Contents
- 1. Transcript
- 1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE June 20, 2005
- 1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO June 20, 2005
- 1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE June 20, 2005
- 1.4. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE July 12, 2005
- 1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO July 12, 2005
- 1.6. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE July 12, 2005
- 1.7. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE September 28, 2005
- 1.8. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO September 28, 2005
- 1.9. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE September 28, 2005
- 1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE October 12, 2005
- 1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO October 12, 2005
- 1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE October 12, 2005
- 1.13. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE October 26, 2005
- 1.14. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO October 26, 2005
- 1.15. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE ONE October 26, 2005
- 1.16. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE January 11, 2006
- 1.17. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE TWO January 11, 2006
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
June 20, 2005
-
COLLINGS
- This is Jane Collings interviewing Larry Gelbart at his home in Beverly
Hills [California] on June 20th, 2005.Good afternoon, Larry.
-
GELBART
- Good afternoon, Jane.
-
COLLINGS
- Thank you for coming, I should say, to your own house.
-
GELBART
- That was on my way.
-
COLLINGS
- Why don't we just start off with your early life and just sort of sketch
in when and where you were born.
-
GELBART
- I was born in Chicago, Illinois, on a wintry day, I guess. It was
February 25th. It was 1928. There was a depression at the time, but I
was hardly aware of that, having been in the dark for the previous nine
months. I was born on Crystal Avenue on the Northwest Side of Chicago.
Chicago then, that part of the city, was, I think, largely populated by
or there were a great many immigrants. My mother [Frieda Sturner
Gelbart] came from Poland, as did her family, and so I was born in that
part of the city. My father [Harry Gelbart] was an immigrant, too, so he
qualified for the Northwest Side. That's it. I guess I was born in the
early hours. Most babies seem to be born in the early hours, or they
were before TV.
-
COLLINGS
- Your parents met in Chicago, isn't that right?
-
GELBART
- My parents did meet in Chicago. My mother was from Poland, a town called
Dumbrova, D-u-m-b-r-o-v-a. Quite recently someone sent me a— He had
visited Dumbrova and he took some pictures in the local cemetery, none
of my mother's family, but it was nice to have visual proof that the
place really existed beyond just hearing about it at your mother's
breast, although she didn't keep saying that as she was feeding me.My mother came to America when she was fifteen, and she was, like a lot
of young women at that time, immediately put behind a sewing machine,
and I don't know if it was slave labor or child labor, but it was heavy
labor for her.
-
COLLINGS
- Did she head out on her own?
-
GELBART
- No. She lived with her family. She lived with her, I guess, her father
and mother. She came from a rather large family, seven, four girls and
three boys, all of whom, sad to say, are no longer alive.My father came from Latvia, from a town called Jakobstadt, Jacob's Town,
I guess, and he apprenticed there from the age of twelve as a barber and
was to continue in that work until almost ninety, so that's a pretty
good run for a barber.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, sure is.
-
GELBART
- They met somewhere. That's kind of lost or my memory doesn't really grab
where it was or how they came to meet, but I guess there would have been
a lot of inter-immigrant meetings. He was kind of a— In fact, I have a
picture of him in a western costume. He was kind of a Jewish cowboy, and
he was that way in life, too. He was by far the more sort of dashing
character. My mother was— For many reasons. One, I guess he was just
disposed to be that kind of personality with a personality, and was in
the world more than my mother was; that is to say, when she wasn't at
the sewing machine, it was because she was at home raising a child, two
eventually, and had not that much contact with the outside world,
whereas he was, as a barber, much more social.
-
COLLINGS
- Sure, he'd have to be.
-
GELBART
- Yes. So they met as teenagers, I don't think they were nineteen yet, and
I think a year after they met or married, rather, I was born. There were
not a lot of children known to be born out of wedlock in those days.I guess we continued living somewhere in that area with my mother's
parents who spoke— Never did ever learn to speak English; it was either
Polish or Yiddish. I lived with them, and until I was five, I did not
speak that much English.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, so the whole neighborhood was speaking Polish and Yiddish them,
because—
-
GELBART
- Polish or Yiddish or Russian. So those were the earliest, earliest,
earliest years.
-
COLLINGS
- What was it like when you did go to school?
-
GELBART
- Well, first of all, they got my name wrong. My birth certificate, on my
birth certificate I'm described as Larry Simon, which was the English
translation of my Yiddish name— "Leib Shloima." Leib can be anything. It
can be Lewis, it can be Lawrence, I guess. It could be almost anything
that begins with an L. Shloima translated itself as Simon. It could also
be Solomon.But my mother, as unsteady as she was with the language and certainly the
written language, didn't dare take me to school because there might have
been something she had to read or sign. So my Aunt Molly [Molly
Pasco],who later insisted she be called Aunt Jean, she Americanized
herself not knowing about Ulysses, James Joyce, that is, and so she—
They must have said, "Larry. Is that Lawrence?"And she said, "Yes," and so I became Lawrence, right, and with the wrong
birth date.
-
COLLINGS
- It's like it's an Ellis Island story of a sort.
-
GELBART
- Yes, exactly, you know those stories. So I was Lawrence Gelbart with the
wrong birth date, a day too early, February 24th. I didn't like
Lawrence. It was just—
-
COLLINGS
- That must have been funny, like suddenly being called on by—
-
GELBART
- I mean Lawrence of Poland?
-
COLLINGS
- —this name, and it's not even your name.
-
GELBART
- Exactly. I think at home they called me Shloima. Not very pretty, but
more accurate.
-
COLLINGS
- But if it's your name, then.
-
GELBART
- That's right.
-
COLLINGS
- There must have been a huge group of kids at the school who basically
didn't speak English, right, because they were coming from your same
neighborhood?
-
GELBART
- By the time I was enrolled in kindergarten, we had moved to the West
Side, and while, again, it was heavily peopled by immigrants, English
was the language that everybody spoke, at least outside the house. So
that was not a problem. Not so much not a problem, I don't think anyone
else spoke only Yiddish. But I caught on quickly, of course.
-
COLLINGS
- So why did your parents move?
-
GELBART
- Well, I guess they wanted to be on their own. They wanted to be free of
my mother's family, at least her parents. I'm assuming that. I think my
dad began to work on the West Side in a barbershop, and so it was
certainly closer to where we were.
-
COLLINGS
- I wondered if this was sort of an upward mobility move.
-
GELBART
- In a way it was. I mean, yes, getting out of the house, leaving your
parents behind, for my mother, was an upward move, although I don't
think she ever really left home in that sense. I think she always felt
very close to her parents. She was not the youngest of the children, but
she was very attached to her mom and dad. Mom and dad; it seems to
strange to refer her parents as mom and dad. I mean, that's so Norman
Rockwell, and they were so Mittel European, you know.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. So did you have a lot of cousins that you were growing up with at
the same time?
-
GELBART
- I had more cousins than I spent much time with. The two cousins I spent
a good deal of time with were my Cousin Aaron [Aaron Ross], who died
about four years ago, and his sister, my cousin June [June Ross], who
died last year.After we moved to the West Side, we would make a Saturday pilgrimage,
always, to my grandparents' home on the Northwest Side, and Aaron and
June, or Archie and Junie, as they were called, still lived on the
Northwest Side. They were the children of my mother's sister Becky
[Rebecca Ross]. So I just, to this day, I smile inwardly when I think
about that because it meant going to the movies and seeing, at a
minimum, a double feature. We'd see triple features in those days,
carrying huge smelly sandwiches into the theater and spending literally
the whole day in a movie house seeing that many movies and cartoons and
short subjects and the weekly serials and so forth. But that was a
highlight of my week, to spend those with two other kids.Then when my sister Marcia [Marcia Ross] came along when I was seven,
then she was, of course, part of the group of pilgrims. My dad didn't
take part in any of that, because Saturday would have been a very busy
day for him as a barber, everybody getting spruced up to go wherever
they went on a Saturday night.
-
COLLINGS
- So you would see like live acts between the movies, right, at the—
-
GELBART
- It depended. On the Northwest Side, we would just see movies. When I was
lucky enough to get taken downtown as a little child by one or both of
my parents, I would see a first-run movie, rarely a double feature,
because those big houses, like the Chicago Theater, the Oriental
Theater, the State and Lake [Theater], they would show a first-run movie
and a floorshow, which always or invariably consisted of a big band, ala
Benny Goodman, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, thrilling stuff, just
thrilling stuff, and comedians, live comedians, and frequently someone
traveling or appearing that was in the motion picture itself, so you
know that was such a treat.We're a little jaded out here now in terms of seeing celebrities, but
then to see a live presentation of the film presentation that we just
saw or the character that we just saw was kind of thrilling. But I know
that that's where I developed a lifelong interest, and more than an
interest, a passion for big bands, and I guess comedians, too.
-
COLLINGS
- Were there any particular memorable Saturdays where you really said,
"This is great"?
-
GELBART
- I think every one. Every Saturday was a great Saturday. I remember comic
routines that I saw when I must have been seven or eight years old. I
still remember sort of key passages from them because they made such an
impression. That and the fact that many of the acts that you saw live
would return year after year.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, right. Interesting, yes.
-
GELBART
- Pre-TV, of course, they could do the same half hour or twenty minutes of
their routine over again, and you didn't say, "Oh, I saw that one." It
would be like hearing a familiar bedtime story again.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. That's a great way to really learn the craft, isn't it?
-
GELBART
- Absolutely, absolutely. It was wonderful. My folks tell me that when I
was, I don't know, under a year, we were downtown seeing a show and the
band started playing, and either I got in the aisle or I stood on top of
an armrest or something and started leading the orchestra. Just a little
popular legend in my family. I'm the only one alive to remember.
-
COLLINGS
- So you could just say that all you like.
-
GELBART
- Yes, exactly. I could even make up a band that I led.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, early on, you took all kinds of dance lessons.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- And clarinet lessons and so on. Were your parents just kind of
encouraging where your interests seems to lie?
-
GELBART
- I don't know whether they thought that's where my interests might be
hiding, and some of them have remained hidden, or it was just the
immigrant dream for their child to do better than they had done or were
likely to do. So they did give me tap dancing lessons when I was, I
think, about seven years old, and I still remember Mrs. Kravitz on the
first floor. We lived on the third floor and I would practice my steps
on the porch, so the whole building could hear them. I remember her
yelling encouragement such as, "Break your legs, why don't you?" "Why
don't you fall down?" and stuff like that.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, this is good training for like possible rejection in the
future.
-
GELBART
- For reviews, exactly, exactly. I was well schooled in rejection by Mrs.
Kravitz, anyway. Old, old lady, god.The building was such, there was a basement apartment, then there was a
first floor, a second floor, a third floor, and we all shared a common
back porch, and if you stepped out of my— There were two apartments on
each floor, so it was almost like a play set. Everybody knew what
everybody else was doing or yelling or tapping. Then, of course, they
put me onto the clarinet because my dancing proved to be—
-
COLLINGS
- Bothering the neighbors? [laughs]
-
GELBART
- Bothering the neighbors. I was a prodigy in failure. At seven, I'd
already abandoned a career. So I moved on to the clarinet. No, I think
first my dad bought me a C-melody saxophone. Nobody plays the C-melody
saxophone.
-
COLLINGS
- That seems an unusual choice for a small kid.
-
GELBART
- Yes, I guess so, but I think it tied into the era of bands and show
business. My dad was always— He was intrigued by show business. A lot of
his customers, you know—
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Well, I was just going to ask because, I mean, of course, there's
the immigrant thing of wanting to get ahead.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- But why in show business in particular?
-
GELBART
- Because it didn't require a lot of education. You could take lessons and
learn how to be a musician, and I guess it was very American to be
noticed in that way and, I guess, to make a lot of money, too.
-
COLLINGS
- Also the lifestyle that was shown in the films of that era was like this
was this incredibly luxurious lifestyle.
-
GELBART
- Exactly, and even in Chicago, which was certainly not the show town that
Los Angeles was, a lot of the people who my father catered to, cut the
heads of and shaved the faces of, were people in show business, so he
was at home with that, and my dad was— I don't know how he learned, but
he did this kind of faux tap dancing around his own chair, literally tap
dancing, and always telling jokes, so that he was in his own light, and
by everybody else's, I guess, kind of an entertainer himself. So if I
could make it that way, that would have been a—
-
COLLINGS
- Was there any history of your father's family back in Latvia being sort
of known as the ones in the village who were really wonderful in this
way?
-
GELBART
- No, no. No, show business did not run in the Gelbart family.
-
COLLINGS
- Just like at home, around at a party or something?
-
GELBART
- I don't think so. My Aunt Jean was kind of a character. She was funny.
As a matter of fact, a couple of years ago, her husband, who outlived
her by perhaps a dozen years, died, and I was one of the pallbearers. I
had not been around when she passed away, and so I'd never seen the
plaque on her gravesite. As I was helping to carry my uncle, my late
Uncle Morris [Morris Pasco], to his grave, I saw next to his the place
where my Aunt Jean was buried and her plaque.On my Aunt Jean's gravesite there's a plaque in color, the appropriate
colors, "A Royal Flush."
-
COLLINGS
- Really?
-
GELBART
- Yes, "Of Hearts."
-
COLLINGS
- Was that her choice?
-
GELBART
- It was her choice, and the inscription says, "Just One More Hand." So
they had their own sort of flamboyance. I looked a great deal like her.
Everyone said I looked exactly like her, so, as you can see, she wasn't
a very pretty woman. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- That's a very unusual thing to want on your gravestone, that's for
sure.
-
GELBART
- Well, she had a great sense of humor.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, it sounds like it.
-
GELBART
- Yeah, she really did.His sister, my dad's sister Jean, and an uncle, Uncle Harry Druck, and
another uncle (Morris), Asher, were, I think, the only relatives that
got out of Latvia. Everyone else in my father's family died during the
Nazi occupation. I don't know where, when, but it couldn't have been
pretty. Whereas my mother's family, of course, all made it over.
-
COLLINGS
- They had all left prior to that?
-
GELBART
- Yes, right. But my dad was typical—
-
COLLINGS
- It must have been tough on your dad.
-
GELBART
- Yeah, it was tough. It was tough. It was tougher on him, of course,
because I never— It's hard to miss people you never saw.
-
COLLINGS
- Right.
-
GELBART
- But typical of the period, he was always sending money home from his
very hard-earned money to help them.
-
COLLINGS
- So I suppose he started losing touch with them in late thirties, early
forties?
-
GELBART
- I don't know that they lost— Yes, when it was over, in terms of their
lives it was over. But I remember post office orders going out all the
time, and clothes. But there must have been a period, I'm not aware of
it precisely, when they were not there to receive it.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. Did that cast a pall over the family that you can— I mean I'm
sure it did, but sometimes parents hide things from kids.
-
GELBART
- I don't know. When you're a little kid, nothing casts a pall, you know.
I'm not aware of it.
-
COLLINGS
- Your dad probably did a good job of—
-
GELBART
- Well, my dad literally did tap dance. There was a lot of denial.
-
COLLINGS
- So what were your experiences at school like with your friends and in
the neighborhood and games and activities?
-
GELBART
- Well, the closest friend I had was a boy named Marvin Klinger, and
Marvin's still alive. He's up in the Northwest somewhere. He became a
major engineer, associated with some large government TVA-type projects,
and he's the one, of course, from whom I copied all my homework, because
I didn't have Marvin's brainpower or discipline.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, that was nice of him.
-
GELBART
- Oh, it's terrific.
-
COLLINGS
- He was a good friend.
-
GELBART
- He was a great friend. He was a great friend, and I repaid him by
calling the character Klinger, which was no way to repay an old
friend.
-
COLLINGS
- It's a good way to repay him.
-
GELBART
- Well, yeah, I thought he would be angry about it, but it was kind of a
badge of, if not honor, at least a little bit of fame.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, absolutely.
-
GELBART
- There were a lot of kids, a lot of kids, a lot of kids that were just
the same. They all came from families that were— They were probably
first-generation American. There was a public park named Franklin Park
where we all played, and I almost drowned because they said the only way
to learn how to swim is to be thrown in the water.
-
COLLINGS
- Who said that?
-
GELBART
- The guy who threw me in and then held me under.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, my god.
-
GELBART
- Yes, it was terrible. I was so bad that— I'm seventy-seven now, about
three years ago I took swimming lessons for the first time and learned
how.
-
COLLINGS
- Jeez, I can understand. God, that must have been terrible.
-
GELBART
- It was terrible.
-
COLLINGS
- He was like holding you under the water?
-
GELBART
- Not "like." He was holding me under the water.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, my god.
-
GELBART
- I can still fight for air if I think about it.
-
COLLINGS
- Jeez. See, everybody talks about how wonderful it used to be when the
kids ran free and they were so unsupervised, but a lot of this other
stuff went on, too.
