Our casting nightmare Part III

More on our snake-bitten CHARACTERS pilot for NBC in 1979.

Okay, we cast the girl. Maggie Roswell. But now we needed the guy who would be her comedy partner. Details of the pilot premise here.

As with the girl, we saw a bunch of guys – some incredibly talented – and Matriarch nixed them all. After she shit all over the screen tests she gave us the name of the couple she wanted. The actress was Ms. Broadway and the guy was an emerging LA actor. Did we like them? Her for sure. Him, it was hard to tell from his reel. But at that point we would have taken Trigger if he weren’t stuffed.

We fly Ms. Broadway out to LA, spend a delightful day trying to cajole her into doing our pilot. She was leaning against it but said she’d mull it over. Back to NY she flew to star in her Broadway play the next night.

We inquired about the guy. His agent said he wasn’t interested. He had just had a bad experience with a pilot and didn’t want to do a series at the moment.

We reported this back to Matriarch who screamed at us again. “You’re producers! Convince him! He’s the only one I’ll approve!” and again she slammed down the phone.

So we call the agent again and arrange a dinner with the actor. For four hours we reassure him that this pilot experience would not be like his previous one, that we are straight-shooter and he can trust us. Eventually, he gives in and says he’d do it – but only because we seemed to have the integrity the other producers lacked.

The next day business affairs and his agent begin negotiating the deal.

Meanwhile… Ms. Broadway is still on the fence. One of her concerns was who would her co-star be? Matriarch messengers over a tape of the actor. Ms. Broadway doesn’t like him.

So right in the middle of negotiations NBC pulls their approval and the deal is dead. To this day I am mortified. You live and learn. Today if that happened I call Matriarch and tell her she can take the pilot and shove it right up her ass. Either the actor is approved or we walk.

But then we were young and green. And stupid. A day later Ms. Broadway decides to pass.

So now we have neither.

Matriarch’s next choice is Jeff Altman. Nice guy, talented, but not right for this role. We pass. She slams down the phone again. Altman then gets cast in another NBC pilot that becomes PINK LADY AND JEFF. That show gets picked up instead of ours. A girl singing group from Japan (unknown to American audiences) that spoke broken English singing bad cover versions of Donny Osmond songs and doing comedy skits with Jeff Altman. It was a super train wreck (as opposed to SUPERTRAIN wreck, which was also picked up).

Finally, we catch a break. Philip Charles MacKenzie (pictured: above) walks into our office. He’s PERFECT. So perfect that even Matriarch has to approve him.

Does he look familiar CHEERS fans? Yep, he played the fiance in the Coach's daughter. Originally another actor played that role but didn't work out. I suggested Philip. He came in with only one day to rehearse and just nailed it. Philip is now a very successful director.

Two more roles to go. Stay tuned for more chapters.

By the way, three years after this pilot David and I sign on to produce the first season of CHEERS. At the first table reading NBC President Brandon Tartikoff takes us aside and says, “You know, you guys were right about Andrea Martin.”

We almost kissed him.

RABBI SCHLOMO RABINOWITZ: CRIME FIGHTER

People ask why don’t I branch out into hour television. I tell them I’m certainly open to the prospect but need just the right vehicle. And finally I’ve found it. Don’t steal this now. I’ll be pitching the major networks and NBC when I get home from Hawaii.

It’s a police drama inspired from an article I read recently in the New York Times. Apparently the police department in Helena, Montana, in an attempt to acquire a bomb sniffing dog discovered that instead of resorting to the huge cost of training one, they could just buy an Israeli bomb sniffing dog. They have a surplus over there (I mention it just in case you haven’t done your Christmas shopping). So a dog was shipped out to Helena, but they discovered one problem. It had been trained in Hebrew. It only answered to Hebrew commands. And even phonetically, Montana’s Finest had trouble getting across their wishes. Not many folks in Tel Aviv speak Hebrew with a drawl.

So they enlisted the help of one of the three rabbis in the town (who also happens to be Orthodox and dresses in traditional 18th Century clothing). He’s now their canine translator and has also been put on retainer.

And that’s my show, dear readers. RABBI SCHLOMO RABINOWITZ: CRIME FIGHTER. It’s like NUMB3RS but with a Hasidic Jew. Every week he’ll walk the mean streets of Helena with his trusty bomb sniffing dog, Farfel. Hopefully there won’t be any crimes on Friday night or Saturday because that’s the Sabbath. But all other times, he is an in-your-face, take-no-prisoners, bad-ass dude.

Gotta go. I need to prepare my pitch and check Alan Arkin’s availability.

RABBI SCHLOMO RABINOWITZ: CRIME FIGHTER – Fridays at 10 (no wait, it can’t be on Friday night) Thursdays at 10 on CBS.

The Hour of Not Quite Rain

Here's another excerpt from my book about growing up in the 60s. It's 1967, the summer of love in Los Angeles.

