Act One Podcast
Act One Podcast
Writer/Producer Michael Warren
Act One Podcast - Episode 32 - Interview with Screenwriter and Producer, Michael Warren.
Michael Warren began his career writing for television as executive story consultant on the classic television show, HAPPY DAYS. He then went to Warner Bros. where he was an executive producer on PERFECT STRANGERS. He also co-created and executive produced two of the longest running shows on ABC television: STEP BY STEP, and FAMILY MATTERS featuring the legendary character, Steve Urkel, which TV GUIDE listed as one of the 50 most popular television characters of all time. He also executive produced HANGIN WITH MR. COOPER, GETTING BY, THE FAMILY MAN, KIRK, MEEGO and TWO OF A KIND. He presently has over 800 episodes of television in syndication.
The Act One Podcast provides insight and inspiration on the business and craft of Hollywood from a Christian perspective.
We're sitting on stage 22 at Paramount, and they're we're watching them do the pilot for Perfect Strangers. And next to me, on one side, is the lady that was the head of ABC Comedy, and Bob Boyette's on the other side. And she turns to me and says, So what do you think? And I said, I don't think it's gonna work. And she kind of went, What? I said, the actor you got playing Larry, there's just no chemistry between him and Bronx and Vincia. And I think Bob Boyet wanted to kill me. So they finish the show, they edit the show, they screen it with the ABC Execs, and uh the lights come up, and the guy says, Great show, guys! Recast the part of Larry.
James Duke:And the rest is TV. You are listening to the Act One podcast. I'm your host, James Duke. Thank you for listening to our little podcast. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe and leave us a good review. My guest today is writer-producer Michael Warren. Michael began his illustrious career writing for television as executive story consultant on the classic television show Happy Days. He then went on to Warner Brothers, where he was an executive producer on Perfect Strangers. He also co-created and executive produced two of the longest-running shows on ABC television, Step by Step and Family Matters, featuring the legendary character Steve Urkel, which TV Guide listed as one of the 50 most popular television characters of all time. He also executive produced Hanging with Mr. Cooper, Getting By, The Family Man, Kirk, Migo, and Two of a Kind. He presently has over 800 episodes of television in syndication. Michael is a longtime friend of Act One, and we have a wonderful conversation about his television career. I hope you enjoy. Welcome to the Act One podcast, Mr. Michael Warren. It's great to have you. Good to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation. I I um obviously uh have been a fan of your work for years, but also just a fan of you. You uh you've been a longtime supporter and faculty member of Act One, and um, of course, you were part of the original uh intermission community for those who are listening in who remember the old intermission community, um, as well as so many other things. Um, and you even taught it, you taught at Biola for a while too, didn't you? Did you teach screenwriting?
SPEAKER_00:I taught uh two sort of uh introductory screenwriting courses at Biola. And uh after years of doing that, I persuaded them to actually hire a full-time faculty member to teach writing, so I didn't have to drive to Costa Mesa.
James Duke:Well, it's great to have you. Uh there's a lot I wanted to spend time talking uh with you about, but um let's let's go ahead and start, let's go ahead and start back at the beginning. Now, you know, obviously not the very, very, very beginning, but um, I do want to start off with if I if I remember, I've I've read a little bit about your career. Um I believe you and Bill Bickley, you first connected at a church, isn't that kind of where you guys first met and got connected?
SPEAKER_00:Writers we we met at the first Baptist Church of Beverly Hills, which uh is very uh high-class sounding, but it wasn't it was a tiny little church, and uh he was I think he was doing uh room 222 at the time, and we became friends, our wives became friends. In fact, our wives went through their first pregnancies together, and uh I was working for the Billy Graham film production company in Burbank, and um he said uh he he got a job as the I think his credit was actually producer on the Partridge family, and he hired me to be the associate producer, and then he went over to Happy Days to become the producer, and he hired me to be the associate producer on Happy Days, and it it was during that season that Happy Days really took off, it became the number one show on television, and uh we started writing it together because Bill had bought the rights to a a book and uh he wanted to know if I wanted to join him and write a screenplay based on this book, which we did. The the screenplay never went anywhere, but uh we had such a good time writing it that we teamed up as writers, and uh we spent uh I think four or five seasons as writers on Happy Days. So that was really the first writing credit I ever had was on that show.
James Duke:So before you connect, it's it's pretty amazing that your first writing credit is Happy Days, but anyway, but um you're before uh before then, um, was this a goal or dream of yours? I'm just curious where where this interest in working uh in the business, you said you were working at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, their film um um film company, but uh where did this come from? Did you grow up originally kind of wanting where did was there like a calling in your life? I'm just curious where this interest came from.
SPEAKER_00:I uh I actually wanted to be an architect. And uh I had a teacher in high school named William Witkowski, which encouraged me to go to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. And when I got to Pratt Institute, uh profoundly naive, uh, the day that I was registering, I realized that the architecture program was five years and you had to take calculus. So I made a step to the left in the lineup and signed up as a graphic arts major.
James Duke:I wonder how many art majors became art majors because of calculus.
SPEAKER_00:That's well, it was pretty daunting. I I think I actually failed high school uh trigonometry, so I knew that this was uh this was not gonna work. And um by my sophomore year at Pratt Institute, which was an excellent school, I realized I had absolutely no talent as a graphic artist. Uh, but I had a I took a film course uh and it was called Film is Art, and it was taught by the guy that ran Cinematic Cinematech 16 in in Manhattan. And I thought, oh, I can do art without having any uh graft uh drafting skills. So I dropped out of Pratt, went to Southern Illinois University and became a communications major and took classes in in playwriting and uh film production, came out to USC in the cinema department, and um spent three semesters there until I ran out of money, dropped out and took a job at Universal. They had just purchased a uh an educational department from someplace, and uh we made these sort of uh we did a film for the state of South Carolina for their bicentennial and things like that. And um I never really wanted to had any inkling of being a writer, I just wanted to be in film production in some capacity. I think every film major wants to be a director. Yeah, um, but um I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And when later down the line, when Bill said, Why don't we write something together? I thought, well, I don't know anything about writing. I took one writing class with Erwin Blacker at USC. And um my wife said, Well, why don't you try it? Maybe you'll like it. So I tried writing, and I did like it. And uh we were rather successful. I mean, it was a series of writing assignments on TV shows, and then we started producing shows, and then we started creating shows, and we got some shows on the air. So it it turned into a 27-year career that was basically writing. I mean, there's a lot of other things producers do, but that's what you have to do every week, is you have to come up with a script.
James Duke:What what is it about writing that you think appealed to you, uh, especially early on when you thought to yourself, oh, I think I can do this.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you know, it's uh first of all, it's just great fun. And um I think I always people said I had a sense of humor. So uh it it came rather easy. I mean, I must confess I wasn't the you know, the the writer that was struggling with writer's block. And this the the stories always came to us pretty easily, and uh we were very fast. We we learned that uh being fast was a tremendous asset in the television business because um every week as a producer you've basically got six stories and works, you know, you're you're six weeks out in the development schedule, so you're working at six different shows in different stages of development all the way up uh until production week. And um the reward for being successful, of course, in television is they ask you to do more. Thank you very much. Can you do it again?