-
GELBART
- Kids have always been mean little bastards, we know that.But the barbershop was a big part of my growing up, because invariably
I'd find myself going there either on the streetcar— Probably on the
streetcar. It was close enough to the school, but not walkable. I'd go
there and just hang out or play the clarinet for my father's
clients.
-
COLLINGS
- Was your dad kind of counting on you to help out a little bit at
the—
-
GELBART
- No. You mean money-wise? No.
-
COLLINGS
- No, no, I mean just playing clarinet or—
-
GELBART
- No. He was always showing me off once I could do something besides say,
"Can I have a quarter?" But he was always very generous with me in terms
of a quarter or a dime, and attention. He told a lot— He knew more
jokes, stories.
-
COLLINGS
- Did he make them up, or did he hear them from people?
-
GELBART
- No, no, he would hear them and he'd repeat them, and he knew every one.
I mean no one knows every one, but if anyone could have known every one,
he would have known everyone. Then I started telling them when I was
about five, and if they had a dirty word in them, all the better. I
still remember a couple of jokes I told when I was five years old.Then my dad, to make more money, he would have customers to the house on
a Sunday, and so he'd work Monday through Saturday and then on Sunday,
people would come by for haircuts and shaves, and he would do that in
the bathroom, throw a cloth over somebody and go to work on them, and I
would be sitting on the edge of the closed toilet playing invariably "In
the Mood," Glenn Miller's "In the Mood," or "Frenesi" or "Perfidia."
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, boy. It sounds like you were pretty good on the clarinet.
-
GELBART
- I was wonderful. I was really good. I was great for a while. I had the
privilege—it was a privilege—of studying with the man who taught Benny
Goodman at a place called the Hull House. It used to be, basically,
places called settlement houses.
-
COLLINGS
- The Hull House, yes.
-
GELBART
- Yes. You know Chicago?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, sort of. But I know about that.
-
GELBART
- Right. So his name was Duke— I don't know what his real first name was,
but he was known as Duke Rehl, R-e-h-l. The highest compliment he could
pay you as a student was— There's a famous set of clarinet studies
called the Lazarus Book, and I think there are at least two volumes, and
they're clarinet solos and clarinet duets. If I came in on a Saturday,
this would be a place called Lyon and Healy Music Company on Wabash
Avenue in Chicago, and his office was on the level with the elevated,
the famous El, the elevated railroad. With a select few students, he
would take out his clarinet and play along with you. If it was a duet,
he'd play the bottom line, you would do the top, or vice versa, and that
meant you really rated with Mr. Rehl. That was the most thrilling part
of my week to meet his expectations, his standard.Then I started walking girls home from school and practicing less and
less, and then one week we were playing along, and he stopped and I
stopped. He said, "Keep going," and I kept going, haltingly, and he
"broke" his clarinet. He opened it, he turned it and made it two pieces,
which you can do with a clarinet, of course. Actually, there were five,
but— And he opened his drawer and put the pieces in and he said,
"Continue," and I knew that I was going to have to do some serious work
if I was ever going to get him to take his clarinet out of the desk
again.So I decided to major in girls, but otherwise, I mean, I had a really— I
had a wonderful technique. I was very, very fast. I didn't have what
they call a legitimate tone. I'd been so influenced by Benny Goodman and
Artie Shaw that my tone was more popular music than it was classical,
and I would never have gone anywhere as a serious musician. But when you
learn the clarinet, saxophone becomes very, very easy, and so pretty
soon I was playing the baritone saxophone and the tenor saxophone and
having a good time being kind of a half-assed musician, instead of
knuckling down and becoming a really, really wonderful musician.
-
COLLINGS
- What were you planning to do when you grew up at that time?
-
GELBART
- I didn't have a clue. I didn't know what I would do, because I was not a
very good student. I was a terrible student. In high school, I flunked
Algebra I twice and Geometry II once. I was not very good at Spanish. So
then the clowning began, to take the heat off the discipline and
the—
-
COLLINGS
- Would you actually get in trouble at school and that kind of thing?
-
GELBART
- I could. I could. Not terrible trouble, but once we had a substitute
teacher and I faked a lisp, and it turned out she was there for about
two months.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh no.
-
GELBART
- Yes, the homeroom teacher. But I was very— But if it came to putting on
a show or writing something for the paper, that was my out, sort of
sanctioned showing-off.
-
COLLINGS
- So they were doing shows and things at the school.
-
GELBART
- Yes, and invariably, it's not so much— I didn't write much in grammar
school. I was a slow starter. I did in high school. But I would go to a
movie such as, say, The Great Dictator jumps to
mind, Charles Chaplin's movie, and I would memorize whole speeches and
then do the movie for kids back on the block.
-
COLLINGS
- So was it easy for you to memorize this stuff?
-
GELBART
- Yes, it was, extremely, extremely, because I wanted to. I didn't want to
know where Abyssinia was, but I wanted to be as funny as any comedian
that I saw downtown.
-
COLLINGS
- So you were particularly attracted to the comedians.
-
GELBART
- I was particularly attracted. It was Rand McNally that I didn't have
much passion for. I liked history. Math, to this day, I can't give you—
Or I'm liable to give you two tens for a five.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, well. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- People like me.
-
COLLINGS
- What can you do? [mutual laughter]What does your sister— Did she go into show business or anything?
-
GELBART
- Well, she ruined it all, my sister, of course. No, she didn't get into
show business. My sister was born when I was seven, and I remember to
this day running up and down Kolin Avenue, K-o-l-i-n, in Chicago,
jumping on running boards and saying, "I have a sister! I have a sister!
I have a sister!" And she was gorgeous. She was really beautiful, ala
Elizabeth Taylor, dark hair and just perfectly put-together little face.Then, of course, I became number two, I think, and I think— I don't
think, I know, I didn't dwell on it and it didn't turn me into anything,
it didn't handicap me, but I know to her dying day that I was jealous of
this switch. God help me if I ever did anything after my parents left,
or I thought they left, for some dinner date or something and I would
tease her or be mean to her, the door would fly open and I would be the
next thing that flew. I mean they really— They were from time to time a
bit generous with their hands.Marcia was funny and self-deprecating, and that's a rare combination in a
beautiful woman.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, it is.
-
GELBART
- But she was less serious about school than I was. I don't know how it
happened. When I say I don't know how it happened, I mean she should
have been dissuaded. I wasn't in a position to do so. I wasn't even in
this city. But she quit high school way early, married someone, that
didn't work out, and her next marriage was a disaster in terms of her
choice. She just never lived up to the promise, I think, that we all
expected, not just because she was so extraordinarily pretty, but
because she was so bright and witty and seemed to be equipped to do
better.
-
COLLINGS
- That must have been hard to watch.
-
GELBART
- It's still hard. It's still hard.
-
COLLINGS
- Did she come out to Los Angeles with your family?
-
GELBART
- She was born in Los Angeles.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, she was?
-
GELBART
- No, she was born in Chicago, of course. What am I talking about? She did
come out, of course. We came out in sections. My sister and my mother
came out first, I believe, by train, and then I came out by— It was sort
of an exodus, a mass exodus. People were coming west, west, west. I came
out with someone who was driving out, so I shared the ride with him and
a couple of women and passengers, or possibly more. I don't know. I was
very young. Then my father came, and he brought something that we'd
never had in Chicago; he brought a car. He brought a two-door Plymouth,
and that to me was like a twelve-door Rolls-Royce. We had a car.But then the early years were very tough, because— Shall I just go
on?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, why don't you.
-
GELBART
- My dad, who was a very, very skilled barber, had to pass the California
test.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I didn't realize that they— Yes.
-
GELBART
- Yes, very difficult and purposefully difficult because they didn't want
a lot of people passing it, I guess, or competing with existing—
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I see, they're sort of protecting the economy.
-
GELBART
- Yes. So he had to study. The test, there was a practical test, there was
an oral test, and there was a written test. My dad, who really was very
poor with English at that time, he had to remember Latin phrases, had to
spell them, write them, pronounce them, and so he flunked the first two
times, and it was tough. My dad, although he didn't have a license, he
was able to and took advantage of the fact that he could cut hair in
nonunion situations. Or maybe it wasn't a union thing. It was a license
deal. He was a barber at Santa Anita, the racetrack, which was then an
ordnance base.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Yes. So he was cutting the hair of GIs. It was twenty-five cents a
haircut and fifteen cents for a shave, suppose—
-
COLLINGS
- Shave a haircut, two bits [singing].
-
GELBART
- That's right, exactly. My dad, it was sweet, these kids would tip my dad
a nickel or something, and my dad couldn't take it. He would give it
back to them.But he finally did pass, and when he passed, it made him. It made him. He
was able to do to work at a place called Drucker's in Beverly Hills, and
it was the shop. I made a list of the
celebrities that he worked on over the years, and it's extraordinary.
It's extraordinary. It guess the most extraordinary thing about my
father, to give you an idea of the range, was that he was JFK's [John F.
Kennedy] barber when JFK used to come out here as president, because he
was Peter Lawford's barber, so it was natural, and then years before he
had been barber to a man in Chicago named Sparky Rubenstein, who history
remembers as Jack Ruby. So he cut two of the three principals.
-
COLLINGS
- That is incredible.
-
GELBART
- Isn't it?
-
COLLINGS
- Wow. It's amazing. How did he run into all these people?
-
GELBART
- Well, in Chicago they sort of ran into him. I mean, he was in a small
local neighborhood, but the West Side was very active. There's a
wonderful book called The Old Bunch, I forget
who wrote it now [Meyer Levin], but it's about Chicago in those days.
He'd have people like Barney Ross, who was the welterweight champion of
the world and Jewish on top of it, which is amazing, and he'd have show
business acts, as I mentioned. I remember the first ones I met were Nick
and Steve Condos, who were tap dancers. One of them later married Martha
Raye and was with her for years and years.I remember going with him once to a place called the Croydon Hotel, which
is where the acts stayed, and there was this strange smell, which I
found out later was marijuana. So that was the first time I had kind of
a contact high.
-
COLLINGS
- Was that common at that time?
-
GELBART
- In show business it was. Musicians, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Marijuana in particular?
-
GELBART
- Marijuana, marijuana, weed, shit, Mary Jane, a joint, and maybe not even
a joint. Reefers.But then out here, he went to work in this particular shop which was
frequented by just the biggest, biggest, biggest stars, and he was
wonderful. He's one of those barbers that would give you a haircut, and
you didn't look like you'd had a haircut, which is important to actors,
especially if they're—
-
COLLINGS
- Well, he must have had a certain kind of demeanor and style.
-
GELBART
- Fantastic, fantastic.
-
COLLINGS
- Because those places don't just hire anybody.
-
GELBART
- Well, no, there are barbers who just give you a haircut. But my dad was
really entertaining. First of all, he did know all these jokes, and he
just made people look great. There again, he had everybody from David O.
Selznick to Bugsy Siegel, from Mickey Cohen to William S. Paley. I mean,
this incredible variety.
-
COLLINGS
- Did he cut your hair?
-
GELBART
- Sure, he cut my hair. When he first cut my hair in Chicago, people made
fun of the way he cut my hair because he cut my sideburns to a point, so
that I looked like a little Rudolf Valentino. [mutual laughter] He used
to love to cut my hair, and I used to love to have him cut it. His tip
was always a big kiss, of course.
-
COLLINGS
- So, I'm sorry, you came out to Los Angeles, but in terms of your growing
up, I forgot to ask, did you have like religious education in your
family?
-
GELBART
- Religious education. My family was the kind that while they spoke a lot
of Yiddish, did not practice a lot of Hebrew ritual. My dad went to what
seemed like the obligatory Yom Kippur services. The house was not
kosher, although I don't think we ever did bacon and shrimp and stuff
like that, or ham, but I made up for that, and shellfish.When I got to be about eleven, I guess, or maybe even younger, about
eleven years, maybe a little bit younger, I started going to Hebrew
school. The Hebrew school was situated directly across the street to the
elementary school that I went to.
-
COLLINGS
- That was convenient.
-
GELBART
- It was convenient. So at three o'clock I would go across the street and
learn to read from right to left instead of left to right.I went there for a couple years, and then it was time to begin my
instructions for my Bar Mitzvah. So they hired a rabbi who came to the
house, kind of a dandy guy. I remember him always smelling my mother's
perfumes, because he was teaching me in my folks' bedroom. My sister and
I would—
-
COLLINGS
- Really? He would go over and—
-
GELBART
- Yes, he would go and just take a little sniff or two and put it down.The apartment at 1210 South Kolin Avenue was very small. There was a
kitchen, there was a dining room full of this elephantine kind of
furniture that immigrants seemed to think represented solidity,
terrible, terrible, with glass fruit that lit up from underneath—I
haven't thought of that in years—and these chairs, each one weighing a
ton. Then in the living room, which was called a "fron troom," not front
room, the "fron troom," in the corner there was this big wooden—[recorder turned off]
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
June 20, 2005
-
GELBART
- So in the "fron room" was this huge four-legged radio and, again, this
wildly overstuffed furniture, and then a little hallway, bathroom, and
my folks' bedroom. My sister and I slept on a daybed in the dining room,
which made out, you know, which opened up at night.So my instruction took place in the bedroom with the rabbi planted at the
vanity table. So he instructed me in my Bar Mitzvah routine, which I
performed. I still remember the blue herringbone suit. I could draw the
necktie for you.
-
COLLINGS
- Wow.
-
GELBART
- We had a big Bar Mitzvah, and the big kick for me was that there was
like a three-piece orchestra and the guy let me play the clarinet with
the orchestra, so in one night I went from playing in the toilet in my
apartment to playing onstage.
-
COLLINGS
- Wow, that's great.
-
GELBART
- That was great. Well, even greater, even greater was a few years later
my dad, again to augment his income, used to work on Saturdays. After
finishing work— The place was called Woolf's barbershop, Charlie Woolf,
two Os. He would go downtown across the street at the Sherman Hotel and
work in another barbershop, work very late into the night. There was a—
I say a shoeshine boy, he was probably fifty, there who gave me the
opportunity to come with him to the South Side of Chicago to play with a
jazz group at a black dance. That's one of the most memorable nights of
my life. I was probably awful, but you couldn't prove it by me. I was in
heaven.
-
COLLINGS
- So did you ever do that again, or was it just the one time?
-
GELBART
- That was just that one thing, and then they found out I was white and it
was over. No. No, I just did it the one time, and it was fantastic. I
had some interesting musical experiences which we'll talk about later
on.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay.
-
GELBART
- But where was I? What was I talking about? My father?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, actually we were talking about how your dad, when you'd come out to
Los Angeles, all of the clients that he had and—
-
GELBART
- It was something to come by after school to borrow a buck now instead of
a quarter and have him say, "Larry, say hello to Mr. [Gregory] Peck," or
Mr. [Frank] Sinatra or Mr. [Frank] Capra or Mr. God-knows-who. So I met
all these people at a very early age, which was a good thing, because I
think when I got older and started doing this a lot, I could still be
impressed by what somebody did, but I was not necessarily impressed with
who somebody was.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, right. That would be a tremendous advantage.
-
GELBART
- It was. Then later, later, later, later, to find myself as a grownup
playing poker with Gregory Peck and playing poker with Kirk Douglas and
to remember that I met them as a high school kid.
-
COLLINGS
- So you were a senior in high school at that time, when you came out to
Los Angeles?
-
GELBART
- No, I was a junior. Right. I was fifteen.
-
COLLINGS
- What year was that?
-
GELBART
- I think '43.
-
COLLINGS
- Do you have any memory just before that of Pearl Harbor?
-
GELBART
- Yes, I do have a memory of Pearl Harbor. You know, I said yes, and what
I really am remembering is hearing about the H-bomb dropping, because it
was Marvin Klinger, my friend who happened to be in California at the
same time, and we both realized that the war was over.Pearl Harbor, I guess— In '41 I would have been in Chicago. I don't know
where I was when I heard that Pearl Harbor "died." I put that in with
Franklin [D.] Roosevelt. I don't know where I was when I heard about
it.
-
COLLINGS
- So it sounds like that kind of thing was just not really on your horizon
much as a kid.
-
GELBART
- Well, I mean war certainly was, the notion that the country was at war.
But what did that mean to anybody? There hadn't been any war movies yet.
There was no television, clearly, and we didn't know what war meant.I do remember as a kid reading and seeing pictures, countless, in the
rotogravure. I remember the pages and the colors were sepia of— They
were still featuring stories about the dead of World War I. But we
really had no— We couldn't hear war. We didn't know what it—
-
COLLINGS
- It just wasn't on your horizon.
-
GELBART
- That's okay. We didn't even ask.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- No, it wasn't. No, it certainly wasn't in our consciousness. Then I
started keeping a list for my dad of people, young men that went into
the service and there were—
-
COLLINGS
- You kept a list for your dad?