In the spirit of freedom and “do your own thing” KHJ radio devised an ingenious contest. Listeners were invited to send in original song lyrics and the winning entry would be put to music and appear on the next Buffalo Springfield album. Every hour the Bossjocks read another finalist. Ohmygod, they were terrible! Sophomoric, overwrought, just loaded with pungent imagery that made zero sense. The jocks would read them very straight over sappy music. I would roar with laughter every hour. But what do you expect? These were 13-year-olds composing this stuff. And many followed the current trend of trying to simulate the free association of a drug trip, which I suppose gave them license to abandon coherent thoughts and poetry in favor of Mad Libs.

Micki Callen was the winner with her haunting if not mystifying ballad, “The Hour of Not Quite Rain”.

In the hour of not quite rain
When the fog was fingertip high
The moon hung suspended
In a singular sky

Deeply and beyond seeing
Not wishing to intrude
Bathed in its own reflection
The water mirrored the moon

The tumbling birds have now sobered
From the leaves of their nursery
Like shadowy, quiet children
Watching sleepily

What???

She beat out 15,000 entries. Micki, if you're out there, I'd love to hear your story on this.

Anyway, here it is. Take some acid and click play.

The casting nightmare continues

Welcome back to hell. Yesterday I explained how we wanted Andrea Martin for the lead in our 1979 NBC pilot CHARACTERS and the network casting VP, "Matriarch" wanted Toni Tennille.

The pilot was greenlit in February, scheduled to film in April, and be in consideration for NBC’s fall line-up. But these casting impasses forced us to push back to October. The rippling effect of problems that caused will be the subject of another grisly chapter.

For these screen tests we had to hire a full crew, build make-shift sets, and have a DGA director direct it. The budget for our little show was hemorrhaging. The director we had hired for the pilot was busy directing something else the day of the test so we had to hire a different director, someone we had never met. He proved to be a charming guy and did a terrific job.

We wrote a new scene for the test. We didn’t want Matriarch to hate everybody just because she’s already not laughed at the scene thirty times.

We assembled twelve actors, put them in six teams and filmed the screen tests. It took all day.

Ultimately, this was a pointless exercise because Matriarch hated everybody. Andrea had no shot. A couple others were discarded because they looked too “ethnic” (read: Jewish).

Now what?

There was a Broadway actress Matriarch liked. We should get her. We saw her tape and liked her too. But she was the toast of Broadway and didn’t want to do a series. I don't blame her. That wasted a month.

Time was running out. We had seen practically everybody.

Begrudgingly, Matriarch said we could test the girl she hated the least and one that we wanted. We would meet at NBC at 4:00 Thursday in a rehearsal hall; each actress would audition and one of the two would be chosen.

The morning of the tests we get a call from Matriarch’s assistant. There will be another final candidate – this actress from New York. We had seen her in New York and hated her. But she was a friend of Woody Allen’s and had him call Matriarch on her behalf. Matriarch was all excited that Woody Allen called her personally so she agreed to fly her out from New York.

We were furious. There was no way we were going to do the show with this lox. She was TERRIBLE. But we had to at least go through the motions.

At 2:00 we get another call from Matriarch’s assistant. Matriarch will only be available for fifteen minutes so can only see two candidates, not three. Guess which one got bumped? Yep. Our candidate.

We go to NBC. Woody Allen’s actress reads first and is appallingly bad. Even Matriarch is stunned. Candidate number two, Maggie Roswell reads and does a lovely job. And following Woody’s trainwreck she was absolutely Lucy.

Since Maggie (pictured above) was one of the six we had approved we were thrilled to have her. (She even looked a little like our prototype -- Gilda Radner.) And she rewarded us by doing a great job on the pilot. Maggie later went on to do character voices for THE SIMPSONS for quite a few years.

And that's just one part. There were three others.

Stay tuned for more horror stories on the snake-bitten project called CHARACTERS.

Andrea Martin and Toni Tennille vie for the same role

This is sort of a follow-up to a post from last week when I mentioned that we wanted to cast Andrea Martin in a pilot and the network nixed it. They wanted Toni Tennille instead. This will be the first in a series of stories about this ill-fated project that I will sprinkle in over the next few weeks. I can’t write them all at once. I’ll have Viet Nam flashbacks.

Today I’ll just focus on casting.

The year was 1979. The project was called CHARACTERS. And the network was NBC (back when they were a network).

The premise was simple (at least initially). I had read a book called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY about the formation of the improv group SECOND CITY. From their original members came Mike Nichols & Elaine May. When the two of them did scenes together it was magic. Eventually they became a very successful comedy team for a number of years. My partner David and I thought a good idea for a series would be a contemporary Nichols & May – two young members of an improv troupe who team up. Since we believe that all good shows need a definite theme, ours was “can two people who are attracted to each other work together strictly as friends?” This was years before WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, by the way.

