workaholic. >WGA: What sort of characters interest you? PR: Believable ones. I love outrageous characters, but I still want to believe we're on earth. >WGA: What about stories? PR: The same. And a good structure. Nothing substitutes for a good beginning, middle and end. And it should maybe be about something that someone gives a shit about. >WGA: How do you work through parts of a script where you hit a roadblock in the story? PR: I would love to know of some tricks. If you have the luxury of time, forget about it for today, or this week, even. go get something to eat and see a movie. If it's got to be done today, what else can you do? I find that if I just start putting something, anything down, it helps. Because then at least you're working off of something instead of nothing. And nobody needs to see the first something. >WGA: What are the additional challenges (or advantages, for that matter) in doing a television show based on the life and works of the star of your show? PR: In first talking to Ray (Romano), he told me about his life, just in the way of getting to know someone. But, the more he told me about his actual life, the more I realized that this was the show. And what I didn't know about the personalities of his family, I filled in with my own. but obviously it was a blessing that Ray had such a screwed up life. >WGA: What is your best experience as a writer? PR: Working with my friends on "Raymond". We laugh like idiots every single day. I'm in love with them. >WGA: Was there any particular writer who acted as a sort of mentor to you? PR: My mentor in sitcoms was actually younger than me – Alan Kirschenbaum. We went to high school together, were in the school plays together. He became a writer first, and then, while I was a struggling actor, he showed up at my apartment in NY during the writers strike of '88 with one of those new fancy "word processors" (about the size of an oven), and we wrote a screenplay. The following year, I moved out to L.A., hooked up with a writing partner (Oliver Goldstick), and Alan taught me the basic, essential structure of a sitcom in about 15 minutes over a terrible seafood lunch. The best advice we ever got was from ed. weinberger, who said, "do the show you want to do, because in the end, they're gonna cancel you anyway". >WGA: Why do you write? PR: Because I couldn't stomach being an actor. Today is the 99th birthday of Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who won a Tony Award for Fiddler on the Roof, a Tony and Pulitzer Price for Fiorello!, and such other musicals with Jerry Bock as She Loves Me, The Apple Tree, The Rothschilds, Rex (with Richard Richard Rodgers), and the opera Captain Jinks and the Horse Marines -- and much more. Yes, 99. I interviewed Sheldon years ago when I was a student at Northwestern, and he returned to campus as Homecoming Grand Marshal. I then made a radio documentary from it for the school radio station, WNUR, and two decades later finally tracked down his address through a mutual friend to send him a copy. And when I told my mother after all that time that I finally found someone who knew where Harnick lived, she said, "Oh, you mean, Aunt Joan?" I was floored. I never had any idea that they grew up together and even went to college together. Though. no, she didn't have her address. When I sent him the radio documentary though and explained my further connection, he sent a handwritten note back, and the first line was, "OH, MY GOD!!! JOAN SERED!!! (which was her maiden name. And yes, this is the Aunt Joan who I wrote about here a few Januarys ago for her surprise 90th birthday party.) Though they've periodically crossed paths over the many decades, I was able to get them together 14 years ago when we all saw a production of his show She Loves Me at the Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois. (And yes, this was the production I've written about several times that starred Jessie Mueller before she left for Broadway and won a Tony Award for starring in the musical Beautiful.) But enough of all that. On with the show. Here's a wonderful, hour-long interview with Sheldon Harnick at the Kennedy Center when he was 90, and you'll see he's vibrant and entertaining. Know too that this isn't just an interview, but includes several of his songs from wonderful performers. And here's one of my favorite of his lesser-known songs, "In My Own Lifetime," from The Rothschilds, which starred Hal Linden who won the Tony Award as Best Actor. Harnick writes poetically and richly with the simplicity of almost everyday language, which is his hallmark. Years ago, when I made that aforementioned radio documentary for the college station, I ended it with this song -- which I preceded with a clip of Harnick talking about how he'd like people to listen to his songs and say, "Yeah. Yeah, that's true." And we'll end our celebration with this video from when Harnick was 94. singing absolutely wonderfully one of his classics (in fact, I think one of the best interpretations I've heard of the song), "Do You Love Me?" from Fiddler on the Roof with Judy Blazer. And I suspect Ms. Blazer is thrilled to be performing this with the song's lyricist. All the more so since it was promoting the opening of a revival of the show. This is a low-key but very nice feature and interview with Harrison Ford at his home in Wyoming, that was aired recently on CBS Sunday Morning. I haven't posted anything about the passing of Vin Scully a couple weeks ago at the age of 94 for two reasons. The first is that so many others have done it far