-
GELBART
- For my dad.
-
COLLINGS
- Why is that?
-
GELBART
- Just of the guys who went off to war, and there were hundreds of them,
really, like three, four hundred guys.
-
COLLINGS
- You mean people from your neighborhood or—
-
GELBART
- People from the neighborhood, mostly his clients.
-
COLLINGS
- I see.
-
GELBART
- There had been a lot of activity in Chicago before the war. The Bund was
very big, the German-American Bund, and these guys, including Sparky
Rubenstein, who became Jack Ruby, these guys used to get into cars and
seek these people and groups out and hit them with baseball bats and
bricks and really break up some of these fascist rallies. These were the
days of Father Coughlin on the radio and Lindbergh saying, "You know we
haven't got a chance."So I was aware, and a lot of people that I knew in the barbershop and my
Uncle Shima, Uncle Simon, who was my Aunt Becky's husband, was a
communist, an avowed communist. It was okay to say you were a communist
then. So I was mildly politically aware of labels.
-
COLLINGS
- So a lot of people were just kind of talking about whether the U.S.
would get into the war and whether they should and that kind of
thing?
-
GELBART
- Yes. Well, when we went to war, I guess everybody knows this, I mean
America was something like the eighteenth military power in the world. I
remember seeing pictures and newsreels of our trainees marching with
broomsticks.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. Why We Fight and that kind of thing.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that's a different—
-
GELBART
- And should we fight? Extreme isolation, I mean.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that's right.Okay, so you're out here in Los Angeles and the war has started, but it's
just kind of a distant—
-
GELBART
- Well, you were more aware of the war here because it's the West Coast
and they have painted out the signs on the streets in Beverly Hills.
-
COLLINGS
- They painted out the signs?
-
GELBART
- They blacked out the—
-
COLLINGS
- The streetlights?
-
GELBART
- The names used to be on the curbs instead of the signs, street signs,
and they didn't know but that there might be a Japanese invasion.
-
COLLINGS
- So this was so the people wouldn't be able to find their way around?
-
GELBART
- That's right. That's right. That they couldn't use the tourist maps.
-
COLLINGS
- Their Maps of the Stars.
-
GELBART
- That's right, yes. [mutual laughter] Yes. Of course, the airplane
industry. I thought of this the other night because I was driving down
toward Vine Street on Melrose, and I had a saxophone teacher and he had
a shop. He taught saxophone in the front, and in the back he made
bullets for the U.S. Army, so he'd come out with his work apron and his
welding mask, give you a lesson on the sax, then go back and start
making—
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you certainly don't think of that as being a cottage industry, do
you?
-
GELBART
- No, you don't, but people did a lot of things to stay out of the army,
too.Of course, the internment camps and the whole Japanese background here.
You were much more aware. Chicago, they didn't black out any street
signs in Chicago.
-
COLLINGS
- You didn't have Japanese students at your high school, did you, at
Fairfax?
-
GELBART
- I don't think so.
-
COLLINGS
- I wouldn't think so, yes.
-
GELBART
- No, mostly Jewish. No, no, there were no Japanese. There would have been
probably around Sawtelle and probably downtown L.A.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, around Sawtelle, for sure.
-
GELBART
- But they weren't in the general population the way they are now.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that's right. Was that something that you had an opinion on at the
time?
-
GELBART
- No, I didn't have an opinion about almost anything except girls and
maybe the odd pimple or something.
-
COLLINGS
- Did your parents ever talk about politics at home?
-
GELBART
- No, my parents did not talk about politics.
-
COLLINGS
- What was your dad's view of the war?
-
GELBART
- I don't know that he had one. I mean, we were all rooting for America.
We all know that World War II was the last good war. There were no
debates about whether or not we should be there.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, and the stuff about the camps hadn't come out yet.
-
GELBART
- The Nazi camps.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- So your dad wasn't— Your parents weren't aware.
-
GELBART
- No, they weren't. No one was aware. How we weren't or whether it was
just denial, I don't know, but nobody talked about it. I think as the
war went on, we learned more and more about what was happening, or what
had happened, and we were horrified then.But there was a lot of activity out here, mostly from the Left. There
were many, many organizations promoting a second front to help take the
pressure off Russia, and then too, I mean, I've never believed, and to
this day I don't believe, that there was a great amount of Leftist
propaganda that worked its way into films. The whole country was against
the extreme Right, both homegrown and foreign. And I knew a lot of
people who were very, very outspoken and dedicated to the communist
cause, who paid for it dearly later.
-
COLLINGS
- This was during the period of World War—
-
GELBART
- Not during, after.
-
COLLINGS
- Just a little bit after.
-
GELBART
- After, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- So when was it that you started— You started working for Danny Thomas in
your senior year of high school, is that right?
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- Also a second-generation immigrant.
-
GELBART
- Exactly. I'd never seen Danny Thomas work. He was from Toledo, but he
made his first mark really in Chicago at a place called— I think it was
called the 5100 Club, and I think my dad saw him work there. But
somehow— Not somehow. As it evolved, my dad began— Wait, I'm backing
into this.One of the first really big opportunities Danny Thomas had in Hollywood
was not in motion pictures or television. Certainly there was no
television outside of that little set in Hyde
Park at the Roosevelt Residence in Hyde Park, New York. No, he was signed to do
something called the Maxwell House Coffee Time
show, starring Fanny Brice as Baby Snooks, and he had a segment on the
show, a seven- or eight-minute segment, in which he played a character
that had nothing to do with the show, called Jerry Dingle the postman or
the mailman. That show was broadcast live from CBS at Sunset and Gower.
Actually broadcast twice. We're talking about pre-audiotape, so you know
that situation. You would do the show at five o'clock for the East
Coast, being eight o'clock there, and then you would do it all over
again at eight o'clock here for the eight o'clock here.
-
COLLINGS
- That's quite a schedule.
-
GELBART
- Right. There's some stories about that, too, about the people who
relaxed and had a few drinks in between.
-
COLLINGS
- So that the versions differed. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- Absolutely. I can tell you from Duffy's Tavern,
that experience. So my dad would groom Thomas before he went out there,
and I really— If anybody had said, "You're going to write for a living,"
I would have thought that preposterous, because it never entered my
mind. But my dad, quite on his own bat, was shaving Thomas every Sunday,
as I said, and trimming his hair. I've also referred to my dad as a
combination of Sweeney Todd and Mama Rose. He started boasting about my
ability to write funny material. The funny material—
-
COLLINGS
- Were you actually writing the stuff?
-
GELBART
- Well, I did for school. I worked with a guy named Jack Mauck, M-a-u-c-k,
who unfortunately passed away, a-w-a-y, just a few weeks ago or months
ago, and we would do— It's a word I hate now, but it's skits. We would
do funny exchanges, man on the street, or whatever, whatever, for high
school productions, auditorium-type shows.I never, never, never dreamt that my father would say this— Well, he
didn't ask me in advance, but he came home and told me that, "I told
Danny how talented you are." I was playing with a band. I had my own
band, Larry Gelbart and his Esquires, ‘sophisticated rhythm,
Wyoming-5443'. I was in show business but not in writing. So he said,
"Danny said write something for him."So can I take one second to go to the loo? Because this Arrowhead water
is—
-
COLLINGS
- Sure. Yes.[recorder turned off]
-
GELBART
- I should amplify that. The Danny Thomas character, Jerry Dingle, was a
mailman, and each week in the course of his rounds, someone would insult
him, and then he would— It was like Walter Mitty; he would imagine
himself to be that person or have that person's job and say how much
better at that he would have been at it. So I, taking my cue from the
most obvious, I had a barber insult him, and then I had him say what
kind of a barber he would be. So from the earliest work, I was
autobiographical. [laughs]So Thomas saw it, and he said, "Pretty good," I guess, and he assigned me
to a man, or recommended me to a man named Mac, M-a-c, Benoff,
B-e-n-o-f-f, who was the head writer for the Fanny
Brice Show, and he said, "Why don't you let the kid sit in with
you?" So I did sit in with Mac three or four times, after Fairfax High
let out, and then the show went off the air for its summer hiatus and
Mac gave me forty dollars and said, "Here, kid, buy yourself a sport
jacket," and I guess I did. In those days, you could have bought two and
two pair of pants.So that's how it started. There was a man named George Gruskin,
G-r-u-s-k-i-n, who was with the William Morris Agency, and he said,
"Would you like to do more of this kind of thing?" No, I wouldn't like
to do more of this, you know. I was very young. I mean, now I look back
and I think it was remarkable. Then it just seemed, yeah, sure, why not?
But sixteen, when I look at sixteen-year-olds now, I think—
-
COLLINGS
- Did you run into other kids like you?
-
GELBART
- No, no.
-
COLLINGS
- So how did this happen?
-
GELBART
- That's how it happened. It's not as though chance favors the prepared. I
was not prepared at all.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, it sounds like you kind of were with all that hanging around the
barbershop and—
-
GELBART
- Yes, you know, I guess so.
-
COLLINGS
- —skits at school.
-
GELBART
- You know what, who said, real life is like high school with money, or
something?
-
COLLINGS
- It's a good point.
-
GELBART
- It's just another kind of sketch for another kind of person.But Gruskin really made my life, because he signed me to the Morris
office; that is to say, he signed my father. I was too young to sign the
authorization.But from there I went to work on a show called Duffy's
Tavern. In radio, at the height of radio, two shows really
stood out for their articulation, their sophistication, their use of the
language. One was the Fred Allen Show and the
other was Duffy's Tavern. So I really had a
couple years of my kind of college, you know.
-
COLLINGS
- That's right. What would you say, were there any differences between Duffy's Tavern and the Fred
Allen Show that you could put your finger on?
-
GELBART
- Yes. Duffy's Tavern would, I guess, be called a
situation comedy these days.
-
COLLINGS
- But I mean in terms of like the themes or anything like that?
-
GELBART
- Those were, yes. They would vary. There were regular characters, weekly
characters on Duffy's Tavern, always played by
the same actor, always in the same role. Usually the program would be
predicated on whoever the guest star was, and it there was always a
top-flight talent, celebrity. At one time they were one and the same;
they're not anymore. Whereas Fred Allen was more
of a kind of a radio revue.
-
COLLINGS
- Like a variety show?
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Do you think they were pitched to different kinds of audiences?
-
GELBART
- No, the same. If you liked Duffy's, chances are
you'd like Fred Allen and vice versa. But if you
liked Fibber McGee and Molly you might not like
Fred Allen, and Fred Allen was— Not
strangely, there's a reason, I know, but women didn't seem to like him a
lot. He had a very nasal sound like this, and people just didn't like
it. They were very put off by him. He sounded very dyspeptic. He was
dyspeptic. Whereas Archie, the bartender, played by Ed who owned,
literally owned the show Duffy's Tavern, was a
kind of a— Not a kind of, very Damon Runyon and a favorite comic type,
the poseur, the pretender, the thing Bob Hope used to do so well,
someone who aspired but was always falling on his ass, you know.
Limitations were no limitation for these kinds of guys. Whereas Allen
sounded like a very experienced, knowledgeable man, and people usually
like to laugh down at their comics, not laugh up at them.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, this was being taped in Los Angeles, right?
-
GELBART
-
Duffy's was, but it wasn't being taped.
-
COLLINGS
- I mean, excuse me, performed.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- At a certain point, I read that they moved to Puerto Rico to evade the
taxes.
-
GELBART
- They did move to Puerto Rico. Ed did, yes. He was guaranteed a million
dollars clear for thirty-nine shows if he did the show in Puerto Rico,
so he did the show in Puerto Rico and all but killed it, because I don't
know who the live audiences were and it lost its flavor, it lost its—
You've got to be a little bit hungry to be a comic. You can't be so that
secure.But Duffy's reminds me, though, when you say was
it broadcast from here, or taped, prior to the tape, invention of tape,
in which Bing Crosby had a huge share of Ampex, which was the
company.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, did he?
-
GELBART
- Yes, he did very well, and in fact, the first day that tape was used, it
was used on a Bing Crosby show, Kraft Music
Hall, it was called. The Brown Derby on Vine Street was the famous
watering hole for all of the broadcast people. Movie people, too, but
largely at that time radio personalities. The place was filled with
perhaps three hundred pictures, caricatures of famous people on the
walls, all signed by those people. On that day when you went in, every
single picture was of Crosby, every caricature was of Crosby. It was
exciting.But I remember once we were doing a show, Duffy's
Tavern, and we broadcast at five o'clock in the afternoon so it
could be heard at eight o'clock in New York, and then we had three hours
to kill because they were going to do it again, same script, same cast,
live at eight o'clock when it would be eight o'clock in Los Angeles. Ed,
the star owner of the show, and that week's guest Monte Wooley, famous
actor, raconteur, they tied a few on. They got so pissed, they were so
drunk, that when they came in at eight o'clock, during the broadcast it
was traditional for actors, radio actors, to stand up and read into a
microphone, Wooley fell down. He fell down on the stage, drunk. Ed,
being a thoughtful host, lay down on the floor next to him, so the two
of them—
-
COLLINGS
- So the techs brought the mics down to floor level.
-
GELBART
- That's right. That's right. And they did the show lying down on their
sides reading the script. Radio was a terrific thing for actors, no
makeup, no rehearsal, hardly strenuous, no memorization, and a lot of
money.
-
COLLINGS
- What did the invention of tape mean to you, if anything?
-
GELBART
- I don't know. It didn't mean a lot. You still had to have a script ready
within a few days of having broadcast the previous. Well, it meant I
could go home earlier. After a five o'clock airing, if it was an eight
o'clock show in New York, you were free at five-thirty, instead of
having to hang around and watch the actors get drunk until eight
o'clock. So it meant I got to go out and do whatever I did in those
days, and I guess I did everything in those days.
-
COLLINGS
- So you were drafted?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- That's how you left Duffy's.
-
GELBART
- I left Duffy's because in February of 1946, I
turned eighteen and the war was over, but the draft was still on, and so
I was drafted and I was sent to Marysville, which is north of
Sacramento, in California, for two weeks of not boot camp, not basic
training, but relocation. It's got a more technical name, but that's
what it was all about. I just kind of hung around for two weeks. I
wasn't assigned anywhere.Meanwhile, my mother and father were saying to everybody— Mostly my
father to everybody he knew, because he knew so many influential people,
"Is there any way my son can get located back here in Los Angeles?" I
didn't think anything was happening. In fact, I was rather enjoying the
kind of military life that I'd suddenly—
-
COLLINGS
- What were you enjoying about it?
-
GELBART
- I don't know. It was different. Actually, I wanted to get back home
because by the time I went away at eighteen, I'd been working as a
comedy writer for two years and I was anxious to go back and make that
fifty and seventy-five dollars a week. I wasn't making a lot of money,
but I was having a lot of fun, certainly more glamorous than the typical
draftee.Then I was shipped to a place called Camp Polk, Louisiana. It's now
called Fort Polk, Louisiana. But then as now, it's considered one of the
worst places you can get sent to. The climate is terrible and everything
else, and the food and everything. Then one day someone called me into
their office and said, "You're taking the next train back to Los
Angeles."
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, good.
-
GELBART
- I said, "What happened?"They said, "You've been assigned to the Armed Forces Radio Service." What
had happened, happily, behind my back, was a man named Irving Yergin,
Y-e-r-g-i-n, who's son is a Pulitzer Prize novelist— Not novelist, a
writer. Daniel Yergin writes about oil in the world.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, yes, I think his name is sort of familiar.
-
GELBART
- He's Professor Yergin. He's a terrific young boy, and I literally knew
him in his diapers. But then I knew me in my diapers. I know a lot of
young people.What happened was Irving Yergin, who had been a publicity man at Warner
Bros., arranged, asked Peter Lorre, a very, very good friend of his, if
he could help me. And Lorre picked up the phone and called a man named
Tom Lewis, Colonel Tom Lewis, who was at one time married to Loretta
Young and had been in charge of Armed Forces Radio Service, which sent
out disks with entertainment for our armed forces throughout the world,
could I be assigned to work for AFRS in Hollywood? They were located on
Santa Monica Boulevard by the cemetery.And they said, "Yeah, sure, fine."So I was on a train and in L.A. in two or three days. First thing I did
was I went to an army supply store downtown and bought a uniform that
made me look like an air force pilot. I was in gabardines, had a soft
crushed hat, cap, and they made me sergeant in about three days,
literally, and I stopped them there. I didn't want to be a lieutenant. I
mean it was kind of a travesty of military life.I lived at home, in my own bed, and I co-wrote a program called Command Performance. Now, in its heyday, Command Performance was a show that was
performed by every major star in Hollywood. Guys would write in,
invariably guys, "I'd like to hear Betty Grable grill a steak." "I'd
like to hear Judy Garland sing a duet with Jimmy Durante." Some of them
were real. Some of them were faux letters that just led to interesting
entertainment.So by the time the war was over, there were still enough stars that
wanted to entertain everybody that was overseas, so I wrote some of the
requests. I wrote a lot of the scripts, and it was fantastic, and I was
able to have a civilian job at the same time, so I had the best of both
worlds.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, you certainly did.