James Duke:Is it um being someone who has created so much, you know? I'm sure you don't, I'm sure you don't love it when people say this kind of stuff to you, but it's true. There's so much iconic television. Um were you a fan of television, like television that you didn't write? Like, I'm just curious, like before before you became a writer, what were some of your favorite television shows? And like the sitcom itself, do you do you love sitcoms? Are there certain sitcoms that you just point to and go, man, I wish I would have created that. I wish I would have written for that show.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I wish I'd created Big Bang Theory. Um, yeah, I was a fan. I, you know, uh my generation, I think, fell in love with the Dick Van Dyke show, which was um a writerly project. Carl Reiner, right? Carl Reiner Yeah, I I really enjoyed those shows. And working on Happy Days, I got to know Gary Marshall fairly well. In fact, Gary was uh the first script Gary had us write for for Happy Days was a story about uh Fonzi's motorcycle is wrecked when um one of the guys backs his car over the motorcycle, and he's convinced that uh Donnie Most has to leave the country and change his name because he's afraid uh Fonzi's gonna kill him. And uh Gary brought us into his office and he said, you know, this is one of the best freelance scripts, because as we were freelance writers at that point, uh, why don't you guys come on staff? And you know, that was the beginning of a long-term relationship with Gary, who was a big mentor to us. He he taught me a lot about writing and and uh the mechanics of writing. Um did he write for Dick Van Dyke?
James Duke:Did he write for Carl Reiner on that show?
SPEAKER_00:Oh gosh, probably. Gary wrote just a ton of material during the 50s and 60s and then into the 70s, and of course, did Odd Couple and Love American Style and a lot of ABC shows.
James Duke:And Love American style, for people who don't remember, so Happy Days was kind of like an offshoot. Like there was an there was a there was a standalone. So Love American Style was kind of like an anthology show, right? Where every episode was kind of different, and there was this one episode that featured the Cunninghams, right? And that became Happy Days. Am I remembering?
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's uh Love American Style was an anthology, and so what it did was it was the perfect place to generate pilots. So uh Gary uh wrote an episode, I think Gary wrote the episode of uh uh television and in uh I don't know what it was called, television happy happy days and then television or something like that. And uh Ron Howard was in it, and uh Harold Gold was the father. Yep, and they they did the episode uh kind of as a backdoor pilot, and ABC passed on it. Well, then Ron Howard did American Graffiti, which was a big hit.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:So ABC came back to Gary and said, wait a minute, maybe we passed them that too quickly. So they had them redo the pilot, and Harold Gould wasn't available at the time. Uh, so they recast the people, and uh Henry Winkler wasn't in the original, right? But uh Henry Winkler came on and and uh they did the they did the pilot, and of course it went on the air and was a big hit. Um, so yeah, it was kind of a roundabout history as to how it came to be. And you you and you and Bill came on what season? Well, Bill came on originally as the producer, okay, and uh I came on the second season as an associate producer, got it, and then I think the fourth season was when I came on as a writer with Bill, and by then the show was number one. It was well, the fourth season was the big hit season for Happy Days, of course. It ran for 250 episodes, so yeah.
James Duke:I mean, that's half my childhood was watching Happy Days. I the I remember the end towards the end. Uh I was already watching reruns, uh, you know, and then the and so I would watch the reruns, and then the final episodes would play um on ABC. And I remember watching them at night. And um uh I remember I remember the episode when Richie left. I remember the famous episode where Richie punched Fonzi. That was like such a you know, I even think ABC, you know, promoted it as a very special episode or something. But one one of the things that I think is fascinating, and we'll we'll get to Family Matters at some point, but there's a connection there between the Family Matters and Steve Urkel that you guys created and happy days, and that is this interesting thing kind of in television history where both shows had a character that didn't start off as a um as a main as a member of the main cast, but ended up becoming one of the most popular characters of literally of all of television. And so Fonzie, can you uh talk a little bit about that? What happened? Henry Winkler was brought in, Fonzie was just this kind of side character, and then he just became he he became Fonzie.
SPEAKER_00:Well, yeah, it's interesting because Gary's intention of the character was that he wouldn't speak. Uh and I think I think in the first the first episode, he said maybe three lines, one of them being you know, and uh and uh abc didn't like the character because he was uh wearing a motorcycle jacket and he was sort of a high school dropout, and they said, you know, what do we need this guy for? But Gary fought for him and he said, Well, you you need somebody to sort of play the counterpart to to Ronnie and Donnie and Anson and and these sort of clean-cut uh guys. You know, he was he, I think Gary saw him as a uh a needed element in the in the makeup of the show. And of course it took off, and uh the the TV audience identified with him and and uh Gary got his wish, he let him uh ABC finally let him wear the motorcycle jacket instead of a windbreaker.
James Duke:Did it ever become like a point of? I mean, I'm there's so much that's been written and discussed from other people. I'm just curious uh from your perspective, was there ever kind of any level of jealousy or frustration by some of the other cast members because Fonzi became so popular?
SPEAKER_00:I think I think the Happy Days cast were very smart actors, and I think they saw that this was uh, you know, a rising tide raises all boats kind of thing, yeah. Where you know this was good for the show, and uh they should hang in there and they I mean they were all friends, they all had a baseball team and played other shows on the weekends, and uh it was it was the greatest cast I ever worked with. I mean, they were really just amazing. Marion Ross well, Marion Ross and Tom Bosley, and and Ron was a great sort of uh team captain for the show. I mean, uh he he saw the worth of this, yeah. So it it it was all good, and I think it was one of the reasons why the show stayed on for so long is that sense got communicated to the audience that these people liked each other.
James Duke:Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, I mean, look, as a kid, I have such distinct memories of watching Happy Days, like you know, the joke that people use now of the whole jumping the shark thing that came from that. Like, I remember that episode, that was an exciting episode to me as a kid. Will Fonzi make it over the shark? I don't know why. Like that that was a right, and then and then uh when his girlfriend Pinky or whatever her name was, she got hurt in the stunt, and he was like, I remember all those things. Like I watched way too much television, first of all, you should know that. Um but uh but those were kind of iconic moments to me, uh, and I remember them so vividly. Um, for you, um, looking back, having written so much that's kind of in the zeitgeist now that you you were you were participating in the stuff that is now in the cultural zeitgeist. Uh do you look back at that differently than someone like me? Like, do you remember do you remember it differently? Does it just seem like uh, you know, that was just a we had no idea what we were doing in the room.
SPEAKER_00:We were just trying to get a push and episode out of it no, it was yeah, it was you were really just trying to get through the day. And uh, you know, the the writing schedule of a half hour, at least when I was in the business, was uh, you know, you you left work at about 11. And when car phones got out, I would call my wife and talk to her because she wasn't going to stay up until I got home. And uh we would have the end of the day conversation, and uh then the next day you'd start at 10 o'clock in the morning. And uh when I became a producer on other shows, I once uh asked the staff, I said, look, why don't we start at like nine, like normal people? And one by one, the cast members came into my office and closed the door and said, I can't start work at nine because that's when I have my therapy appointment. So I I think that's why TV starts at 10 a.m. That's great.