We pitched it to NBC. They liked it but wondered, what if she has a boyfriend? Then it could be kind of a triangle relationship. This was a little different than what we planned but okay. We were young and just wanted a sale. Here’s what we found out later: One of the big development honchos had just read SEMI-TOUGH, which had a triangle relationship in it. So the word went out – we want a SEMI-TOUGH. That’s how a football themed piece became an improv group piece.

We wrote the script and got the greenlight to make it. Now came casting. David and I had never done casting before. On MASH, executive producer Burt Metcalfe (himself a former actor and casting director) handled all of that. We had enough to worry about with what dress looked best on Klinger?

We met with head of casting for NBC – let’s just call her “Matriarch”. I think her first casting assignment was RICHARD III for Shakespeare. We told her our prototypes were Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner. From day one she hated us; I don’t know why. Maybe because we were then very young and inexperienced, maybe she just hated the project; I never found out. But she was not an ally.

We hired our MASH casting director, read a bunch of people, found ones we thought were good, and ran their names by Matriarch. She hated all of them. Unilaterally. The last thing she said to us was “Keep looking!” and slammed down the phone.

We decided to try our luck in New York, maybe find some new faces. In two days we read every actor and waiter in Manhattan.

Side note: Neither David nor I are big soap opera fans. These big soap opera stars would come in to read for us and just stand in the doorway as if to say, “Yep. That’s right. It’s me. In person.” We didn’t know who the fuck they were. This did not sit well with them.

Anyway, we found more worthy candidates and put them on tape, using just a black-and-white camcorder in the office. Nothing fancy. No real screen test.

The actress we were highest on was Andrea Martin. She came out of the Toronto chapter of SECOND CITY and currently was in SCTV (that brilliant sketch comedy show -- now available on DVD). We brought the tape back to Burbank and Matriarch just hated her. Loathed her. Wanted her killed. Matriarch also crushed us for bringing her black-and-white screen tests.

Finally, we asked who she saw in the role and she said Toni Tennille. After picking ourselves off the floor, we took NBC prez Brandon Tartikoff aside and said this is ridiculous. She's a marvelous singer but if we were doing a biopic on the Captain & Tennille there are still probably better actresses to play Toni than Toni Tennille. He agreed that was an odd choice.

We left it like this: we could fly some people out here and do real screen tests and then make our final decision.

Part two tomorrow: the screen tests and ultimate resolution.

What to get the person who has everything and is weird?

Here are a couple of fabulous Christmas gift ideas.

Tired of having to buy those $.49 rolls of toilet paper? Now for only $800 you can get a new state-of-the-art computerized toilet seat. With the push of a button on your handy remote, your caboose will get washed and dried while you remain seated in luxury on your heated toilet seat.

I’m not kidding.

It’s perfect for really lazy people or Captain Hook.

Developed in Japan (where else?), presenting the SWASH 800. And here’s my favorite feature: re the spray that shoots up to clean you, there’s a single “For Him” button that says “back” and “For Her” there are two buttons, one for “back” and the other for “front”. The dryer feature works for all.

Soon there will be a model for writers with a button labeled “agent”. Push that and smoke will come up your ass.

And for all you LOST IN SPACE fans, you can now purchase your own full size robot. The third season version (which we ALL know was the best!).

Here are some of the features it comes with:

Acrylic bubble based on the existing original.
- Laser cut steel brain with polished stainless steel top cover and crown.
- CNC machined light rod ends brain cup and neck bracket.
- Accurate acrylic collar & vents, hand formed based on the original jigs used.
- Torso based on the original stone molds.
- Welded steel torso hooks.
- Laser cut aluminum bezel with engraved acrylic chest buttons.
- Machined & clear anodized aluminum microphone with stainless steel screen.
- Actual Dialight sockets and Lens (not reproductions!)
- Hundreds of individual parts fabricated from Fiberglass, acrylic, aluminum, steel, etc.
- All metal tread sections, knee plates and hinges.
- Real rubber tread belts, knee bellows, leg bellows, arms & neck bellows.
- 32 machined aluminum wheels with v-groove.

And wait! There's MORE! Dick Tufeld, the original voice of the robot has recorded 500 tracks.

Again, this is not a joke. This item is really for sale. Here's the link.

And for how much you ask? A pittance! A mere $24,500. That’s right. Just $24,500. Why, it’s like they’re GIVING THEM AWAY.

The only thing is, check the small print. No single guy who purchases one of these authentic LOST IN SPACE full sized robots will ever get laid again.

“Danger, Norbert Schleppleman!”

Great Vin Scully calls

Vin Scully will be back in the booth calling Dodger baseball for the 61st season.

Thanks to Rob Adams here are some classic Vin Scully calls.