-
GELBART
- I spent one year and eleven days.
-
COLLINGS
- You were discharged after that, is that—
-
GELBART
- I was discharged after that. If I hadn't had those eleven days, I'd have
been draftable again when the Korean police action broke out.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, because you had gone over one year, yes.
-
GELBART
- I had gone over one year by eleven days.
-
COLLINGS
- So you were discharged because it was all over, is that what—
-
GELBART
- Because a year, that was it. They didn't need me anymore.
-
COLLINGS
- So that worked quite well.
-
GELBART
- That worked out fantastically. A friend of mine who had not those eleven
days was drafted.
-
COLLINGS
- So by this time you're definitely thinking of yourself as a writer, I
presume.
-
GELBART
- Yes. Yes. Well, I'm definitely thinking of myself, and I'm being paid as
a writer.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, but it's not like, oh, this is just sort of fun for now?
-
GELBART
- No. This is what I'm doing. This is what I'm going to do. I didn't
realize how much I was learning. On average, the next person up from me
would have been ten years older, and so I was working with really
experienced people who never said, "This is a that and that's a this,
and if you want to get to that, you mix a little of this." They just did
it, and I absorbed it.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you ever think of performing at all?
-
GELBART
- Yes, I thought of performing at all. When I got out of the army, I
worked with, among other people, a man named Laurence Marks,
L-a-u-r-e-n-c-e M-a-r-k-s, and he and I wrote a monologue for me, and I
delivered it to an audience at a Command
Performance taping. It was a nondescript monologue. I mean, anybody
could have done it, including me. Time magazine
covered it, but something important happened that week in that
department, so I got bumped. But I think even if I'd made Time magazine, I mean, I'm a very sort of shy
extrovert, and it's so fulfilling to do what I do, that I didn't really
need that other thing.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. I could think of them as being very different activities,
actually.
-
GELBART
- Yes, but now I mean so many performers are writers. But years, years,
years later we were doing a M*A*S*H episode and
somebody said, "Why don't you play the part of that supply sergeant."I said, "Oh, okay, fine," for a lark. I got down on the floor and
rehearsed the scene and said, "You know, I'm very uncomfortable. I don't
know how to be me on camera in someone else's clothes and makeup." So I
backed off.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's all right. You can't do everything. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- No. No.
-
COLLINGS
- So after you finished with Command Performance,
that's when you started—
-
GELBART
- I went back to Duffy's Tavern, because I had
been working on Duffy's Tavern anyway. No, this
was while I was still in Command Performance,
working in Command Performance. I teamed up with
a fellow named Sid Dorfman. The two of us were a team. Sid was making
about two hundred and fifty— Oh, before I went into the— I don't know,
maybe you know the story. I have told it before. But when I got my draft
notice, I was working for Ed for Duffy's Tavern,
and I was making fifty dollars a week, maybe I was up to seventy-five,
I'm not sure, and I said—
-
COLLINGS
- Which is not bad for those days.
-
GELBART
- Not bad, yes, not bad indeed. And the credit was worth ten times that.So I said, "Ed, I have two weeks before I have to report for military
duty. Could you just give me a hundred dollars a week for those two
weeks? I'd like to say that when I went in I was making a hundred
dollars a week."He said, "I'd love to help you out, kid, but it's just not in the budget.
I'll tell you what, don't ask me again, and I'll give you a nice set of
military brushes." So I didn't ask him again, and he didn't give me the
military airbrushes, either.But when, still in the service, Sid and I went to Ed and we said, "We
want a raise."He said, "What were you thinking of?"So we said, "Five hundred a week."
-
COLLINGS
- Whoa, that's a big raise.
-
GELBART
- Each, each. So he said, "No, no way."So we said, "Well, then we have to leave."He said, "Okay," and he then went off to rehearsal. When we hadn't shown
up, never owning up to the fact that we had had a meeting, he said,
"Where are those guys? They're late. They're fired." Well, that was it.But we did, we went to work for Eddy Cantor at the salary we wanted,
except Sid got sick and we only finished one of two weeks, and then we
went to work, I think— It doesn't matter. I just went back to civilian
work. I went back to work and worked for Joan Davis, who's not with us
anymore; Jack Carson, who's not with us anymore. Most of the people I
went back to work for aren't.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you find that you had to write different kinds of material for Joan
Davis as a female comic?
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes. Well, not as a female comic so much as a Joan Davis, as
opposed to somebody else. That's one of the things that made radio
writers desirable and at the same time kind of put a crimp in their
development, because you would have to change your style for whatever
comedian you worked for. You were kind of— You were not kind of, you
were— We were mechanics. So you never really just found your own voice,
ala Woody Allen, say, or Mel Brooks, you know. You were always trying to
write bespoke material. That didn't come until way, way later.
-
COLLINGS
- Then you started working for Your Show of
Shows?
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- No. Okay, all right. I've got a whole list of your shows, your radio,
but I haven't memorized it.
-
GELBART
- No, that's okay. A lot of people make that mistake. No, that was Caesar's Hour.
-
COLLINGS
- Jack Paar?
-
GELBART
-
Caesar's Hour came way later.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Before that came the Jack Paar radio show, his first series on the air
replacing Jack Benny one summer. The summer of '47.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, and Bob Hope.
-
GELBART
- And Bob Hope for four years. That was a really, really intense learning
experience, very profitable, and delivering material under all sorts of
conditions and writing for radio, writing for television, his first
television shows, writing for his movies, writing for his personal
appearances. The key word is writing, writing, writing. Larry Marks and
I were partnered on that show for four years and we had an immense
falling-out and we didn't work together anymore after that.Then I went to New York to work, first for Red Buttons, then, of all
people, Pat Boone—it's called paying the rent—then, Patrice Munsel.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, did you always work with a partner at that time?
-
GELBART
- Up until the end of the Hope days, yes. When I went back to New York,
Buttons, Caesar eventually. While I didn't work with one other person, I
would be part of a staff or heading up a staff.
-
COLLINGS
- So would it be a kind of a thing where you're like sitting with the
other person and you're just kind of throwing a few ideas out and—
-
GELBART
- Right, right, and somebody says, "That's good," or someone throws out
something and you say, "That's bad, but how about this?" Yes. I don't
know a working combination that I haven't been part of, just—
-
COLLINGS
- Would you be sort of like taking notes at the same time?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Or would there be a secretary, writing, dictating, taking—
-
GELBART
- Rarely, rarely a secretary. I don't think I really worked with a
secretary—secretary—until Caesar's Hour, and
then the secretary was another writer named Mike Stewart, and he typed
everything everybody said because there were a lot of people all talking
at once. How he did it—
-
COLLINGS
- So you would have like typed notes that was sort of a long draft of what
you were doing?
-
GELBART
- There wasn't time, really, in weekly radio or television for drafts.
Usually, the thing was the thing. There was just no time.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, so it was kind of like first draft, you—
-
GELBART
- Yes, you served it when it was hot.
-
COLLINGS
- That sounds like fun.
-
GELBART
- It was fun and tremendous training. Tremendous training. I mean, you
wrote some garbage, but some stuff was wonderful because it had that raw
energy and even wrongness that it was vital.
-
COLLINGS
- So what would you say that was sort of like the major thing that
happened after that? It was definitely you went off to England, but you
were sort of working on a few shows, radio shows.
-
GELBART
- Well, Bob Hope was great training because while every show, starting
with Duffy's, required that you come up with it,
that you deliver it, that you were on time, and that you would fix it if
it was not good, that was more or less true of all the radio shows. The
Hope experience was much more intense, because you were doing that much
more for him, those different media. There was kind of a relentlessness
about it. You could, in one week, work on the radio show, work on a
television show, work on a motion picture, and work on it at home or be
on tour, in a Quonset hut in Alaska, all at the same time. It really
taught you to not think that it had to always be quiet, think that you
always had to have a certain space, to think that you had to have a
certain kind of typewriter or even a ribbon. You just fucking did
it.
-
COLLINGS
- Had you been that way before?
-
GELBART
- Well, no, because I'd never been tested that way, but I think what I had
and had to do before got me ready to do that.
-
COLLINGS
- But before, did you feel like it had to be quiet, that you had to—
-
GELBART
- Well, it was more or less quiet. If you and I were writing a script now,
this is about the way it would be. You'd say something, I'd say
something, maybe the guy raking the leaves would have been a terrible
annoyance. But later, when I worked on M*A*S*H,
for four years my office was situated next to the sound department, and
one of the shows that they were always editing for sound was SWAT. So I heard nothing but screeching brakes
and car doors slamming and machine guns and sirens, and it just couldn't
matter. I don't say it didn't matter, but it couldn't matter, which
stands you in good stead when you've got a lot of kids and family and
stuff around.But where, where did this start?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you were talking about something about your experience—
-
GELBART
- Learning.
-
COLLINGS
- —with Bob Hope, yes, how it was a real learning curve.
-
GELBART
- Yes, a learning curve and almost hairpin turns, not so much curves, and
something that was to prove really invaluable was the experience of
visiting a lot of different service areas, including Korea. So when M*A*S*H came around, I could really smell Korea.
For four years working on M*A*S*H, there was the
aroma of kimchi in my head the whole time, because I had been there. So
that was an invaluable service.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
June 20, 2005
-
GELBART
- Four years before, I was working for Hope, I was doing my homework, my
high school homework, listening to him on the radio. Now he was my homework.
-
COLLINGS
- Isn't that amazing?
-
GELBART
- I mean I wasn't unaware of this kind of— And I like clothes.
-
COLLINGS
- You always liked clothes?
-
GELBART
- I always liked clothes. I think I got that from my father. I got some of
my clothes from my father, too, some shiny blue pants. I liked cars. I
liked the good life, and here I was at eighteen being able to enjoy it,
I mean really making four figures a week and—
-
COLLINGS
- This must have been staggering.
-
GELBART
- —incredible lifestyle, incredible. So that was that. I mean, I was
aware. I wasn't sitting back and saying— I don't think I've ever learned
to be blasé, but anyway.
-
COLLINGS
- Your parents must have been just bowled over.
-
GELBART
- I think they were. I think I certainly exceeded my father's braggadocio,
and my mother was very proud of me, that I wrote, since she couldn't
write anything but Yiddish. But I think she was—
-
COLLINGS
- She could write in Yiddish?
-
GELBART
- She could write in Yiddish, and my dad did take lessons to write in
English. It was touching. He always wanted to push the fact that he had
assimilated, you know.But to my mother, the fact that I had been or was, by the time she passed
away, a producer, that was it because that meant a boss. That was like
the foreman of the sewing—
-
COLLINGS
- Sewing factory.
-
GELBART
- —factory, right, because a writer— Although she liked writing. My mother
was very witty. I talk about how funny my dad was, but she had real acid
and she was cruel. She was really cruel and funny, and funny.I'll tell you a story. I'll leave this in because I think it's
fascinating, because one thing that people have said to me, and I'm
aware of it, but I mean I'm not so self-aware that I wear it as a
placard or anything, but people say, "How can you go from comedy to
tragedy so quickly?" But I know, I do know, because I said, "How do I do
that?" because it's— I remember when I was about six years old. My
mother was, I can't think of any other word for it, hitting me. She
wasn't abusing me. She was punishing me for something I did, maybe like
not eating a banana, I don't know.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh yes. [mutual laughter]
-
GELBART
- Asking for it, wasn't I?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- No, no, I had misbehaved or something, or she thought I had, and she was
really lacing into me. I said, "Ma, I'm not made of rubber."And she said, "Sometimes I wish your father had used one."
-
COLLINGS
- Whoooooo.
-
GELBART
- So I could see how you could take— That you could be funny or wry or
something, at the height of what was really a very traumatic
experience.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Did that change the tone when she said that, or did it—
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- It wasn't like she didn't throw it off, toss it off?
-
GELBART
- All I can tell you is it's seventy years later and I remember it. And we
both knew she had said something really good, but that was so out of
character for my mother to use the word "rubber." I had never heard my
mother use a four-letter word.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, I was thinking that.
-
GELBART
- Here she is with a six-letter word. Is it six? Yes. It was very
uncharacteristic, but that's how she thought, and fast.
-
COLLINGS
- Did your parents continue to speak Yiddish at home after you went to
school and were speaking English?
-
GELBART
- Somewhat.
-
COLLINGS
- But they didn't speak it with you, right?
-
GELBART
- No. I think as Jews become, as any group perhaps, but I know with Jews
for sure, having been one all my life, that you drop it as conversation,
but your speech is peppered with it, because there's just some words
that don't go away.
-
COLLINGS
- I mean today there's such an emphasis on people preserving the language
at home.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- But I think in these previous generations people tried to
assimilate.
-
GELBART
- Assimilate, absolutely, absolutely, and I think that's healthier. You're
not betraying your native land or your native tongue by— I think
especially— Oh, I don't know what I think especially.
-
COLLINGS
- But your parents did speak English at home after a certain point?
-
GELBART
- They did. It was over, over, over.
-
COLLINGS
- That was all over.
-
GELBART
- Yes. But my mother would continue to write, and when she wrote letters,
they was always in Yiddish. She read a lot. She read— There was a
newspaper called the Daily Forward, which was a
Jewish daily, and there was a daily column in there called "A Brintela
Brief" [Hebrew phrase], Letters to the Editor. "My husband is killing
me," I this, I that. She loved that. Ann Landers.
-
COLLINGS
- Did she come from a fairly educated family back in Poland?
-
GELBART
- No. No. They were not educated. As I said, it was a dairy farm, so—
-
COLLINGS
- But I mean they just that they taught the kids how to read and
everything?
-
GELBART
- They taught, yes, but not much. Of her brothers, one became a barber and
was partnered with my father. One became first a house painter and came
to California early enough that he could take advantage— Was smart
enough to take advantage of real estate out here.
-
COLLINGS
- That's nice.
-
GELBART
- Did very well. One was nothing. I don't know what he was. I don't mean
to downgrade him or put him down, but I just don't know what he did. And
the sisters were all very pretty. My mother was beautiful, my mother was
really, really beautiful, kind of Louise Brooks looks, very exotic. But
with that, I think she was uncomfortable with her— With sexuality. I
think she was.
-
COLLINGS
- So your mother was beautiful and your dad was a snappy dresser.
-
GELBART
- A rake.
-
COLLINGS
- They must have been quite a couple.
-
GELBART
- I think they were. They used to tell me— One of the stories that
persisted in my childhood was that the first time he tried to kiss her,
she ripped a silk shirt off his back. I can believe that she ripped it
and I can believe that it was silk. [mutual laughter]
-
COLLINGS
- Well, why don't we leave it there for today.
-
GELBART
- Sure, absolutely.[End of June 20, 2005 interview]
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
July 12, 2005
-
COLLINGS
- This is Jane Collings interviewing Larry Gelbart at his home in Beverly
Hills on July 12th, 2005, and this is tape three.
-
GELBART
- I'm looking at a picture of the Duffy's Tavern
cast, the cast of the radio show Duffy's Tavern.
Sandra Gould is there as Miss Duffy. The original Miss Duffy was
portrayed by Shirley Booth, who was Mrs. Ed, more correctly Mrs. Ed
Poggenberg, and she originated the role, and she was a prominent radio
actress for a lot of years and then, of course, she went on to have a
very big career in pictures. I think she won the Academy Award for Come Back, Little Sheba. She originated that
role, the starring role on Broadway and then made the movie.Then there's Eddie Green. Eddie played the waiter, and one of the few— As
I look at this, I see now, in hindsight, that this was one of the few
sort of mixed racially shows, racially mixed programs, because it's not
that— I don't think there was a racist policy, but there was so little
crossover, and at that, a black would have always been a servant, as in
Rochester with Jack Benny and later on Louise Beavers played some famous
role. I can't even think of it. But Eddie Green has another kind of
asterisk to his name in my memory, because he wrote what became a
wonderful Les Brown classic, A Good Man Is Hard to
Find. He wrote the song, which is a terrific song.Then it says Charles Cartin as Finnegan. This man is not Charles Cartin,
this man is Charlie— Oh, god, having said that, I can't remember his
real name. But it was not Cartin. They're thinking of Sydney Cartin of
The Tale of Two Cities.
-
COLLINGS
- That's important to correct.
-
GELBART
- Yes, it is. It's Charlie, Charles, oh—
-
COLLINGS
- It will come to you.