James Duke:Yes, all the all the therapists in town are book solid from every page.
SPEAKER_00:Can't get a nine o'clock appointment.
James Duke:Can't get one anywhere. Um so uh Gary Marshall. I I actually had the pleasure of meeting Gary Marshall um before he passed away. And he actually I actually had him speak at Act One once um that year. And uh he was lovely. And of Course, um, he's he's he did so much, he was he was so prolific, and you talked about that a little a little bit earlier. I'm curious, like when you look back, you you mentioned he was like a mentor to you. What do you what's one of the big one of the most most important things you learned from working with Gary Marshall? What was like a one of one or two of the big takeaways you took from him?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think he was an absolute genius. I know that word's used too much, but he could he could point to what another his routine was when you went to the run through, particularly the network run through, he'd go back up to the writer's room with everybody and he would put his finger on what the problem was. He'd say, Look, uh, act one, scene three doesn't work, guys, because it it's not consistent with the thrust of the story, and it's the act break, so it's really important. And uh I I think his his ability to kind of get at the nut of the story was profound. And uh, you know, you sit in a room with a bunch of writers, and you know, the other guy that was great at doing this was Low Gans. When Lowell Gans was producing uh Happy Days, he would he would sit and listen and he'd say, No, that doesn't work. Yes, this does work, but keep it on track. And when you had that conversation that would last for about an hour in the story pitch, he would then from memory recount the major beats of every scene in the show. And he'd go through them one by one, by one, by one, and one, and everybody would take notes. And so when the writer that was going to write the the outline left the room had a very clear vision of what the story was. And you know, in a writer's room, sometimes somebody will pitch a joke that everybody laughs at, and it's the funniest thing I've ever heard. And Mo would say, Yeah, that's that's great for the room, guys, but it's it it doesn't go in the script. Yeah, because it's it's not on point. And I think that was the greatest thing I learned from Gary was just how to stay focused on so you didn't go off. Uh you know, when you were when we were executive producing shows and we had showrunners working for us, I remember one time Dave Ducon pitched a story for for Happy Days, and uh he said uh Carl and uh Jay go uh go to a motel for some excursion, and in the closet of the hotel there's a congo drum. And I said, David, I haven't traveled extensively, but I've been in a number of hotels in my life, and I've never found a congo drum in the closet. So sometimes writers get fall in love with things that don't work.
James Duke:And he what makes what keeps a joke in? Is it if Gary laughs at it, as if if it or if it you know, um Gans laughs at it? Like what keeps a joke in versus having a joke not make it in the script?
SPEAKER_00:Well, the guy at the head of the table makes the final decision, you know. Uh it's easy for, you know, I've I was not a great joke guy, I was more of a story guy. But uh whoever was at the head of the table, whether it was me or Lowell or Gary, was never at the head of the actual writing table, but whoever's the head guy has the decision. And uh he says, that's out, that's in. And everybody knows that's the end of the discussion. Um and with it's not a democracy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
James Duke:I've heard that, I've heard that a few times about writers. Um and and also, right, when you have a cast like you guys had, and and uh just the situational comedy, when you have these actors who are capable of physical comedy, of you know you're in front of a live audience and you can milk something for right, that's gotta be fun, just kind of thinking up situations and moments that you know those actors are gonna have fun with in front of that live studio audience.
SPEAKER_00:Well, yeah, and if you if you get lucky enough to have uh the cast of happy days or a show like uh perfect strangers, um it's it's amazing. It's actually a challenge because you can't write long scripts because the actors are just gonna embellish a stage direction into uh 30 seconds of comedy, and you're killing me, guys.
James Duke:That's great. I read an old um article about you and Bill Bickley, and Gary is quoted as calling, oh yeah, those are my those are the the minister or something, he called you like the ministers or something, right? Right. And he and and it's something something about in the article where you guys said basically if there was ever any anything in the script where there was like a priest or a nun or something, but he would have you guys write it.
SPEAKER_00:I I I think that Gary always thought we were Catholics. I don't know why, but he did. That's probably all we knew. Yeah, we he came he came to us one time and he said, uh, I want to do a show where uh Fonsey has to get baptized, so you guys should write this. Well, the character of Fonzi was a Catholic, yeah, and so we didn't know anything about Catholic baptism, so we we had to start calling priests and getting getting advisors to tell us what this was.
James Duke:That's great. The um there, of course, were so many spinoffs of happy days. Do you remember? Do you remember um the first time Robin Williams was on set doing Mork and Mindy? Was there some not doing Mork and Mindy, but doing more? By the way, that is such a crazy who came up with the idea of having an alien that Fonzie faces off against like I believe there was an episode where so he Fonzie faces off against an alien more, and then Fonzi faces off, I think at one point against the devil or a demon or something. Like there are all these great episodes where Fonzi's facing off against these. So with Robin Williams, where where did that come from? Did Gary had Gary seen Robin Williams do other stuff, and that's where the idea came from?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I wasn't on Happy Days the season that Robin came on. But the the story I always heard was that uh they had cast, they had written this script and they had cast somebody, and very early on in shoot week, it may have been at the Monday morning reading, I don't know, but somebody decided that the actor wasn't gonna work. And so um, I don't know if Gary had seen Robin at one of the you know uh laugh factory places around town, or somebody recommended him, but they brought him in like on Tuesday or Wednesday of shoot week, and uh he just you know amazed everyone. The the writers uh were concerned because they saw a lot of their dialogue get rewritten on the spot, but um you know it's just one of those fortunate things, which happens a lot in television, it happened with Family Matters, and uh so you know it that was one of the spinoffs. I mean, Mork was just so hot that ABC said we got to do a show with this guy.
James Duke:That's I I I just I find it so fascinating, and I think you guys, it wasn't a you didn't have a show, but I think Tom there was a young Tom Hanks was on Happy Days, right?
SPEAKER_00:And um oh yeah, Tom Tom Hanks. It was an interesting story, you know. Gary, Gary wanted to do a show. Um and I don't know where this came from, that the character that Tom Hanks plays comes back to town and he's gay. And uh he has to sort of work that out with with Fonsey. And we we said to Gary, look, we don't want to write that show. Uh it's just to me, it's it's fraught with alienating a high percentage of your audience, no matter how it's written. Um, and it's there's nothing physical about it. Why not do a show where this guy comes back and he's uh he's spent his entire life between when he left Milwaukee and when he comes back studying karate because he wants to beat up Fonzi.
James Duke:Yes, I remember that episode.
SPEAKER_00:Uh yeah, and so I said it's it's gonna have a lot of physicality to it, and how does Fonzi respond to this? And of course, the the crux of the story is Fonzi doesn't even remember this guy. So he's like, Why are you angry with me? What did I ever do to you? Um so it was a lot of fun, and uh it's it's just it's another example of trying to find this the crux of the story that's gonna work with the characters you've got and and what they do best, yeah.