better and using recordings of him, and the other is that I can't do him justice, and to try would almost give the wrong impression for being so short of the mark. However, there are a few things I've decided are worth noting. One is that he was as brilliant as others said. And brilliant for 67 years. And didn't just broadcast baseball, but also (which most people forget) announced football and golf for NBC for a while. And was not shockingly excellent at it. Another is something I didn't hear any tributes mention, but it's one of the things that always deeply impressed me about Vin Scully that encapsulates his dedication. It's that he actually trained himself to read lips -- so that when the manager would go out to the mound to talk to the pitcher during a tense moment or when a player would get into an argument with an umpire...Scully would tell the listener what was being said. It was remarkable. "Tommy just said, 'Lou, how could you miss that? You're better than that, it was a terrible call.' And Lou is saying, 'Go back to the dugout, Tommy, I don't want to run you out." And third, this is just a personal appreciation of an offbeat memory. As you may know, for the past couple of decades, the Cubs have had "guest conductors" who lead the crowd in singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Some are famously awful, a few pretty good (usually professional singers), and most perfectly enjoyable in a "Well, they can sort of carry a tune somewhat okay." One day when the L.A. Dodgers were playing the Cubs at Wrigley Field, the team asked Vin Scully if he'd lead the crowd in the song, and he said yes. I happened to be listening, and two things stood out. The first is that, usually when a visiting announcer was invited to lead the singing, they do some fudging when it came to the line, "Root, root, root for the Cubbies," because they wanted to avoid saying that -- but Scully knew that that was the line at Wrigley, and he'd agree to sing, so that's what he sang. And the other thing is that -- he was stupendous. An absolutely great singer. I've always remembered it, because Scully was really good, And notable too is that (being Vin Scully) as good as he is singing, he praises the crowd. And...what the heck, if anyone is going to try to describe Vin Scully's brilliance and even come close to succeeding, this is it. It's his legendary call of the ninth inning of the perfect game that Sandy Koufax threw on September 9, 1965 -- against the Chicago Cubs, of all teams. How brilliant is it? I have a book of great baseball writing...and they include a transcription of Scully's entire call. As the editor notes, you (the reader) will think that this was written, and then edited to make it perfect, but it was all extemporaneous, spoken live on the spot, for 8-1/2 minutes, not a word was changed. That's how great it is. Here is that ninth inning. Back in 1992, Billy Crystal starred in the movie Mr. Saturday Night, which he made his directed and co-wrote with Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. The film co-starred David Paymer as his brother. It didn’t do very well at the box-office, though I thought was reasonably entertaining. Jump forward 30 years, and the movie has now been adapted into a Broadway musical and opens next week, on April 27. And Billy Crystal will again be starring in it – and David Paymer will be playing his brother. And the script has been written by… Billy Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. The 30-year gap, while a challenge, is not as odd as it would be on other projects. That’s because in the movie, the character of standup comic Buddy Young, Jr. ages about 30 years or so, to age 73 when he's largely washed-up, but has a chance for a big comeback -- and Crystal is now 74. So, that means rather than having to wear heavy make-up to look old, Crystal and Paymer will pretty much only need to wear a wig to play their younger selves. I’m also intrigued by the musical score, for several reasons. On the one hand, the music is by Jason Robert Brown, a highly-accomplished composer, who has won two Tony Awards. On the other hand, he’s best-known for very serious, almost brooding works. His two Tonys, for instance, were for Parade (a true story from 1913 about a Jewish man wrongly accused of killing a black girl, and ultimately being lynched) and Bridges of Madison County, based on the movie with Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood. He also won a Drama Desk Award for the off-Broadway show, The Last Five Years, about the break-up of a crumbling marriage. (It was made into a movie with Anna Kendrick. In fairness, for all its comedy, Mr. Saturday Night is not a laugh riot, and somewhat serious about a self-absorbed comic who has broken most of his relationships. But what’s also odd is that Jason Robert Brown, who as far as I know has written both the music and lyrics to all his shows, is only writing the music for Mr. Saturday Night. Why not the lyrics, I have absolutely no idea. I’m also intrigued that the lyricist is Amanda Green who has a Tony nomination, which speaks well for her talent, though it’s for a show I’ve never heard of, Hands on a Hardbody, that closed after 28 performances. So – it’s just sort of…intriguing. And I’m curious how that all came about. CBS Sunday Morning did a nice feature recently about Crystal and the show, and it includes snippets of several songs (all of which he seems to do well). Here it is – |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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