-
GELBART
- It will. Very, very, very, very successful radio actor, and it's killing
me now. By the time we finish—You know the two blind brothers who have a
thing called— It's a weird anagram, it's like SPERDVAC [Society To
Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy]. Actually, Hy
Averback put me on to them. They are probably America's greatest radio
historians. SPERDVAC, it's called.
-
COLLINGS
- Was one of them working at the UCLA Archive for a while?
-
GELBART
- It could well be. It could well be.
-
COLLINGS
- Because I met the radio archivist many years ago, and he was blind.
-
GELBART
- That was probably him. I'm sorry, this Charles is— Charlie Cantor,
Charlie Cantor. He became Charles Cartin for posterity.At any rate, then of course, there's Ed. Ed was a former— Did I tell you
last time about how he assumed the role of Archie?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- He created the show with probably one of the best radio writers, then
later theater writers around, Abe Burrows. Abe Burrows is the father of
Jimmy Burrows, who is now probably the most successful half-hour comedy
director in the industry, as we're so fond of calling it. Well, we can't
call it the artistry. But Abe and Ed came up with this show, this very
Runyonesque show, about a barely literate barkeep called Archie, who ran
Duffy's Tavern. He ran it because Duffy never actually appeared.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, Duffy always calls at the beginning of the show.
-
GELBART
- Duffy, at the beginning of the show, yes. "Hello, Duffy's Tavern, where
the elite meet to eat. Duffy ain't here. Archie the waiter speaking. Oh,
hello, Duffy." Ed had this very nasal kind of delivery. The most
wonderful guests from all parts of the business, movie stars and theater
stars and literary stars and classical music stars loved to appear,
because they could literally let their hair down with him.At any rate, when they were casting for the part of Archie, the manager,
they listened to person after person. I say "listened" because it wasn't
a matter of— It wasn't visual. It didn't have to be visual. And nobody
seemed to fit the bill that their imaginations had created. Then Ed, in
instructing an actor on how to read a certain speech, an actor who was
auditioning, it's almost like a cheap Broadway musical, everybody turned
around and said, "Ed, you're the guy." So he did it. He was the guy, and
so he took over the role.He was also a terrific— Most comedians who enjoyed long successes
generally in that time they would have started in vaudeville, then
radio, then maybe they'd do some motion pictures, but they were terrific
editors of their own stuff. They knew what was best for them, and Ed
certainly did, too. He was very, very, very sharp that way.I was a novelty. I mean I was six years old— Sixteen years old. I could
have been six. I was like a puppy on that show, you know. And he was
very smart. I mean, here's this kind of freaky kid who can come up with
jokes, and I only cost them fifty dollars a week. I told you the draft
story. So I was a bargain, you know, and I stayed with him for two
years, finally getting up to a couple of hundred, anyway, I think.
-
COLLINGS
- Did the performers work with, edit the material at all that you guys
wrote?
-
GELBART
- No. The performers just— It was a dream job for actors. They came in and
we talked about that, didn't we?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, yes.
-
GELBART
- No, they didn't. They didn't edit.
-
COLLINGS
- They didn't ad lib at all?
-
GELBART
- No, they didn't ad lib. No, you couldn't ad lib in radio because it was
very censored, and this show had a lot of— Ed had his battles with the
censors because he was always trying to slip double or triple or
quadruple entendres into the script, and so you had to fight for those.
So that no one could take a chance and just improvise on the air. It
would have been unthinkable.Fred Allen was famous. He was the only other show really on radio that
compared to Duffy's, or we compared to it,
because it was so word-conscious, and Fred used to love to engage the
censors. He created an act or there was an act, a vaudeville act, that
he referred to constantly, the Muckenfuss sisters. They were always on
tenterhooks waiting for the slip of the tongue.There was very little blue material on the radio. I remember one— When
you did hear it, you were bowled over, because I mean, this just didn't
happen. The radio was in the living room or in the kitchen and came
right into the home.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, mixed company.
-
GELBART
- Big companies and you had to mind your p's and q's, and you probably
couldn't even say "p" then.I was listening to a program called— It was the Rudy
Vallee Show. Rudy Vallee was a former orchestra leader who
became the star of his own radio variety show, and a regular on that
show was John Barrymore, who in his later not— Kind of lousy days, and
one of the guests on a particular program was John Barrymore's brother
Lionel [Barrymore], who was, in fact, although he looked like John's
older brother, was the younger of the two. In a prepared script, John
had this speech that he read. It said he remembered as children they
would play until it was time to come up and get ready for— Get into
their pajamas, and then he said, "And then my big brother Lionel would
tuck me into bed," and then there was a pause, and he ad libbed, "Mmm,
looks like a typographical error." [mutual laughter] There wasn't a lot
of that.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. I happened to hear one of the episodes of Duffy's, and it was—
-
GELBART
- I have four little half-hours, if you want them.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that you wrote?
-
GELBART
- I'm not sure.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay, yes, I'd love to hear. I actually, have to say, I really,
really loved the show.
-
GELBART
- Wasn't it— Isn't it good?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Who was on it?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, this was an episode, it was from October 19th, 1943, and it was
Duffy's Tavern versus Grogan's Bar and Grill.
-
GELBART
- It could have been. I could have been there.
-
COLLINGS
- When Eddie is going to leave and go over to Grogan's.
-
GELBART
- Over to Grogan's?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. There's some lines in there like, "Okay, speaking of getting out of
jail, Eddie the waiter is thinking of leaving us." Then so Duffy needs
to hire somebody else, so he calls the Bowery Bum Personnel Service.
[mutual laughter]Then there's something about a letter that they write, and he signs it,
"You are nothing but a crook and a swindler and an all-around like other
things. I remain the same." It's just like it just comes, it just keeps
coming, and you just kind of like laugh and giggle and you just get
weaker and weaker. It's just so funny.
-
GELBART
- Yes. It was a wonderful program.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. I mean the effect of it, just listening to it and for the first
time ever, I'd never heard it before, it was just— You just felt sort of
light and carefree and it was just constantly just kind of funny and it
didn't stop.
-
GELBART
- Yes, and bubbly.
-
COLLINGS
- Bubbly, exactly. It was just kind of effervescent.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- It must have been a great thing to work on.
-
GELBART
- Well, on a page of script, say a script would have maybe fifteen or
twenty speeches on it, almost every other speech would be a punch
line.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, right, right. And the wife, Duffy's wife, is always just such
a—
-
GELBART
- Oh, that's Duffy's daughter, Miss Duffy.
-
COLLINGS
- Duffy's— Oh, Miss Duffy. Yes, I'm sorry. Yes, that's right, his
daughter, she's always— She kind of vacillates between sort of setting
up straight lines and doing her own punch lines, which are just always
so funny.
-
GELBART
- Yes. Well, she was— That's kind of a carryover from what they called in
burlesque "the talking woman," the woman that you did a sketch with.You can't imagine the number of— As a matter of fact, a few years ago at
Sotheby's— Archie wore an apron. That was the only concession to kind of
a visual effect, because it was unnecessary. He wore an apron tied
around his waist, like a barkeep, and he would have— Ed would have—
Incidentally, Michael Eisner now lives in Ed Gardner's old Bel-Air
mansion.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Yes. Whatever that means. But Ed's mother— I was thinking of the leap
from a radio comedian to this kind of media emperor. Ed was funny. He
still— He was a very cheap man, mean, as the British say.
-
COLLINGS
- Careful, careful.
-
GELBART
- Careful, yes, right, exactly, careful with a buck. I remember one week
one of his brothers wrote and said that their mother had been dead for
some time now and they were thinking of putting— They wanted to put up a
stone, a headstone in the cemetery, and each of the surviving children
were going to put two hundred dollars. I was there when Ed dictated a
letter to him. He said, "Two hundred dollars, two hundred bucks is a lot
of money. I'll be very happy to send it, but I expect at least a page of
jokes from you."
-
COLLINGS
- Wow.
-
GELBART
- So the guy said he had to earn the grave money.But now I've forgotten completely. Oh, the apron. So when any guests
would appear, Edward G. Robinson, Gregory Peck, Dame— I mean just, I
can't—
-
COLLINGS
- Peter Lorre was on the show that I heard.
-
GELBART
- Peter Lorre. They would autograph his apron, and then Ed's mother, who
later wound up under a tombstone, she would embroider the name, each one
in a different color, so he had this kind of rainbow of names, and it
was quite beautiful. A couple of years ago, it came up for auction at
Sotheby's.
-
COLLINGS
- I was just going to say where is it?
-
GELBART
- I said, "I have to have this," and so did Jimmy Burrows.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay, never mind.
-
GELBART
- So Jimmy Burrows got it. He said there was no way anybody was going to
outbid him. So that's one of the rare pieces of physical memorabilia.
Somebody might have a microphone, but nobody had props.
-
COLLINGS
- Did he always wear this hat?
-
GELBART
- Always had that hat, yes.He was sick for years, he was quite a drinker, and in his last years he
was sober. I had dinner with him and his second wife, Simone. It was
spelled Simone, but pronounced Sim-uhn. She was very French. She was
French, which is to say she was very French, and I think he liked that.
I think he liked that, being a kind of "dese, dem and dose" guys,
yes.
-
COLLINGS
- He really was that?
-
GELBART
- He really was. He talked like that, you know.All these guys wore hats. I mean, that's the first thing I thought of
when I stood as a teenager, literally, in the hallways at NBC, and these
guys would come in with their fedoras. I mean, they were wearing gray
fedoras, and neckties, of course. You did not not wear a necktie.Writers came and went. Ed was notorious. He would hire a bartender if the
guy was funny while he was making Ed a drink, and the guy would show up
the next day. I once kept a kind of gold star list of people who came
and went.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's interesting. And so he would just have them come on like for
the day and then that would be it?
-
GELBART
- Well, he hoped it would be for more than a day, but he did cruel things,
too. Each writer would do an act or a section of the following week's
script. So you'd have four or five to pick from and assemble a show, and
frequently we would read our material to Ed in his dressing room at NBC,
which no longer exists. The building is gone and everybody in it,
almost. And we would laugh or not laugh.So one week there was a guy, I remember his name, his name was Al
Johansen, a sweet man, and he said, "Okay, Al, let's hear your stuff."
So Al started reading, and behind his back Ed gestured to the rest of
us, "Nobody laugh. Nobody laugh." So, like the paid monkeys we were, we
didn't, and this guy thought he was laying a terrible egg, and then we
told him at the end.But he could be perversely funny. One week the writers were sitting
around the table and he said, "I got a new writer coming on today. He's
a very good comedy writer." And he was. "His name is Larry Marks. Now,
he's very sensitive because he weighs over three hundred pounds, so
nobody, nobody mention his weight or do anything funny about it."So we said, "Of course. Well, who would?"So at the appointed moment Larry Marks appears, walks into the room, and
Ed says, "Take a seat, you big fat tub of shit."
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, my god. [mutual laughter]
-
GELBART
- You knew it was coming.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- He was funny. I can say it now, because I felt it then, I mean he really
did love me because I was such a departure from the kinds of guys he was
used to all his life. One week he said to me, "Kid, you like boats?"I said, "Yeah."He said, "Come with me," and we went down to— He had a boat in some
harbor somewhere, and we sailed across to Catalina and he served me
breakfast in bed. He said, "You've got to tell people about this," and I
am. Ed Gardner serving a— If you'll notice, and you did hear the shows,
there were no writer credits for a long time.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, I didn't even know if the heads and the tails had been cut off or
anything.
-
GELBART
- No, there was no— There were no credits. In a few years there were, but
somebody as decent and liberal and generous as Jack Benny would not give
writers credits, because the general feeling among comedians was that
out there in America in radio land, the people thought the actors were
making it all up. But the [Writers] Guild prevailed and we did get
credit.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, when did they enforce that?
-
GELBART
- You could look that up. I don't know. But that was a big thing.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I'll bet it was. Good for the Guild.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- When did you first start getting involved with the Writers Guild
yourself?
-
GELBART
- In the forties as a radio writer. There was a Radio Writers Guild. I
remember Abe Burrows got up at a meeting and he said, "We can't keep
taking this crap. Say there's somebody from an advertising agency like
Lay, Back and Whackit." [mutual laughter]
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, for example.
-
GELBART
- For example, for starters, because they were all Young and Rubicam and
somebody and somebody. [mutual laughter]Abe— Did we talk about Guys and Dolls?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- Abe got kind of the break I always envied, and later, I think, got my
own form of it. When Guys and Dolls the musical
was trying out, they were in trouble with the book, the libretto.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, for censorship reasons.
-
GELBART
- No, no, not for the stage then. You have to rely on good old
self-censorship for that.No, they were trying it out out of town. The score was terrific. It was
Frank Loesser. The cast was wonderful. But the book was weak, and so
they cast about to find somebody to, as they used to say, doctor it.
Somebody had the bright idea of calling Abe Burrows. Duffy's was the nearest thing to Damon Runyon, which, of
course, is what Guys and Dolls is based upon. So
he was just in the right place with the right experience at the right
time.I say I had somewhat of a mirrored experience, because when M*A*S*H came around, the combination of having
been in Korea and in many army and naval and marine situations with
[Bob] Hope, of that all played in a sense to my strengths. If not my
strengths, my experience.
-
COLLINGS
- So when you were writing the parts for these sections for Duffy's, did each writer take a certain part, or
would everybody write for everybody?
-
GELBART
- Well, it would go like this. Generally, the staff was comprised of five,
six, seven, eight writers or maybe nine if he hired the bartender that
night, and one night he actually did. I would see him reading somebody's
material and saying, "Jesus, this is great," and he'd call the guy up
and say, "I love this, I love this. This is wonderful, terrific. Yeah,
thank you," bang. Then he'd read the second page, he'd say, "This is
shit," and he'd call the guy back up and fire him.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, my gosh.
-
GELBART
- He once— I'll remember where I was. Where was I, about— What the
different writers did. But he called me once. He was always talking
about the budget, there was no money, there was no money, there was no
money. In the meantime, he's living in a house Eisner's living in now,
so you know how little money there was. But he said, "Kid, I've got to
fire somebody. I've got to fire somebody."I said, "Well, Ed, if you have to, you have to."
-
COLLINGS
- "It can't be me because I'm hardly making anything."
-
GELBART
- No, no, that's the kicker. He said, "Tell me the truth. Are you any
good?" He wanted me to rat on myself.I said, "I'm terrific. I'm probably the best buy you've got."Anyway, the writers. Say the guest coming up was Edward G. Robinson,
okay? That was the guest spot. First of all, you sat around and you
pitched ideas. Edward G. Robinson is coming, "Oh, great. I wrote a play,
he'd be perfect for it, so when he gets here, nobody tell him that I
stole this from Little Caesar," or something.
I'm making up a premise now. But so that would be the thing.So there would be the section of the show that would lead up to the
appearance of the guest, then the guest's spot. I think it was two acts,
that's all. So half the team, say, would do the buildup to the Robinson
thing, then maybe somebody would write the Robinson standup, which would
consist of "Welcome to Duffy's." I remember one joke, "Welcome to
Duffy's." I think this was John Garfield, the actor, he said, "Welcome
to Duffy's," and Garfield said, "Were there many survivors?"Ed said, Archie said, "Jeez, you haven't been in the place thirty
seconds, and you've insulted it and you've knocked it already."Garfield said, "What's the record?" [mutual laughter]So you could hear the characters as they came. So at the reading of the
new script, which always took place at Ed's house in Bel-Air, each guy
would read his assignment, so to speak. Duffy's Tavern, the opening
monologue, "Tonight, Duffy, Deems Taylor, is dropping by. Deems. As in
Deems, dem, and dose. Yes, he's the music cricket" or whatever,
whatever.
-
COLLINGS
- The music cricket.
-
GELBART
- Did I tell you about the malaprops, what they used to do at NBC at the
stenographic pool?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- Well, these were the old days. Obviously, there were no computers, but
the script would get typed or even sometimes submitted in longhand to
the steno pool, and then young women, invariably, would type out the
script. But they used to correct our malapropisms.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Because, yes, they thought we had screwed up. So they were always—
Fortunately, we remembered.But anyway, we would each of us read our assignment, and then there was
always one or two people who functioned as what we called head writers.
They would take the stuff and piece the best of it together, and there
would be a script. Then Ed would do the final, with the writers or the
head writers, do the final run-through of it.I remember one night he showed up to read a script, and he was really
plotzed; he was drunk. He sat down to read it, we gave him about ten
pages, and he started to read it and he loved it and he loved it and he
loved it, and he got to the last page and then he looked at the next
page and he said, "This is great, but you start the second act like you
started the first act."We said, "Ed, that is only the first act. You're reading it a second time
through without knowing it."Everybody for whom it did any good was on Benzedrine because we were
always up late, late, late working. It didn't do anything for me, it put
me to sleep.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh yes, sometimes those— You never know with that stuff.The show was on every night?
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- Once a week?
-
GELBART
- Once a week.