James Duke:And there's this really and there's and and Fonzie, you know, no I'm I'm giving spoilers here if you haven't seen the 40-year-old episode of of uh family uh happy days. Um Fonzie lets him win. I remember because he wants him to, yeah. I remember that's great. Um, it's such a great character beat for Fonzie. Okay, so I love happy days. We've talked about it. Yeah, I everyone gets it. The whole audience is like, we get it, Jimmy. You love happy days. Move on. All right. Um now you did you work on you did you didn't work on Laverne and Shirley at all, right? We wrote some episodes of Laverne and Shirley. Okay, so you wrote a couple okay. Um, which was another, once again, such a great show that Gary, it was just such a smart show. Once again, the cast, brilliant. You wrote on a show that I don't think it's talked about enough that I also loved as a kid. And that was what's happening. You worked on what's happening.
SPEAKER_00:We did uh we were called what's happening was uh they were afraid it was gonna get canceled. So um Bud Yorkin called us in and said, Would you guys produce what's happening? And uh we were not we were kind of uncomfortable because we'd never done a black show. And uh so we said, Okay, so we took over the show, and uh during the summer when we were prepping episodes, the show became a hit in reruns. So Bud Yorkin comes to us and says, Okay, we don't need you guys. Oh, really? We really do know how to do the show. Oh wow, uh, we just needed summer reruns to kick us into being a hit. Oh wow. So I think we I think we were there for well, he was very nice. I mean, it was a very cordial relationship. He uh and it was kind of a kick working with Bud York and I mean my gosh, talk about an icon of television. Yeah, um I think we did 13 episodes, and um and we went, we left that to I think we left that to do uh Love Boat. I don't know. It it's all very hazy, which is another right.
James Duke:I mean, love boat. It's another show. I uh but you probably once again, you probably have me to blame because as a little kid, I probably was the one watching it in reruns. Um wasn't happening. Uh I remember when they rebooted it, it was like one of the first reboots I'd ever heard of. They did what's happening now, and and you know, they do that all the time now, but back then that was like unheard of. Um, Love Boat, let's let's go there, let's go to Love Boat since you went there. Um, so that's a different kind of show. So when your first approach, I don't know how that worked, your agents, your managers, the studio calls you, whoever, and says, Um, would you guys like to work on Love Boat? Is that did you give pause? Okay, wait, this is an hour long. It's uh it's a kind of a dramedy type show. Like, what were the thoughts going into writing for Love Boat from uh after doing sitcoms?
SPEAKER_00:It was very strange because uh somebody from ABC came to us and said, Love boat's been on the air for uh for eight seasons, it's uh getting very tired. Uh would you guys like to come in and put it to bed? And um we said, Well, okay. So they said, Well, you gotta have a meeting with uh it wasn't spelling, it was uh gosh, I've gone blank on his name, but it was the producer, exec producer. And uh he said, You you got a meeting at his house Saturday night at eight o'clock or something. So we drive up the Beverly Hills together, and in the car, I said, I said, uh, you know, I don't think I've ever seen Love Boat. I don't remember, I have been I have no memory of it at all. And Bill said, Oh, this is not good. I've never seen it either. So we go, we meet, we we meet the exec producer, and uh he, you know, there's a small talk, and he says, uh, so what do you think of Love Boat? And I said, you know, I think it's just it's kind of old fashioned. I figured a show that's been on the air for eight years has got to be old fashioned. And he said, you know what, you're right. What would you guys do with Love Boat if you came on as producers? And I said, Well, I I know that it's three stories, I'd make each one of them a sitcom. And he kind of thought for a minute, he said, uh, you know, that's that really sounds interesting. And then he said something that really surprised me. He said, Do you guys have passports and tuxedos? I said, Yeah. He says, Good. I want you to get on a ship. It's leaving from Miami, it's uh it's gonna go through the uh Panama Canal. We're shooting an episode, last episode of this season. You go down there and watch how they do the show. So that's what we did. Wow, and we we got 24 episodes of love boats.
James Duke:So wait a second. Love boat use an actual cruise ship? Well, people were going to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_00:They did 19 episodes a a year on a stage at uh in uh Hollywood, and uh then they did three two-hour shows a year on actual boats. Wow. On actual ships. I mean, we did one, we did two where we got on the boat in Geneva, went through Gibraltar all the way around to Hamburg, Germany, and then we did another one um in Spain or someplace, I forget. It was such an incrazy schedule. Um but yeah, we we we hired three writers for each hour-long episode and had them do basically a 20-minute airtime of of basically a sort of sitcom with romantic overtones.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, and and that was it. That was the end of the series. You you you put it to bed. Like that.
James Duke:Um so um I think uh shortly after that, you had um some somewhere around this time period is where you connected with um uh the Miller Boyette team, right? And you began working with them. Is that is that right?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we had worked with uh Tom Miller and Eddie Milk on Happy Days, they were the exec producers of Happy Days along with Gary. And then um Eddie Milkes died, and uh Tom Miller teamed up with Bob Boyet, and it became Miller Boyet for a number of years. Uh Boyet had been with ABC, he was a network exec for a long time. Um and so yeah, we uh they had uh they had done a pilot uh for perfect strangers.
James Duke:For perfect strangers, and that was like the start. Perfect strangers like the start of TGIF, wasn't it? Like that was like the first, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Yeah. Um so they brought us over, and uh this was a another one of those moments where inadvertently you become a genius, and we're sitting on stage 22 at Paramount, and they're uh Tom and Bob didn't like to shoot their pilots in front of an audience, they like to block and shoot them over a two-day period. So we're a bunch of people are sitting in the stands watching the show, and we're watching them do the pilot for perfect strangers. And next to me, on one side is the lady that was the head of ABC Comedy, and Bob Boyet's on the other side, and she turns to me and says, So what do you think? And I said, I don't think it's gonna work. And she kind of went, What? I said, The actor you got playing Larry, there's just no chemistry between him and Bronx and Pincho. Um, and I think Bob Boyet wanted to kill me. Uh so she I she gave me one of those looks like, Well, what do you know? Who are you? She doesn't know me from Adam. So they finish the show, they edit the show, they take it to end for the screenings, which we didn't go to because we weren't, it didn't have anything to do with the show officially. Tom and Bob just asked us to come over as friends and watch the show. So the story I heard back from Bob is they screen it with the ABC Execs, and uh the lights come up, and the guy says, Great show, guys! Recast the part of Larry. Wow.
SPEAKER_02:So and the rest is TV history, right?
James Duke:I mean, you were you were a prophet. Yeah, like um that's giving giving advice to uh future screenwriters and television writers, maybe don't uh give that note to this to the network executive.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I didn't have anything at stake, you know. Right, right, right. I didn't I didn't even know that Tom and Bob were particularly interested in having us come on the show. I just thought it was like, you know, hey, this will be fun. But um so they they hired us um to be, I don't know, some goofy title, like supervising producers or something. And so we were involved in the casting for this the part of Larry. And I had seen Mark Lynn Baker in a movie called uh My Favorite Year, uh with Peter O'Toole. And uh I said, you know, we ought to we ought to read him for this part. Well, he came in and he and Bronson just clicked. I mean, they were they were terrific. So we we had to reshoot the pilot with Mark Lynn as as as Larry, and uh they were both absolutely brilliant, they came from completely different uh acting backgrounds, but they worked so well together.