-
COLLINGS
- But it took all of this to get it.
-
GELBART
- To prepare it.
-
COLLINGS
- To get it in shape.
-
GELBART
- Yes. And at that, it was always last minute. There's just something
about the job expanding to the time you have to do it in.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, it always does. Another episode that I heard had Peter Lorre in
it, and he was going to be doing a— Well, he and Duffy were sort of
working together on a children's reader, Duffy's
First Reader.
-
GELBART
- Uh-huh. What year was that, do you remember?
-
COLLINGS
- This was 10/19/1943.
-
GELBART
- '43.
-
COLLINGS
- And Peter Lorre is going to do a children's book. He's going to be the
character of Uncle Jack, your Uncle Jack the Ripper.
-
GELBART
- I knew that. You know something, that was lodged back in there.
-
COLLINGS
- The story is about a little boy and girl who fell into a concrete mixer.
[mutual laughter]
-
GELBART
- Good stuff, huh?
-
COLLINGS
- It's just so not the kind of coddling kind of PC [political correctness]
stuff that you find today.
-
GELBART
- Absolutely, well, of course, of course.
-
COLLINGS
- You just couldn't have a story about a boy and girl that fell into a
concrete mixer.
-
GELBART
- Today, no. They might try it themselves.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, you'd be sued.
-
GELBART
- Well, don't forget, these were the days of W.C. Fields, too, you know,
where W.C. Fields, there's a scene in one picture where he's in a hotel
room with a child and he's on the second floor and he has to go
someplace. He says to the kid, "Stay in this room and do not fall out of
the window unless it's absolutely necessary."
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Well, his whole running thing was that he hated children.
-
GELBART
- He probably did, too, but then a child played a tragic terrible role in
his life. He lived in the Griffith Park area, and Agnes— Not Agnes.
Katherine de Mille and Anthony Quinn, she was the director's adopted
daughter, and their child lived quite close to Fields. They were his
neighbors, and the kid wandered over one day.
-
COLLINGS
- Swimming pool?
-
GELBART
- Yes, duck pond. Field had it drained and he never did fill it up again.You know, they have all the scripts at UCLA. All the Duffy scripts are there.
-
COLLINGS
- The scripts are?
-
GELBART
- The scripts, all the ones from my two years, three years, I don't know,
how long I was there, however.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I didn't realize that. I thought it was just some of the radio
stuff. That would be in the Arts Special Collection thing.
-
GELBART
- Yes, Julie Graham.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, Julie's got them.
-
GELBART
- They're all there. Not "they're all." That very script might be
there.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Well, good. I'll Xerox off a couple pages and we can kind of go
through them a little bit, too.
-
GELBART
- Okay. They were fun. They were fun.
-
COLLINGS
- So when you were at Duffy's, who were your
friends? Were these the guys that these guys that were like ten years
older than you?
-
GELBART
- Yes. I learned some bad habits, too. I mean, I was witness to some bad
habits. I would be around when married guys were calling call girls, or
I could be around when the call girls showed up. But I guess I was
absorbing a lot. I was learning how to smoke. I was learning how to
dress.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you smoke in your life?
-
GELBART
- I started smoking on Duffy's. I was eighteen,
and I remember I bought a pack of Parliaments because they looked so
good, they were in very hard box, and I got myself a gold Dunhill
lighter, and I tried to give myself a cancer, you know, because that was
the thing.Again, while I wasn't making the kind of money I would later make after I
left Duffy's, it was pretty good money. So I
could treat myself to a lot of things that teenagers didn't have the
ability to treat themselves to, cars and clothes, and I think that was
it, and girls.
-
COLLINGS
- Would you like take it home and like show all this stuff to your high
school friends, or were you sort of divorced from—
-
GELBART
- No, there was one— I had a very close friend, we're still close, we're
still alive, missing one or two senses, but he and I were very close in
high school. It was very hard to say, "What do you want to be when you
grow up?" because I was doing something and I hadn't even grown up yet,
you know. I was able to be in both places, because emotionally I was a
high school kid. I couldn't leave that behind. Of course, my studies
went, which were never sterling to begin with, got even more
tarnished.
-
COLLINGS
- I'm surprised you'd even find time to even go to school with this
schedule at Duffy's.
-
GELBART
- Well, I would go to school. I lived on 624 ½ North Genesee, which is
right across the street from the side gate to Fairfax High School. I was
in the ROTC, so I always skipped that. I was in that because that meant
I didn't have to go to gym, and that was always— That was an early
talent, not going to gym. So I wouldn't get there until the second
period, and then I had subjects like band and harmony, radio, acting,
nothing, nonsense classes. I don't know how I graduated, but it wasn't
with honors, I can assure you.So Emil and I kept in touch, were in touch, we lived within a block or
two of one another, and I think he was quite proud of what I was doing.And I had a girlfriend.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, you did?
-
GELBART
- Yes, of course, I had a very long-time romance with a fellow student at
Fairfax, so that— I won't say it kept me grounded because, well, anyway,
dot, dot, dot.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Well, like I think that it probably gave you— Sort of kept your
youth alive a little bit and probably helped, contributed a great deal
to your success at Duffy's because this is—
-
GELBART
- Might have been. But I used to go to work with a fellow named Bill
Manhoff, who lived on Fuller off Melrose, and that meant I walked, which
was nothing terrible. Eight blocks in those days was a breeze. But I
would go over there in my ROTC uniform, take my overseas cap off, loosen
my tie, and start working on Duffy's. A lot of
it was— I mean, I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't mean to listen, but
you listened, you listened. You had to listen to what other people were
saying. When you're writing comedy, when you're writing anything in
conference, you have to pay attention to what other people are teaching
you, telling you, about that episode or that page or that speech. No one
sits around and gives you lessons.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. In terms of when you mentioned the idea of listening, I mean how
do you sort of grab these ideas? I mean, do you ride around on the bus
listening to conversations?
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- Where would you hear things that sort of sparked your—
-
GELBART
- I don't think I was consciously using life as a well or a stockpot for
what I was doing. No, that was strictly confined to this show, these
characters, or that star, in the case of a Bob Hope or someone. And so
much of that was kind of stereotypical cliché, that, you know, I wasn't
trying to emulate authentic dialogue or true conversation. I was trying
to do very what the British called bespoke material for the particular
personality I was working for. So I really wasn't interested in what—
Anyway, I wasn't on the bus a lot because I was able to buy a car very
quickly. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- No, I just sort of threw that out as a random example.
-
GELBART
- No. Later in life, when I found out that the real show business is in
real life, not up on the stage, in terms of all the world being a stage,
then it's not as though you say, "I must really listen and use some
imaginary filter to collect," something someone will say something and,
boom, you know you want to repeat that or you want to get something like
that or you want to know why somebody like that would say something like
that. But that comes later. This was basically just Jokes 101. This was
just delivering the kind of things you hear on Duffy's Tavern, somebody says, "Were there any survivors?" and
you say, "What's the record for insulting this place?" You just thought
in chunks of one, two, three, four, word combinations. And rhythm,
rhythm was important.
-
COLLINGS
- Rhythm, rhythm, yes, absolutely.
-
GELBART
- Yes. It's not by accident that so many musicians— Abe Burrows played
wonderful piano, funny piano. Woody [Allen] plays clarinet. Mel [Brooks]
plays drums, which is not really an instrument, but he's very musical.
Sid Caesar is a recovering saxophonist. A lot of people have that
experience because it does give you a sense of tempo.I read a piece the other day by Alan Ayckbourn, and he talks about
wanting to write. We can't have an orchestrater or a composer's
notations, but as much as you can you try to say where the accent is,
where the rise is, where the inflection rests, where you leave off the
question mark on purpose, even though it looks like a question. Those
are craft things, and you learn those.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. The Duffy's that I listened to just
definitely had a sort of a staccato—
-
GELBART
- Rhythm.
-
COLLINGS
- —tempo that was a really important part of keeping everything
rolling.
-
GELBART
- Yes. It was also eastern, which was unusual. I mean, Fibber McGee and Molly were Midwestern. Jack Benny was
Hollywood. They talk about living in Beverly Hills. Bob Hope was just
really a monologist, peppering an audience with one-liners. But Duffy's was urban and, more specifically, New
York.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. You could sort of picture it down on the Lower East Side or
something.
-
GELBART
- Yes, exactly. I wonder if we ever, if they, we, ever gave it a location,
at the corner of where and whatever. But obviously, it was the Bowery,
because it was a—
-
COLLINGS
- Right, Bowery Bum Personnel Service.
-
GELBART
- Yes. But what goes around, etc., etc., etc. I'm writing a script now
with one of my sons [Gary Markowitz], and it's about a very Bowery-type
place.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, we can talk about that— It's not ready yet, I can see.
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. So would you like to talk a little bit about working with Bob
Hope? We sort of touched on it last time. Just sort of fill it in a
bit?
-
GELBART
- Right. After Duffy's I did a number of shows,
not for great periods of time, and then in '48, I guess, came this offer
to my then partner and I, Larry Marks, of the "Sit down, you big fat
piece of—," fame. We were asked if we wanted to be, or we were sold by
our agents to, I don't remember it exactly.
-
COLLINGS
- By then you and he were a writing pair.
-
GELBART
- We had decided to become a pair, yes. We had worked together on Duffy's, but not as a pair. We worked together
on the first Jack Paar radio show, but not as a pair, on which Hy
Averback was the announcer.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Yes. Yes. That's, I don't know, the summer of something, '46, maybe.So we presented ourselves as a team, Larry and Larry. He was called Fat
Larry, unfortunately, and I was the kid. I was the kid for years, until
last year, actually.
-
COLLINGS
- Fat Larry and the kid.
-
GELBART
- Fat Larry and the kid, right. Sounds like a Butch Cassidy thing. Right.
So Hope wanted us for four years.
-
COLLINGS
- A contract for four years?
-
GELBART
- A contract for four years, and he said— He said or his representatives
said, "We'll give you—." And a year meant thirty-nine weeks.
-
COLLINGS
- Thirty-nine weeks of material?
-
GELBART
- Thirty-nine weeks of radio broadcasts. That was eventually to include a
number of television series per year, specials, as they were called
then, and some work on his motion pictures, punching up scripts, adding
jokes to them.
-
COLLINGS
- He was the most famous successful box office figure ever, I think.
-
GELBART
- Of everything, everything. I think so. He was iconic, to coin a new
cliché.It was quite a thing, and for a comedy writer, the epitome. Although for
years he did not enjoy a very good reputation with writers he hired, far
too many of them, and not very generous towards them.
-
COLLINGS
- He didn't know what he wanted at that point?
-
GELBART
- No, he knew what he wanted, but he wanted more, always more. So we
negotiated. I think it was for— I know it was for four years, and the
terms they offered were something like a thousand for the first year and
then eight-fifty for the second year.
-
COLLINGS
- Why?
-
GELBART
- Well, because if you only had one year of it, you'd have made a lot of
money. I guess that was their thinking. Or it was also bait on the hook,
you know. Then it went to eleven or something. Then it went to
twelve-fifty.
-
COLLINGS
- Interesting.
-
GELBART
- Yes. So we said, "Give us—." Eight-fifty per person, not for the team,
which is pretty good money.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, but it's just strange.
-
GELBART
- We said, "Give us the least money the first year. We know you're going
to want us back, and we want to get raises, not cuts." So that's how it
worked out. They did do it that way, and for that then princely sum,
which that's not bad today either, we were assigned to the radio shows.
The radio shows were somewhat similar to Duffy's
Tavern and similar to all shows of the period in a way. There
were four writers and two junior writers. I'll leave the junior writers
out of the equation. It's simpler to do it the other way. Each writer or
each writing team, there was another fellow writing by himself called
Norman Sullivan, and I thought it would be great if we teamed up and we
could be Gelbart and Sullivan, but it didn't work out that way.
[laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, there you go.
-
GELBART
- So all of us had to write a monologue, jokes for a monologue.
-
COLLINGS
- His opening monologue.
-
GELBART
- His opening monologue, because Hope was, first and foremost, and to the
very end, primarily a monologist. That's where he came from in the
theater, that's what he loved doing the most, and that's what he spent
the most time perfecting. First we'd have a general meeting.
-
COLLINGS
- His timing was just great.
1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO
July 12, 2005
-
GELBART
- Speaking of Hope's timing, while he wasn't a musician, you know he was a
tap dancer, a very good tap dancer, and that helped all kinds of rhythm
in terms of acting and jokes. So we would— I forget just amongst us or
with him included, I'm not sure, the monologue, for each week's
monologue we would select, say, five topics: Santa Anita's opening, he's
got a new picture opening, the baseball season is opening, or Congress
just did this or Bing Crosby just did that. It could be any number of
things, but we limited it to five topics.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, would he tend to touch on those kinds of political things?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- In the Jay Leno sense?
-
GELBART
- Much milder.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. That's what I thought.
-
GELBART
- Hope never drew any blood.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, because when you mentioned Congress did something, I just couldn't
picture that as well.
-
GELBART
- He made Will Rogers-type jokes about Congress. They were needles, but,
as I said, they didn't—
-
COLLINGS
- They just sort of upheld the values of the democracy.
-
GELBART
- Yes, I mean, it was probably the same jokes that the Romans made about
their senators. It was just, yeah, that's right, we're so democratic we
can joke about how corrupt we are or stupid or arrogant or whatever.
Hope became more political toward the end, but in the beginning he was
very, very careful to be neutral.
-
COLLINGS
- He became very, very anti-communist.
-
GELBART
- Hawkish, yes. Yes, I know, somebody reminded me that he called M*A*S*H a "sit-commie" but—
-
COLLINGS
- A sit-com in the sense of communist?
-
GELBART
- Yes. "Sit-commie."
-
COLLINGS
- A "sit-commie," okay. Yes.
-
GELBART
- Yes. But I mean, with all his criticism of what I was doing and the some
of the criticism and I extended in reverse, that was all forgiven or
forgotten when I was asked by his family to deliver one of the three
speeches at his mass when he died.So we'd get the topics. Then we had a rule, no more than twenty jokes on
each topic. As we separated to go to our different typewriters, no more
than twenty jokes. Let's not compete ourselves into the ground here, you
know. And so we would do that. Hope he didn't know that, I'm sure.
-
COLLINGS
- That's interesting.
-
GELBART
- Yes. There was the opening monologue, then probably a commercial, then
exchanges very much like Duffy's with the
regulars on that show, Jerry Colonna or Brenda and Cobina (played by
actresses Blanche Stewart and Elvia Allman); or Skinnay Ennis the
bandleader, or Doris Day the singer or whatever, whatever, whatever, and
the guests would come on. There was always a guest star. Then you would
either do a sketch, primarily a sketch, although there might be a duet.
There was certainly no dancing, it being radio. We divided that, too.
"You guys do this, you guys do this, you guys do that."Then we would all assemble at Hope's house in North Hollywood, and we
would read the material aloud to him. The first thing was, he would look
at the monologue jokes that we had submitted, and he would read them to
himself or out loud, if he felt like it. If he liked the joke, he would
put a check next to it. Do you know this process?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- Okay. I've described it in other places, so I didn't know. He'd go
through all the jokes and do that. Then he'd go back to page one,
knowing he was going back to page one, and if he still liked that
checked joke, he didn't bother to read the unchecked jokes, he would
strike through a slash on the check, meaning this is worth a second or
third look, and he'd go through all of those check marks.
-
COLLINGS
- This is very methodical.
-
GELBART
- Yes. Some did make that cut, literally, and some did not. Now he went
back to just the checks and the slashes, and if he really liked it
still, he would circle it.
-
COLLINGS
- Wow.
-
GELBART
- So that by the time he got back through reading, oh, I don't know,
sixty, eighty, a hundred jokes, there would be enough jokes to use for a
six- or seven-minute monologue. Then those— I'm sorry.
-
COLLINGS
- Whatever happened to the unchecked and uncircled that's left jokes?
-
GELBART
- No one knows.
-
COLLINGS
- I mean you never resubmitted them in another context?
-
GELBART
- Sure. Of course, you'd change the name, change the name of the
president. Now then, someone with a scissors would cut out the circled,
checked, and slashed jokes, put them on a table, and essentially routine
them. "This is a good one. This can follow that. No, this should be one,
that should be three, this should be two." And they were stapled and
Scotch-taped together, and then a secretary would transcribe them, and
that was the monologue.Then with the material for the rest of the show, he would say, "I like
that. I like that. That could be better. That could be better, I think
it just needs a bigger kid at the back," meaning a bigger joke to pay
the whole thing off, and that's what we did.
-
COLLINGS
- Did he offer sort of commentary on why he did or didn't like things, or
did he keep that to himself?