James Duke:They did. They they knew the show that they were making, and every week they knew how to. I'm curious, like as a writing staff, would you guys? I mean, did it feel like you were writing for like a Lewis and Martin act? Like it was just these two guys riffing and going back and forth with one another.
SPEAKER_00:Uh I used to go down to the stage during lunch. I'd I'd take a uh a lunch down and and watch them and Mark was a very highly disciplined stage actor. And uh there was a stage direction in a script that said, Larry enters dejected. I watched Mark Lynn Baker come in, his body language he learned how he rehearsed how to slam the door in such a way that it wouldn't catch. So he'd have to slam it two or three times, get mad at it. He would take off his coat and toss it onto a coat rack in such a way that it would hang there for just a second and then fall off. Yes. Then he'd take his keys out of his pocket and throw them on the little table by the door in such a way that they would slide across and then fall off the edge. And he would rehearse that for like half an hour to get it down perfect. And of course, when he came in, when you shot the show, that was 30 seconds for the stage direction. So you were writing 25-page scripts for a 30-minute sitcom because otherwise you'd be six minutes long. It was crazy. And and Bronson was just the other way. Bronson was this intuitive, wild guy that had uh absolutely brilliant ideas and uh would would weave them into these reactions. And so together it was just wonderful. They would always elevate the quality of the script.
James Duke:Let's talk a little bit, just for people who aren't familiar with the way that live sitcom television is produced. Um, let's talk a little bit about kind of the nuts and bolts. So essentially, you were talking about earlier about the six six weeks out you were constantly moving scripts through in different phases. So let's just take one episode of Perfect Strangers. You would start when by the time you give us the timeline of when you would start writing it to when it when it finally was shot and in the can. About how long did it take to produce one episode of Perfect Strangers? And what were the steps along the way?
SPEAKER_00:Well, the first step is you sit in a room with a writing staff and you come up with a story. And uh most writing rooms had a bulletin board with three by five cards with very basic ideas, you know, Lucy crushes grapes. Um, but the first week is pitching out the story, and once you get sort of the major bones of the story, then the exact producer's got to go to the network and pitch that to make sure that you know you're not doing a story that the show that's on before you is doing the same story and get network approval.
James Duke:Got it, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Uh second week, now you're going through the story in greater detail with probably some of the writing staff, not all of them, and the person that's gonna write the script. And the the object of those meetings is to really structure out enough of the story so that the writer can go off and write an outline. Third week is you're noting the outline. All the writers get copies, you sit in a room, make suggestions, pitch, uh basically story. You're still on story. Uh, fourth week, you've you've uh you've come back and you've got a first draft from the writer, and that's noted. Now you're pitching jokes, more greater and greater detail. Uh and this is another thing Gary was very good at. Somebody would pitch something and he would say, uh that's that's a that's a Friday note. Don't deal with that now. That's the too too soon. Um fifth week, you'd have a you'd have a second draft from the from the writer, and you'd sit around and table the script. You'd try to get into as good a form as you could, because that would the product of that rewrite was going to be the script you read on Monday morning. So the sixth week was Monday morning, read the script. Writers go off and uh punch it up, do rewrites. Now that they've heard the actors say the lines, they've got a better clue as to what needs work. Tuesday, uh, the director's been on the stage all day rehearsing with the actors. Tuesday you go to we usually had four o'clock run throughs. Uh you'd run through the script with the cast, uh, you'd give it the director notes, the cast notes, the writers would go back and rewrite the script. Wednesday you'd come in, director would work with the cast and the rewrites. Uh, four o'clock run through with the network. The network would now give notes, everybody would give notes to everybody. The writers would go back and make the final pass, rewriting the script. That was pretty much it. If it didn't get in on Wednesday night, forget about it. Um, I never agreed agreed with the idea of uh doing a rewrite on shoot night. Uh Thursday was a technical day. Writers didn't go down there.
James Duke:That was the director's so the script, so the script was locked by Wednesday night. The script was locked. You right.
SPEAKER_00:By the rewrite that went out to the cast Wednesday night, that was it. And so technically for us, different yeah, different shows work different ways. Uh friends had a different process, uh, crisis writing. But uh yeah, Thursday was a tech day. Uh, when it was three camera, all of our shows were except for much later in our career, were 35 millimeter film shows. So they were all shot on dollies. You had to mark off the stage with dolly marks, and so Friday came in, you'd do a run-through at uh four o'clock, uh, minor notes, um, some director notes for camera and stuff like that. But then at seven o'clock, you'd bring in the audience and you'd shoot the show. And since so many of our shows, with the exception of Perfect Strangers, had minors in them, you had to finish by nine o'clock. I mean, that was oh wow, that was it. So sometimes you'd shoot some lines from minors during the four o'clock run-through uh dress rehearsal, because everybody was in costume. You could pick those up for inserting later. How long would you shoot with an audience? We would rarely shoot with an audience past two hours. Usually we were out in an hour and a half. Because by then it was, you know, Ron Howard was an interesting actor. He, by Monday morning, he forgot all of his dialogue from the previous Friday. He just had trained himself to get it out of his head. So if you had to bring him into a looping session, you had to have a script with you because he wouldn't remember what the line was.
James Duke:Yeah, so the actors, so they get that script on that Monday morning, but really they're getting changes throughout the week. So they're they're learning their lines, but they're not really putting them to memory, probably into that last 24, 40 hours.
SPEAKER_00:Right. They they know there's going to be changes.
James Duke:Um, the so uh uh when you're filming the when you're filming the episode, do you go through the scenes multiple times or do you or do you run through it as a complete show and then run it again at all? Or is it just how we go how is the filming take place?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we would go through the dress rehearsal top to bottom, not not stopping. Show night, we'd do each scene and then we'd stop, and the writers and the actors and the director would all kind of convene in a little huddle and say, Do we have this? And if everybody agreed we had it, then we'd move on to the next scene. You know, there's an interesting, I know you're gonna get to Family Matters, but uh Jaleel White was the most brilliant 13-year-old I ever met. And uh, we did a bowling show once. So you've got the standard, you know, the where the ball, the ball return and the seats, and it's it's Carl and Um Jay are bowling. And we shoot the scene, we all get together, everybody says, Man, it was great, went perfect. And Jay says, Um I don't think you're gonna like it. And and we said, Why? And and he said, I was looking in the wrong direction of the B camera, it's not gonna cut. Wow, well, none of us noticed that. So we said, Well, let's shoot it again. We're here, we got the set, we got the actors, we got the bowling balls. So we shoot it next week. I get in an editing session because I usually went to the editing sessions with Jim Miley, and he says, Boy, am I glad you shot the bowling scene again? Wow, Jay was right. Um, so you know, you're looking for help wherever you get it.
James Duke:You know, I remember uh the first time I realized on I'd heard that adage um that uh film is the director's medium, but television is the writer's medium. And I'd heard that, and the first time I saw that, like in real practice, because I'd been on film sets before, but when I went to see a taping of Everybody Loves Raymond, and a friend of mine was a was like a P, this was year obviously years ago. A friend of mine, my old roommate, was actually a PA on the show. And so I went to one of the tapings, and I remember watching where um they're shooting a scene and you know it goes really well, and big laugh, everyone enjoys it, everyone claps, and they did what you said. They they stop after the scene, and you see the big huddle. And and and before the scene, before the huddle, when the scene ended, everyone's clapping. Uh, the director jumps out of his chair and is like, that was fantastic. And you see the the cast like laughing, like, yeah, that was great. And uh, but there's one guy who never got up out of his chair. And uh, and it was what's his name? The showrunner, I forget his name. Um, and uh, and then you see everyone kind of huddle around him, and and I don't know, maybe 30 seconds afterwards, all of a sudden the crowd breaks and you see him go, let's run it again. And and literally you see the director turn and go, Okay, everybody, let's run it again. And I was like, Oh, that's the guy in charge. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_00:He was very good. That was a very well-written show, I thought.
James Duke:Oh, yeah, yeah, well, that was a great show. The um so all right, so let's talk a little bit and thank you for that. I think that's gonna help a lot of people understand. Different shows have different processes, but that's kind of the traditional that was the traditional way in which uh um a situational comedy uh multicamera was was shot and kind of functioned.
SPEAKER_00:So thanks to Desi Arnaz.
James Duke:The Desi Arn.
SPEAKER_00:I know Desi Arnaz created that process.
James Duke:I love Lucy. Um, so where did the idea come from to spin off a character from perfect strangers into their own show?
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's it's one of the most misunderstood myths of television. Um ABC wanted to do a black comedy show, and uh we found that we just there was no place in Perfect Strangers mainly because of the time constraints. The shows kept getting longer and longer and longer. So we started eliminating people, and you will recall that perfect strangers had a character that ran this uh thrift store place, yeah. Which which that character got cut. And uh Harriet, the the elevator operator, was gonna get cut, but we we wanted to take care of her, so we put her in the the new show, which was called Family Matters. Um Tom Miller had this idea that it would be a multi-generational black show, and the character of the grandmother would have this breakfront uh China Cabinet, and each week she would take an object out of this china cabinet and would relate the story of how she came by this in her varied career of working for very famous people, including the Queen of England. Wow. Um Bill and I didn't know how to write that. And we said, Tom, I don't know how you write that. I mean, God forbid we go for a hundred episodes. Is she gonna have a hundred objects of this breaker? So we wrote a pilot and uh it had far too many characters. And uh I thought it was the worst piece of writing we had ever written. We shot the pilot. My wife and I went to England for a vacation. She said, How can you go away while this show is being viewed by the network? I said, Don't worry about it. Not in a million years are they gonna pick up this show. It's a terrible pilot. I get a call while we're in London from Tom's secretary saying, You gotta get back here. ABC has picked up Family Matters. I said, You gotta be kidding. This year's pilots must have really been terrible. So we go back, and now the process is each week we're making a pilot to try to figure out what the heck the show is because it can be about grandma finding objects. And so around about episode 10, we didn't have a we didn't have a script um for episode 10. And it's it's coming up in three weeks or so. So I remembered that we had written a script called um, I don't know, remember when or something for NBC. And we turned in the script and we got a call from the development people at NBC for a meeting, and we figured, okay, this is they're gonna give us notes in the pilot. We go in, and the purpose of the meeting is for the NBC execs to insult us and say, This is the worst pilot we've ever read in our lives. Oh man, it's it's gross, it's offensive. What were you guys thinking? You got a guy in here that re uh apparently eats mice. Goodbye, never come back again. So we left thinking, well, that was weird. That that could have been a phone call, it would have been just as embarrassing. So we pulled out that script, and the script was about a girl, little girl's first date at school, and uh her her dad tries to fix her up, her brother tries to fix her up, and in the end, of course, a very nice kid from the school invites her to the dance and all as well. So we changed the name of the characters, did a minor. We did a rewrite in about four hours, and that became Laura's first date. So now we go to casting, and Jaleel White comes in. I think he's 13. He's got the wardrobe, he's got the voice, he's got the glasses. He's he's this character. He he came in as Urkel, he came in as Urkel, he was amazing. Wow. So we say, okay, cast this guy. It was a one-off, it was a guest star part. So we go to the reading, and I mean, he just knocked it out of the park. And after the reading's over, Tom and Bob ask us over, and they say, Tom says, make an all-episode produced deal with that kid as fast as you can. Wow, they sign him up that day, and uh that unfortunately was uh a story of cast jealousy because he he stole the show. I mean, it became the Steve Urkel show.
James Duke:It did, it became I I remember watching it the first season and then watching it the second season and going, Oh, this is a different show. This is this is a Steve Urkel show.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. And we pared down the cast, we got one of you know, we cut one of the miners, we tried to make it more economical, but definitely the Steve Urkel show. And I felt I felt sorry for the other cast members who were legitimately the stars of the show, but uh it was that would be a big uh ego-bruising situation. Well, but we did 250 episodes. No, we did uh 215 episodes of that show. Wow.
James Duke:Wow, yeah, that that I can see why, especially because he's a kid, he's coming in and yeah, and kind of supplanting, you know, and and and but he but once again he enters the zeitgeist like Fonzi. Yeah, all of a sudden people are quoting him. They are like you know, his his uh his um quotes are are being put on t-shirts and mugs and all that stuff. And yeah, it becomes this thing, and really um that was kind of I'm trying to remember correctly. I think you guys had three shows on TGIF at that point. That was kind of when TJF kind of reached its zenith point, wasn't it? Was was at the height of Urkel's popularity?
SPEAKER_00:It was Perfect Strangers, um Full House, uh uh Step by Step, Family Matters, and Hanging with Mr. Cooper for a season. We're all on at the same time, and we almost died.
James Duke:I bet you did. Now, but full house was on at the same time, but you guys, you Miller Boyette was full house, but not you guys, right?
SPEAKER_00:No, we didn't we weren't on full house, yeah. But and so full house was really what started that sort of adolescent-oriented comedy for ABC that was so successful because Full House launched Perfect Strangers, right? We were we did six episodes behind Full House on Tuesday nights.
James Duke:Oh, on Tuesday nights before they moved to Friday, right?
SPEAKER_00:That's what really launched the show. We got a big audience.
James Duke:Um, they moved you guys to Friday, right? Got it. Okay, and then and then um so so Family Matters just you know just explodes and it just takes off. And and now you're like you said, you're you you've had to reduce the cast a little bit and stuff like that. Um, talk a little bit about whenever you feel like you've caught lightning in a bottle as a writer, as a creator. Um, was it one of those things where you're like, okay, what what what kind of crazy scenario can we get Steve into this week? Like what was the writing process for that show kind of going forward? Because obviously, like you said, he was such a talented performer, um, kind of similar to Henry Winkler. Like, you just guys are just did you did you kind of pull from your experience with Happy Days and Gary with what you what you get they were doing with Fonzie, with kind of what you were trying to do with Urkel?