-
GELBART
- It was just yes or no, given the volume, to make a case for or against
any particular joke. You didn't quarrel. I mean, we guys, we were like
fountains. "You don't like that? Here's another one. You don't like that
one? Here's another one."I remember he was riding in a car once with a comedy writer named Jay
Burton. Was that him or was that Hope or Milton Berle? It doesn't really
matter, but Jay had— Jay was a geyser, and he gave the comic page after
page after page of stuff, and the guy said, "I don't like this." Jay
threw it out the window. And I'm sure he didn't have a carbon. It's
just, "You don't like it, I'll give you another five hundred."So then you did the show.
-
COLLINGS
- So would you all sit at your typewriters just thinking?
-
GELBART
- Different places, different, not in the same room. There was no staff
headquarters. Larry [Marks] and I worked at his place, primarily. Two
other guys worked somewhere else, and two other guys worked somewhere
else.
-
COLLINGS
- Would you think about jokes while you were walking down the street or
taking a shower, or was it always while you sat and did the work? "Now
it's time to work and come up with these"?
-
GELBART
- No, I think you think about them all the time. It's like once you've
decided on a topic, the mind goes to work, working even though you don't
know it is, but certainly working when you want it to work, saying,
"Santa Anita, Santa Anita."The only time Hope got angry at me, and he only got angry at me once in
four years, I wrote some terrible jokes on purpose. It was for Santa
Anita.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really, why?
-
GELBART
- I don't know. I just— You get tired. I wrote these jokes about him
betting on a horse that was so old, people were betting him to win,
place and live.
-
COLLINGS
- I don't think that's terrible. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- Well, I thought it was, and I put that down. And then I did another one.
A horse he bet on had a bad break, he stumbled at the starting gate, he
tripped over his hearing aid.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, that one's not okay.
-
GELBART
- He picked them. He picked them. He checked them, he slashed them, he
circled them. I said, "You're really going to do these?"He said, "Yeah."I said, "It's going to sound like a Hope monologue."And he said, "What's wrong with that?"
-
COLLINGS
- Ooooh. You're living dangerously.
-
GELBART
- Yes, well, in the fourth year. Oh no, he got angry one more time. Not
angry but curiously snappish, and you'll know what I mean when I tell
you. It wasn't even a good joke. I made some reference to his nose, and
he said, "That's some hooter you got." What's so
odd is that we would always do jokes about his nose, but that was in a
professional way; ski nose, that kind of reference.
-
COLLINGS
- I know, and his nose is like a— Exactly.
-
GELBART
- Ski snoot, all of that. But in a personal context it took on a whole
other thing. His vanity was hurt.
-
COLLINGS
- So what kind of person was he, just to be around?
-
GELBART
- Exciting, very exciting. I mean, you were always going somewhere, even
if it was only to the Valley to deliver your material. You were always
traveling and always— He was just magnetic. There was a crackle about
him and a—
-
COLLINGS
- So just people working for him just felt charged?
-
GELBART
- You were charged. You were charged.I remember we were somewhere in the Orient and we were recording a radio
show, and of course we couldn't travel with a—
-
COLLINGS
- A radio studio.
-
GELBART
- So we needed an actor to play a role, or somebody to play a role in a
sketch, and I said, "I'll do it."So he said, "Okay, great."So I was standing on-stage with him at one microphone and he was at
another microphone, and I'll never forget the power that he projected
almost knocked me over. I mean it just— I couldn't believe how strong he
was.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, it's so interesting.
-
GELBART
- Yes. I thought, "Wow, that's a great clue to why he is so successful. He
gets you." He got me.
-
COLLINGS
- So you hadn't really felt that before you were in his presence while he
was performing?
-
GELBART
- Yes, you're listening to the joke, "Did he do it right?" and of course
he always did. "I could have done it better," or, "Next time I'll—." You
know what I mean? You're listening as a writer. I was there as a
performer and wasn't paying attention to what was being said, but rather
how it was said, and it was tremendous.He was exciting. He was full of surprises, and what's better than
surprises? The surprises were usually— I think I'd say it in the book.
You'd call up on a day like this, just an average day, a nothing day, a
working day, and he'd say, "Your passport valid?"
-
COLLINGS
- Time to go.
-
GELBART
- "We're going to Russia," we're going to any place, and you did.
-
COLLINGS
- So this was the first time you had done a lot of traveling.
-
GELBART
- It was my introduction to traveling.
-
COLLINGS
- How'd you like it?
-
GELBART
- Well, I never stopped for over fifty years. I loved it. I love traveling
when you don't have to write a monologue for somebody at the other end
of the plane ride.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. So you'd be sitting on the plane writing and—
-
GELBART
- You'd be sitting on a plane, you'd be sitting in a jeep, you'd be
sitting in a tent, you'd be sitting in places you never dreamed you'd
ever be, but you were writing because you had to and you delivered when
you had to, and it was tremendous training, tremendous. On any variety
of subjects too.
-
COLLINGS
- I don't want to interrupt you, but do you think he was energized by the
war, the World War II and the Korean thing? Was this an important
context for him?
-
GELBART
- I think he was born energized. I think he sprang out and heard that slap
on his ass and thought they were applauding and took a bow.
-
COLLINGS
- [laughs] Okay. You said last time that it was a really, really intense
learning experience.
-
GELBART
- It was.
-
COLLINGS
- So was this just the pace of the work and the travel, or was it
everything?
-
GELBART
- It was constant. You were on a train. You were working on a radio
script, maybe, and also on a television script, and you were working on
some lines for the next town where he was going to do a concert.There was a confluence of events at that particular time, at one time,
within that time. Les Brown had like the number one record out, "I've
Got My Love to Keep Me Warm," and Doris Day was the singer and she had
the number one record out, "It's Magic," and it just felt like the
number one experience. It was just— Another nice thing for me, another
thrilling thing for me, was that Les Brown, who was a darling man and a
very, very good friend of Hy's [Averback]— They're buried side by side
in the Westwood Cemetery. It just worked out that way; they didn't plan
it.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, in the Westwood Cemetery as in Westwood?
-
GELBART
- Yes. Amazing coincidence. Maybe there are no coincidences.But Les would let me sit in with the band. He'd let me in rehearsal play
the clarinet parts, so I mean I was in heaven.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, on top of the world.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- So you decided to leave after four years?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- That was enough?
-
GELBART
- It was enough for several reasons. One, my partner and I, Larry, things
had gotten very acrimonious between us.
-
COLLINGS
- You just had different visions?
-
GELBART
- Different everything. Different beat, different—
-
COLLINGS
- Different beat?
-
GELBART
- I had an ulcer by the time I was twenty-one. I remember my— I lived
alone, and my milk bill was forty dollars a month, you know. [laughs] I
was tearing myself up, and I can't blame the other people, I'm blaming
myself for behaving under that kind of stress in the way that I did,
punishing myself rather than addressing my antagonist.So we were going to break up, and we did. I didn't want to— I wanted— I
was going with a girl who had moved back to New York, and that was part
of it, but not the greatest part of it. I wanted something outside the
experience I knew here, another show.
-
COLLINGS
- Here in Los Angeles?
-
GELBART
- Yes. Here in Los Angeles, here in radio, here in, what, just sort of
being this trained monkey, you know, who turns out jokes and jokes and
jokes and jokes. So at that time, Red Buttons had done a successful—
What did they call them? They didn't call them pilots. Yes, I guess they
did call them pilots. It doesn't matter. No, he didn't even do a pilot.
He had been given an airtime on CBS, and the William Morris office said,
"You want to go back there and do that show?" It seemed perfect, and so
I did.
-
COLLINGS
- You were working not in— Now you were working on your own. You didn't
have a kind of a team?
-
GELBART
- There was no team. There were other writers, but I was the— It was me,
basically. I mean, there were other writers, but I got to do the hiring
and I got to do the organizing. I resist the term "head writer," because
I think it's so terrible, but that's what I was.
-
COLLINGS
- How old were you at that point?
-
GELBART
- 1952. I was born in 1928.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, so you were thirty-four.
-
GELBART
- Was I thirty-four?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, 1952—
-
GELBART
- 1928 to 1940, no, I was twenty-four.
-
COLLINGS
- Twenty-four?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- How can that be? Jeez.
-
GELBART
- Why not? Everybody can be twenty-four.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I know, I know, but this just seems like a lot.
-
GELBART
- No, I'm joking. No, no, 1928 to 1948 is twenty years, plus four is
twenty-four.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, right, right. Wow, that was a position of great responsibility
for someone of that age.
-
GELBART
- I didn't do too well in the beginning, I really didn't, because Red was
a— By the time I got there, he was a performer, an entertainer, a
standup by himself, solo performer, that is, but he had gotten his early
training in burlesque as a comedian. And in burlesque there was not a
lot of standup. You didn't tell jokes to people sitting out there who
wished to hell you'd get off so they could get on with the real thing,
but a lot of sketches, a lot of sketches; short sketches with a middle,
with a beginning, a middle and an end, and I didn't know how to
construct one of those. I did not learn that with Bob Hope. With Bob
Hope it was joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. It didn't have the narrative development.
-
GELBART
- That's right, none, of even something as primal as a burlesque sketch,
and Red did, and I learned. I learned how to start, go somewhere, and
finish.
-
COLLINGS
- Although Duffy's had a bit of a story.
-
GELBART
- Indeed, it did. But there again, you were more concerned with a
line-by-line writing of it rather than any kind of an arc.
-
COLLINGS
- The arc of the whole thing.
-
GELBART
- None at all. If someone had said "arc" to me in those days, I would have
looked for two animals. Sorry, sorry, sorry. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- So after that, when was it exactly that you started with Caesar's Hour? Was that directly after Red
Buttons?
-
GELBART
- That was '55. That was '55. No, after Red. I left Red after the first
year and a half of his show, and then I did anything. I had to pay the
rent. I was married.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, you had gotten married by this point.
-
GELBART
- Yes. I got married in '56, I think.
-
COLLINGS
- How did you meet your wife?
-
GELBART
- You want Sid Caesar first or my wife first?
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, your choice, whichever you think comes first.
-
GELBART
- I'll get back to my wife.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay.
-
GELBART
- Incidentally, in this current issue of Vanity
Fair on page 142, there is a Photoshop assembly of the writers of
the Caesar's. They keep saying the [Your] Show of Shows, but it's more than that.
But anyway, there's now, present day, there's Carl [Reiner], there's Sid
[Caesar], there's Mel [Brooks], there's Woody [Allen], there's Neil
Simon, there's me, there's Aaron Rubin, there's Mel Tolkin, there's Joe
Stein, and there we are. Did I say Mel Brooks?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Well, he's bigger than life, so I said him twice. But it's kind of
interesting, terrible. I mean we look like our representations at Madame
Tussaud's.
-
COLLINGS
- No Botox, huh?
-
GELBART
- No. Sid. Oh, so I did some fast work. I worked for Pat Boone, if you can
believe it, for thirteen weeks. I did his variety show. I did some work
at CBS as staff.
-
COLLINGS
- So you left the Red Buttons show because you just didn't feel like it
was a good—
-
GELBART
- Because he fired me.
-
COLLINGS
- Because he fired you.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Why did he fire you?
-
GELBART
- Because the network wanted some changes, and so that was one of those
changes. [laughs] Then we didn't talk for about twenty years.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh. So you sort of, for the first time ever, you were kind of casting
about trying to figure out where you were going to be working, because
before this everything had flowed pretty—
-
GELBART
- But this flowed, too. I mean, I was always desirable because I could
deliver and I wrote good stuff. So it was not a question of having to
look around long.Oh, and the other show I did was Patrice Mansel. Do you remember Patrice
Mansel?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- She was a very popular entertainer. She was operatic, actually, but very
attractive and accessible, and she had her own variety show on the air
for a while. So I mean, to do those shows only really speaks about how
few shows were being done in New York that I could work on.Then '55, I got a call to play with the Yankees. Sid had had his own show
then. I was not on Your Show of Shows ever, but
I was on Caesar's Hour, which was his version of
it, and I was there for two years.
-
COLLINGS
- I saw a— They had something from Caesar's Hour
at the Archive, and it was from '55, 10/10/55.
-
GELBART
- Right. What's the show?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, there was a really, really interesting segment in the beginning
where Sid and his wife have some friends over, and the friends are— It's
eleven o'clock, the friends are leaving, and the wife offers everybody
coffee, and then there's a whole thing about one wants cocoa, and the
other one wants tea.
-
GELBART
- I don't remember that.
-
COLLINGS
- Then somebody comes into the kitchen, and then they somehow all end up
in the kitchen making these elaborate meals.
-
GELBART
- I don't remember that.
-
COLLINGS
- The place just gets like messier and messier, and it's absolutely
fascinating because it's one long take where people are just kind of
revolving around in this space, cooking.
-
GELBART
- Really, 10/10/55?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. By then it's two o'clock in the morning and the friends all leave,
and Sid says, "Oh, boy, it's great having all these friends in? Isn't it
wonderful? Well, go ahead and get all these dishes taken care of. I'm
going to bed," and the wife starts yelling at him.
-
GELBART
- Flips.
-
COLLINGS
- Which is just amazing in 19—
-
GELBART
- Was the wife Nanette Fabray?
-
COLLINGS
- The wife was— Oh, I had it. No, it wasn't. It might have been Sandra
Deel.
-
GELBART
- I don't think I was on that show then, or that— I couldn't have been
there and not on that, but I can't remember. Sandra Deel? I don't
know.
-
COLLINGS
- Because she does sing. She does sing.
-
GELBART
- I know she does.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, later on in the show.
-
GELBART
- My favorite moment in that kitchen was—
-
COLLINGS
- They used that kitchen a lot, the kitchen set?
-
GELBART
- Yes. The show was always somebody always eating, or we were doing eating
things, because we were all such— The Yiddish word is "noshers".
Gluttons, I guess, is the English word for it. [laughs] But there's a
scene where Sid, as the host of the dinner party, goes into the kitchen
to check the lamb chops, and he pulls out the drawer in the broiler and
the lamb chops all fall on the floor. Carl [Reiner] has come in beside
him and looks down, and Sid looks up, and Sid says, "Are you going to
tell?"Carl says, "No, I'm not going to tell. I'm not going to eat, but I'm not
going to tell." [mutual laughter]We did some wonderful— I don't know. I don't know why I don't remember
that episode that you're talking about, or that sketch. But that was a
wild place to work.
-
COLLINGS
- There also on that show, there was an opera spoof called Gallipacci,
that's the one where Sid Caesar is putting the—
-
GELBART
- The broken pencil.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, exactly. He's putting the—
-
GELBART
- I know.
-
COLLINGS
- What do you call that?
-
GELBART
- Mascara. No, eye— He's working with a—
-
COLLINGS
- What the heck is the name of that game?
-
GELBART
- The what, sweetheart?
-
COLLINGS
- You know, where you make the crosses and the—
-
GELBART
- Oh, here's exactly what happened. Have you seen it?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that's this episode.
-
GELBART
- When people ask if there was ever any improvisation on that show, and I
always quote this example, because there was little or no improvisation.
What happened was— What is this called? Eye liner.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. Eye pencil or—
-
GELBART
- There's a word for it. Not mascara, that's this, right?
-
COLLINGS
- No, the mascara is for the eyelashes.
-
GELBART
- That's right. Right. Okay. This is a pencil, grease.
-
COLLINGS
- A grease pencil.
-
GELBART
- Right. Sid was supposed to— And as he sings, he was painting a tear.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, he was supposed to paint a tear.
-
GELBART
- That's right. But the pencil broke. Now, what you see next is total
improvisation. With a live camera, with a live studio audience, with a
several million live people out there, Sid does this [draws tic tac toe
figure on his face], then he does this, right, and finishes on the beat
and stays in character. It was brilliant, just brilliant.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Because I had read, you had talked about that in your book—
-
GELBART
- Oh, you know it then.
-
COLLINGS
- I had read that, and then so when I saw that segment, I was really
prepared to watch it, and it did seem to me like he kind of like glanced
at the camera just for like a moment, like a sort of, "Well, you know, I
gotta do something," kind of look, like.
-
GELBART
- Yes. It was in that moment, the seed got planted. Oh, I'm sorry, I
didn't realize you'd read it. I wouldn't have told it over again.
-
COLLINGS
- No, it's okay.
-
GELBART
- I can't remember the kitchen scene, though. Because I was there for
that, so I would have been there for that. But Sid—
-
COLLINGS
- I'm surprised to hear that you say that those particular scenes had no
improvisation at all, because this was like a five-minute-long take in
the kitchen.
-
GELBART
- That would have been worked out to the move, to the moment, to the turn,
to the line, absolutely. I mean, think of it. The show ran an hour,
which means in those days there would have been six minutes of
commercials, so it's fifty minutes. You had to plan everything. You
can't say, "We'll wing it here, we'll wing it there, we'll do this,
we'll do that."