SPEAKER_00:Well, with with Family Matters, in a way, it was really easier because first of all, we had the dynamic of Steve Urkel is in love with Laura, Laura wants nothing to do with it. Um, Steve Urkel sees um the father as sort of the father figure in his life. The father doesn't want anything to do with him. So, and you know, the mother. Attitude is whenever Steve comes over, he breaks something. So they had there was a lot of sort of built-in dynamics to play with the characters. So it was it was kind of an abundance of riches. And you know, in the the first season of Family Matters was really rough going. ABC was very unhappy with the show. And and again, in one of those uh weird intersections of time, a bunch of the ABC execs came down the week that we were shooting the first episode with Steve Urkel, Laura's first date. And um the the the talk on the way walking down to the stage was, you know, we're really concerned about the show, it's kind of struggling in the ratings. We really need something that's gonna break out. So we went down to the stage, watched the filming of the Steve Urkel first episode, and somebody, I think I I think maybe it was Bob Boyet who turned to the ABC guys and said, Is that enough of a breakout for you? I mean, the audience went crazy over this kid. I mean, it was I just never seen anything quite like it since since uh Fonzi. So uh you I mean you're always looking for that guy, but it's so hard to engineer. I mean, it just happens.
James Duke:Yeah, yeah. The uh what led to the move? Uh, this is a little inside baseball, but for people who remember the show, what led to the move to CBS? Uh, obviously the show had been on for a while, obviously the ratings had started to go down a little bit, but um what led to the eventual move from ABC to CBS?
SPEAKER_00:Um ABC wanted to cancel step by step. And uh there was some kind of contractual arrangement that we could not we could not sell one of the shows to another network for um more money than what ABC was paying. I think it's a kind of a standard thing. They don't want you to have a hit show in their network and sell it to somebody else and make more money. Um so Bob Boyet engineered this deal with with CBS. He said, What we'll do is we'll sell you family matters for uh slightly less money than ABC's paying us, and we'll and we'll sell you step by step uh for whatever you want to give us, because ABC's basically canceled it. So it's it's a free agent. So that's how those shows got bundled to go to CBS. The problem for CBS is their audience didn't wasn't familiar with these shows, and the public know I had no, I ran into people constantly who had no idea during that season that those shows were still on the air. It's crazy.
James Duke:That's it's so different as it is from it is now, whereas back then networks had real identities with their shows, and you would tune in, and oftentimes people would just leave the channel on. So, like if you if you're coming to watch an eight o'clock show, you would just watch it all the way through to the news. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they didn't know that they were on another network to look at right.
SPEAKER_00:So CBS got hurt in the process, but we didn't.
James Duke:Well, and step by step is this was this other kind of really fun show. Well, did it start out as a did it start out as a Suzanne Summers vehicle or as a Patrick Duffy vehicle? Or was it really, hey, let's go out and create a show around both of these?
SPEAKER_00:Like I'm curious the the how that you know it was a ABC said to us, we want to do Brady Bunch. Got it. It's that simple. We want to do the Brady Bunch. Got it. Yours, mine, and always. So we went out casting, and uh Suzanne had just done a show called uh She's the Sheriff. Oh, yeah, which was on a lot, it was on MGM lot.
James Duke:Yep, it was on MBC, it was on MBC, I think, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we took a meeting with her and uh she was delightful, you know. And we thought, well, this is great, this will be the the the mother wife. And uh somebody said, you know, you ought to talk to Patrick Duffy because he's I guess it was coming off Dallas or I don't know. And uh Patrick Duffy is a is a wildly funny man. I mean, he just he broke us up in the room, really. So we thought, well, hey, this this seems to work, and we got very lucky with the kids. Yeah. Um, I mean, I call them kids, they were 17, 18 years old, some of them, but uh put the show together pretty quickly, and uh then we then we went looking for the the sort of screwball character in the show because these were parents with children, so they had to be relatively stable, right? Um and uh we found the character of Cody, uh, which was who was kind of an off-the-wall surfer dude, and and in real life he was an off the wall surfer dude. Uh so we got very lucky with the show, and it fit into the TGIF mold. So he did 165 episodes.
James Duke:Man, I know you are you are bringing back some memories right now, just talking about these shows back to back. I uh you you have such a long history with casting um kids, right? The child actors, uh people um, people under the age of 17. Um, you have such a great record of just there's just so many great performers in your show. Was there a particular kind of secret that you and the casting directors you'd work with? Was it was it was there anything that you looked for in particular? Um, that for the kind of performers that you were looking for for your shows?
SPEAKER_00:Uh, we had great casting directors, but the the person who was really instrumental was Bob Boyet. Bob Boyet called uh cast Henry Winkler. Oh wow. Bob Boyet cast the Olsen twins. Bob Boyet cast uh Cody. Gosh, I've gone blank on his name. You get to be my age, there's a lot of names that are go away. Um Bob had an incredible instinct for I think I think uh Jaleel White was the only person Bob didn't wasn't involved in the casting of, but it was so obvious to see at that at that first reading that you know you you could have been a dunce knowing that that was the kid you need to sign up.
James Duke:The um hanging with Mr. Cooper was a show that you guys kind of similar to um Love Boat, right? Like uh you were given the show, like you were asked to you you didn't create it or anything like that, but you were it had been on the air for a couple of years, and you were given the show and asked to you know make tweaks or just kind of keep it going. Uh what what was that experience like?
SPEAKER_00:Well, you know, the the worst thing for a production company or a studio is to get a show in the air for three years and have it canceled because there's very little syndication money that's gonna return all that deficit.
James Duke:Yeah, so and just and I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you, but just explain that for people because the syndication winner was it was five years, right? Like a you needed a show to be on the air for five years.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you you needed a show on the air for five years to get a good syndication return, but you definitely had to have four seasons because four seasons gave you enough to strip the show, meant you were running it five days a week in reruns in the daytime, or right, because you had 20 you had what 22, 24 episodes. Well, back then you had 24 episodes a year, so that got you to you know 96 shows. Yeah um, and hanging with Mr. Cooper was sort of on the bubble, as the network says, and they were thinking about canceling it. So ABC came to us and said, Look, if you can do one more season of this, and this and the studio was gung-ho, it was like, we'll do anything you want. Uh and we came in, we looked at a bunch of episodes, and we said, you know, one of the problems with the show, it's just been all over the place. I mean, the characters' attitudes changed, and so first of all, we just need to clean up the structure and get everybody on on attitude on point. I think we let a couple of the casts go because again, it was the problem of uh ABC back during that area. You know, if they had a if they had a problem, they just throw extra cast members. You know, if we keep adding people, maybe we'll get lucky. Um so we did the we did a hundred, we did uh I think we did 22 or maybe 30 episodes to bring it up to a realistic syndication package. I don't think the show ever did great in syndication, but it recouped the studio's deficit. So everybody was happy.
James Duke:When you come into a show like that, that are already what are the some of the unique challenges you found with coming into a show with already established characters, already established um kind of way of doing things? Do you do you kind of feel like the grown-up in the room that everyone's kind of looking at you like, uh, here comes this guy? Or or were they very accepting of you, like, oh yes, like we we're so glad you're here?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think we had enough of a of a resume by that point that they figured this was a good thing. I mean, these guys that did step by step in Family Matters are coming in to help. But we sat in the room with each one of the cast members separately and said, Tell us about your character. And the thing that was very clear is they had no idea what their character was because they had played so many different things. Uh, I'm the introvert, I'm the extrovert, uh, you know. So we talked with them to develop a character right then in the room to say, Are you can you be happy with this? Does this work for you? And the response we got from everybody is that's great. Now I know who the character is. So writing the show was not that difficult. And Mark Curry was a very sharp, instinctive comic. Yeah, we had a deal with him. He said, You know what? They never they never let me try my own stuff. And I said, I tell you what, at the run-through on Tuesday night, you could try whatever you want. And if we like it and it's funny, well, it'll be in the script. And it was, I would say about 70% of what he pitched. We said, write that down. That's that's that's good stuff. Uh 30% of it was kind of like, hmm? What does that mean? Uh, but he was great to work with. We brought uh Marklin Baker over to direct uh some of the Hang with the Cooper episodes. Um we actually did our passion project, which was we called the plumbing show. The plumbing show was a character who wants to put add a bathroom to their home. It started way back on a syndicated show called uh gosh Please Stand By, which was done for the NBC O and O group. The father wants to add a um a bathroom upstairs and it's a disaster. So then we did it on um we did it on perfect strangers, we did it on step by step, we did it on uh a couple other we did it on Cooper. That's like well, we just we just thought it was fun to sort of take an idea and see how different people did it, yeah. And uh yeah, I actually have all those episodes on a reel somewhere that's uh that's great for the TV museum.
James Duke:That's great. When you when you uh look back at your career, um having written, I mean, what are we looking at? 400 or having having produced like 600, 800, however many countless hours of television. Um do you uh do you have a favorite or two that you look back on of just episodes that you're particularly proud of? Ones that that maybe were hitting at a particular time in your life that that that gave them a greater resonance or the performance or just just anything in particular? Are there uh certain times, certain episodes that you look back on of your work where you're particularly proud of?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think a lot of the perfect strangers episodes, particularly, because I just I fell in love with the actors and uh like I say, they always they always brought the writing up to a higher level. Uh some shows you're kind of right, you're kind of struggling with the cast to get them up to the level of the writing. Um yeah, you know, you you you look back on the Tom Hanks Happy Days episode, and you say, that was that was pretty cool. Um but I you know I forget, I don't even remember, I don't think we wrote that episode. Um uh one time I was watching TV and I saw an episode of of Happy Days, and our credits came up at the end as writers, and I had no memory of the show. I mean, I I couldn't have told you we wrote that episode if you put a gun to my head. Uh that's great.
James Duke:That's great.
SPEAKER_00:You know, one one one time, you know, I'm sure you've heard Laverna Shirley went through a series of producers. The girls drove the producers nuts. And we're walking along along across the lot one day, and Gary Marshall's coming the other day, other way, and I said, you know, I said to Bill, you know what he's gonna ask us. And Gary comes up to us and he says, Uh, I don't suppose you guys would be interested in producing Laverne Shirley. I said, Gary, come on, we're your friends.
James Duke:You don't ask your friends to do that. You don't ask, you don't ask friends to produce Laverne.
SPEAKER_02:Come on.
James Duke:Oh, that's good. That's funny. That's funny. Um I'm also impressed that you you haven't you you haven't done a Gary Marshall impersonation because usually when I talk to people, you know, they they do they do they do their they do their Gary, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's it's it's so characteristic though, it's easy to mimic, you know. Gary was a guy you never wanted to have lunch with because he tried to talk while he was eating. It's not a pretty picture.
James Duke:I love it. I'm gonna get you out of here with this. You tell one of my favorite anecdotes. When you when I when I was going through the the act one program in 2001 and you came and spoke, you told this uh really funny story uh about people guys coming in to pitch you guys on a new TV show. And uh I wonder if you could tell that story to uh to my listening audience about well, you know, you know, this was a this was a time, and it was a very short time, it was only for like a season or two, that the studio asked us to sort of screen pilot ideas.
SPEAKER_00:And uh, you know, Warner Brothers had this uh writer's workshop thing that you went to. It was like I don't know, it was like 13 weeks, and different producers on the lot were asked to come in and talk for one of these sessions. But then we also heard people just come in and say, Hi, how are you? I'm Bob, I'm George. Okay, here's the idea there's a father that's really a really bigoted person, he's just this incredible right-winger guy, and uh his wife is this kind of ditzy person that doesn't quite get anything and is kind of slow, and and then he's got these these two kids. Uh, I think it was two kids, I'm not sure, but one of them is uh one of them is a real liberal guy, and he's uh very pro-progressive, you know, uh and he's always in the face of the father who's this extreme convert conservative. And then there's a daughter that's sort of the peacemaker. She's trying to always make peace between uh the other three characters, and and we kind of listened to this for a while. I said, Isn't that isn't that all in the family? I mean, that's exactly all in the family. The guy says, No, that's not all in the family. This is with gnomes. He said, Yeah, you know, little the little foresty creatures. We build these little tiny sets so we can save a lot of money on production, and we hire little people to be the actors. That's what I thought. I gotta get I gotta tell uh I gotta tell Warner Brothers this isn't gonna work.
James Duke:Guess what? Someone somewhere is going to make that, and we're gonna be the we're gonna be the dopest.
SPEAKER_00:Good luck casting that.
James Duke:Oh man, I love that story. Uh little sets and everything. I love how the everything's little, the little money on costumes. Let's have it. It's so stupid. I love it. I love it. Okay. Well, this has been I I'd love talking to you. I think I know the audience of just really enjoyed um enjoyed this. This has been so much fun, Michael. I really appreciate you just giving us your time. And uh, thank you for having me. It's been a real blessing. I always try to close all of our podcasts by praying for our guests. Would you allow me to pray for you?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I need all the prayers I can get.
James Duke:Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we just uh thank you for today. Thank you for just the opportunity to be able to speak with my friend Michael. Just um, God, I just want to pray a blessing upon him right now. Just pray a blessing upon his life. And um, I know uh they're gonna be just doing some traveling soon. Just I just want to pray for traveling graces for them. Um, God, thank you for uh just uh Michael and his testimony and who he is and everything that he's done and just um just his witness to you or and for you, uh, to so many. And um, God, we just uh ask that you continue to just um uh let Michael uh just know how much uh you love him, um how much uh he means to you. God, I pray that he would fill your presence in his life. And um, just pray for protection and guidance for him and his family and just a blessing on everything um he's working on now. And uh we just pray this in Jesus' name and your promises we stand. Amen. Thank you for listening to the Act One podcast, celebrating over 20 years as the premier training program for Christians in Hollywood. Act One is a Christian community. Of entertainment industry professionals who train and equip storytellers to create works of truth, goodness, and beauty. The Act One program is a division of Master Media International. To financially support the mission of Act One or to learn more about our programs, visit us online at Act OneProgram.com. And to learn more about the work of Master Media, go to MasterMedia.com.
unknown:So the only side of the ball. So we're going to start the ball. So we're not trying to get it. So the one is fine.