-
COLLINGS
- I sort of felt like the scenes with Sid and Sandra Deel and the other
couple, kind of reminded me of the [Jerry] Seinfeld show.
-
GELBART
- Probably reminded them, too.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. And I think that they've actually done some— They did kind of an
opera spoof in that show, too. I was wondering if they were playing even
off of—
-
GELBART
- They might have been. I mean, the people who do those shows went to
school on those shows. That was their pre-K. I mean, I've said this
before, but I mean when we did our show, even by then it was hard,
though, but when we did those shows, there were no footprints in the
snow. We didn't have to say, "Did somebody do this last night?"
-
COLLINGS
- That's right. That must have been great.
-
GELBART
- It was.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you also said about that show, "I don't think there was ever a
group so aware of their own psychological problems and others." You said
that the writers dealt with their psychoses, neuroses, and I just
wondered why is it that those writers were so concerned to sort of
explore these issues? It's very different than the kind of humor in Duffy's.
-
GELBART
- I don't think they were so much interested in exploring them as they
were aware that they contained all of this dramatic/comedic material,
that life was the best research you could do. And forgive me if I repeat
myself, because I know, I mean, by this time, I think I told you that I
once made a vow that I would never repeat myself, but I didn't know I
was going to live this long.
-
COLLINGS
- Darn it! [mutual laughter]
-
GELBART
- This was the first generation of comedy writers who were, one, maybe
first-generation Americans, and, two, certainly that had been or were in
and some still are in therapy. So we were very interested in what made
us tick. So maybe I shortchanged your answer, maybe this was a wonderful
way to explore our own hang-ups, hang-downs, whatever, whatever.The sitcom started in 1950 with the first Goldbergs.
-
COLLINGS
-
I Remember Mama.
-
GELBART
-
I Remember Mama, right. But this was kind of the
first real sort of hard comedy take on domestic situation comedy, the
husband and the wife and the friends and suburbia. Sid, as soon as he
got to the top of his career, was living in King's Point, Carl was
living in upstate New York, a number of the writers were all upstate, so
they were aware of the commuting, and also the commutation from Odessa
to—
-
COLLINGS
- The city.
-
GELBART
- —the city and then beyond the city.
-
COLLINGS
- So did the writers tend to be in therapy? You said that the writers on
Duffy's were all taking Benzedrine.
-
GELBART
- Well, the Benzedrine suggests, with today as a reference, suggests a
kind of a high life or addictive or romantic Toulouse Lautrecian kind of
thing, only with Benzedrine. It was just to stay awake. It was not to
get kicks or to get high.The therapy, was that the other part?
-
COLLINGS
- You were saying that many of the writers tended to be in therapy and
then take material from that.
-
GELBART
- Yes, because they were in therapy. They would have been in therapy if
they weren't on Caesar's Hour or Your Show of Shows. They were in therapy because
everybody was in therapy at that time.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. The psychology was very big in the United States in the
fifties.
-
GELBART
- Very big. But for some people, it didn't go away. My guess is that Woody
Allen is still in therapy. I know Carl's been in for years and years.
I'm not outing them, it's just it helps them in whatever way it helps
them, and to be aware of yourself or to become aware of yourself is to
perforce become aware of other people and know you're not alone in these
experiences or these emotions.
-
COLLINGS
- So did everybody feel like they needed to go and find themselves a
therapist, otherwise they kind of weren't doing what everybody was
doing?
-
GELBART
- I didn't have a therapist. I did not have a therapist until I got to
England many years later. No, I felt I was too busy doing my life to try
finding out why I should be doing it in some other way than I was doing
it. There were those people, maybe I was one of them, I don't know, I
don't remember the me of then that well in these terms, in this
instance, who thought I don't want to screw around with myself. I am
what I am, and if I get better, if in fact I am screwed up, maybe I
won't be as good as I am.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. It's like if it's not broke, don't fix it.
-
GELBART
- That's right.
-
COLLINGS
- This is a sketch that you drew of the floor plan of the writers'
room.
-
GELBART
- Oh, for Neil Simon.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, is that what that was for?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Because I was wondering why you would have needed to draw a floor
plan.
-
GELBART
- I didn't need to. He was working on this show called Laughter on the 23rd Floor, and we were not on the
twenty-third floor. We were on the seventh or eighth floor, but he said
twenty-third sounds better. And he said, "What did it look like?"So I said, "You don't remember?"He said, "Wasn't the couch here? Wasn't this over there?"I said, "I'll draw it for you." So I did. I drew it and I gave it to
him.
-
COLLINGS
- You've got Caesar's chair in there.
-
GELBART
- Caesar's chair. Sid sat in the middle, very, very— In a very regal
fashion. The first thing he did, he would come in the morning, wearing a
hideously but beautifully tailored suit, very wide shoulders, shoes made
especially for him, huge cufflinks, keychain. He would take off his
pants and hang them up because he—
-
COLLINGS
- You know what? That happens in Seinfeld. They do that.
-
GELBART
- Well, there you go.
-
COLLINGS
- There you go, yes.
-
GELBART
- There you go.
-
COLLINGS
- I'm going to have to change the tape.
-
GELBART
- Go ahead.
1.6. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE
July 12, 2005
-
GELBART
- So this drawing indicates the position of Caesar's chair, and he sat
there and we all sat around him and he sat facing the desk, and at the
desk was a young man named Michael Stewart, who later went on to write
Bye Bye Birdie and Hello
Dolly! and lots of successful shows. He was just considered
kind of an amanuensis/writer, and for that job he got seventy hundred
and fifty dollars a week, which was pretty good money, especially for
somebody who wore Thom McAnn shoes.At any rate, one Christmas my wife and I decided to give Sid, who not
only had everything but probably a dozen of them, a new throne. So we
got him this very, very golden-looking fabric chair for him to sit in,
and he loved that. I mean it just seemed to suit him as he sat there
unsuited, and that's why the chair is there.But, you know, memory does what memory does, as we know, as we think we
remember it. When Neil was writing Laughter on the
23rd Floor, he said, "I'm doing a thing where the writers have
a— They're trying to pitch funny names for an actress. Do you remember
any of the ones that we ever did, you know?"I said, "Well, the funniest one, the really funniest one was we talked
about an actress and her name was Angela Jonesela."He said, "Oh, that's great. Can I use it?"I said, "It's yours. I'm not giving it to you. That's your joke."He said, "I thought that was your joke."I said, "No, no, no, no. You thought of that. I've always admired it, but
take it, it's yours.""Thank you."
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. The commercials in Caesar's?
-
GELBART
- Commercials in Caesar's.
-
COLLINGS
- I mean your memory of them. I'm sure the commercials were not meant to
be kind of humorous and ironic at the time.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- Right?
-
GELBART
- You mean the actual commercials?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- No, they were meant to—
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Because there was one at the end for Helene Curtis Super Soft
Spray Net that was just so silly.
-
GELBART
- Funny enough in itself?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that I just really had to ask whether there was supposed to be any
note of self-deprecating humor that perhaps was to blend with the
program.
-
GELBART
- If that was the case on any given commercial, then it was the decision
of the advertising agency.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. I was just wondering if what your memory—
-
GELBART
- No. That was a separate country. We never went there. They might have
thought, but my guess is that they meant every word of what you think is
now so silly.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Because they had ladies in gauzy dresses kind of leaping through
space with their, you know— The hair is set.
-
GELBART
- The hair stays in place, right.
-
COLLINGS
- I was just wondering if it was pitched to kind of blend in with the tone
of the whole show.
-
GELBART
- No, no. [mutual laughter]
-
COLLINGS
- I did also want to also ask you about the writing room, because you
mentioned it is a room.
-
GELBART
- There were two rooms with an accordion-type folding partition in
between, but it was generally open, so it was two rooms, about the size
of the one we're in right now.
-
COLLINGS
- So that was different than the situation where you would go and sit
around at Larry Marks' house, for example.
-
GELBART
- Yes. This is the first time I was ever in sort of a gang-writing
situation since way back on, say, Duffy's
Tavern, when we would assemble in one room. No, this was there from
page one, you were together. Sometimes we would split up. A couple of us
would go off and do a totally self-contained segment or someone would go
off and write a special song. But by and large, we were all thrown in
the hopper together.
-
COLLINGS
- So you'd all come in in the morning, kind of like an office
situation?
-
GELBART
- Totally.
-
COLLINGS
- You'd all come in in the morning and just—
-
GELBART
- Except for Mel Brooks. Mel made it a point to be late, and then he made
it a point to deride us for being—
-
COLLINGS
- Early?
-
GELBART
- No. On time and being so— It was demeaning to him to have to come in on
time, like some kind of worker ant. Once there, he would read the Wall Street Journal for a while and then send
for his bagel. One time he sent for a bagel and coffee, and somebody
quickly made a check out of cardboard and signed his name to it and gave
it to the delivery kid. It was for ten dollars. It was sort of to teach
Mel a lesson. But I don't think he bothered to learn the lesson.
-
COLLINGS
- So you come in at the beginning of the week, and I mean what would—
-
GELBART
- We'd come in on a Monday morning, and we'd say, "Well, what are we going
to do?" Sometimes we'd have a couple of things that we had thought about
before we said, "We'll do it, we'll do it, we'll do it." But by and
large, the page was very blank on Monday, the program having aired on
Saturday, all of us having rested on Sunday, Monday we looked at each
other and said, "Now what? Should we do a movie takeoff, should we do a
this? Should we do? Oh, I know, we haven't done a this for a while.
Should we do the Hickenloopers?" which were the domestic couple, the
married man and wife in suburbia. "All right, let's do a this and let's
do a that. And you know what? I saw a movie the other night and I think
it's ripe for satire." Or, "I saw a musical," or another television
show. Television then, of course, became its own—
-
COLLINGS
- Self-parody.
-
GELBART
- Right. As in Helene Curtis or Rubenstein commercials.So we'd outline, say, a half a dozen items that might be doable, some
might fall out, some might not, and then we began the writing process.
The writing process was, "How about if we open the sketch in the
bathroom and he's shaving?""No, no, we did shaving," or somebody shaved last night. "No, let's have
the guys in their offices and they're talking to each other, and we'll
intercut guy to guy to guy to guy.""Okay. All right."So Sid says, and then you start throwing lines and lines, and if Sid
liked the joke, he would say, "Put that down," to Mike [Mike
Stewart].
-
COLLINGS
- So when you were pitching the very early ideas, Sid would be a part of
that, too?
-
GELBART
- Absolutely. If he didn't like it, he pretended he was at a machine gun,
and he would go [sound of machine gun]. He would shoot the joke down,
which is hard to do when you've got your pants off.Then bit by bit by bit the sketch would build, you know, and between
Monday and Wed— We worked till six o'clock. We went home at six. Sid
would sometimes like us to stay a little longer, but that was it, six
o'clock. Then we would work until Wednesday. By Wednesday it had to be
finished because sets had to be built, orchestrations had to be created,
if necessary, and you had to rehearse it. So on Thursday, they went
into— Sid had what seemed like an entire floor in this building. There
was reception, of course, then there was the writers' room, then maybe a
couple little rooms, and then the large rehearsal room. Then if you went
up some stairs, you went up to his office, which was very Caesarian, as
things tended to be with him, and that was it. But there was no— Other
than the star that he was getting the star treatment, Carl didn't have
an office, Howie Morris didn't, Nanette Fabray, none of the people did.
Writers didn't have individual offices. We had the room.So on Thursday the cast would get up on its feet and the director would
be there, the camera director. Nobody directed Sid and the actors in
terms of performance, and they would run the show. I don't even think we
had a table reading. I think it was just they just got up and did it
with the scripts in their hands. It was very little time. If there was a
piano pantomime or something, Sid, when it came to that part of the
program, he would do that.We would be making notes. "This felt a little weak. Maybe we can cut from
here to here. Do we really need that?""No, what we really need is a new this."Then we would go back in the room, the writers would, and start thinking
about other stuff for the next week or fixing up what we just saw. That
was Thursday. Friday was the same. Saturday, we'd be in the theater, and
Sid would not work on stage. He had a very gifted comedian named Milt
Kamen, K-a-m-e-n, standing in for him, and Milt would walk through the
show.Milton Berle used to do that, and one time he stopped the rehearsal and
said to his stand-in, "No, no, you're doing it all wrong."The guy said, "I'm not going to be doing it. You do it right." [laughs]The writers would be there in the house, making notes, whatever,
whatever, whatever, and then we would have an audience in for a dress
rehearsal. Then we would all assemble, "we all," the writers, Sid. Carl
and I would probably give Sid the notes. Now, that's really putting your
head in the lion's mouth when you had to give Sid his notes. This is
like a runaway train.
-
COLLINGS
- Tweaking his thing.
-
GELBART
- Tweaking his thing, saying, "You know, you're not doing that quite
right. Let's cut that. I love it, but it's hurting that.""Okay."I got the unenviable/enviable job of talking to Sid.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, you did? How did you get that?
-
GELBART
- They elected me, "You do it." [laughs] I guess really how did I get that
is while I was the newest of the veterans to be working with Sid, I had
been around a long time, you know, and it was either a bedside manner or
a dressing room manner, whatever it was, I'm able to do it, because by
and large, you know, you cull your own criticism. You're not going in
there and nitpicking, and the best of the comedians knows you're trying
to be helpful, and that there's no ego and there's no— This is really
direction, and Sid took it. The best of them do.So then they go out and do the show. Sometimes we'd watch the show at
home. Sometimes we'd be in the theater. A lot of comedians liked their
writers in the theater because they liked the writers to start the
laughter, because there were no laugh tracks here, there was no
sweetening, mechanical.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, they didn't have signs telling people to start?
-
GELBART
- Applause, but never to laugh, never to laugh, or an announcer saying,
"Laugh." The announcer was Hugh Downs, who later went on to have a big
career as a kind of eminence in television, but he was just a guy
standing there with one hand cupping an ear, saying, "Live from New
York." And live then meant live. It didn't mean live on tape. It didn't
mean partially live. It didn't mean this once was live. This was live
live. An hour and a half or an hour, an hour show took one hour. That's
all. And you know, that was another art, timing the show, allowing
enough time for laughter, sometimes allowing too much time for laughter
that never came. Sometimes on air, you'd say, "We've got to cut this.
We've got to cut that." It was adrenaline-making.Then Sid would come back to the dressing room, and he would have a
tumbler waiting for him, a water glass, a large glass filled with
Scotch, totally filled with Scotch, no ice cubes, no twists of
anything.
-
COLLINGS
- This is for after the show.
-
GELBART
- This is for after the show. "This is for me. I did all this for you. Now
this is for me." And he would down that drink, and there would be a
sandwich waiting him, but I mean a sandwich. There was a Sherpa on top.
It was huge, from one of the nearby delis. He would eat that, wash it
down with this slug, and then vomit.
-
COLLINGS
- Really?
-
GELBART
- He put out so much, he had taken so much in, there was lots he had to
let go of.
-
COLLINGS
- Wow.
-
GELBART
- I mean, it was—
-
COLLINGS
- That's amazing.
-
GELBART
- —incredible, yes. It was incredible, the expenditure of all kinds of
energy.Then we'd all go to a restaurant called Danny's Hideaway, which was a
very popular place with celebrities in New York in those years.
Upstairs, Sid would rent the entire upstairs, and there would be more
drinking, more red-meat eating, more "That was funny when you this, and
that was funny when you that," a postmortem, but very good-natured, and
he was very generous. I mean, the stuff really flowed.Then Sunday you'd get the phone calls, "I liked this. I didn't like that.
Why did you do that? That sketch was too long. That was hysterical. That
was this," from your friends, from your family, to each other.And then Monday morning, "Well, what are we going to do?" Thirty-nine
times.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you ever wake up Monday saying, "You know, I don't feel very funny
today"?
-
GELBART
- That's okay, because other people would be funny.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. So it kind of evened out that way?
-
GELBART
- Yes, in a room— Let's see. There was Sid. There was Carl. Howie would
normally be in there, the late Howie, unfortunately, now as we speak.
Mel Tolkin, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, me, Sheldon Keller, Gary Belkin,
Mike Stewart, so that's ten people, right, and Sid's brother Dave, who
rarely spoke, but was a darling man. So if you weren't particularly on
your game, someone out of the eleven people would be, or three or four
or five of them.
-
COLLINGS
- So did shows tend to sort of organically shift from one writer to
another in terms of where the spark really came from for that week?
-
GELBART
- It might, it might, it might. But different writers had different
specialties. Mel Brooks never, never really said a funny line. Mel never
just made a joke, pitched a joke. Mel, it's a rare talent that he has,
could get up and do maybe three or four or five minutes, all connected,
all working, all complete, but all coming from some place in him that no
one else has inside them.
-
COLLINGS
- So was it fun?
-
GELBART
- It was fun. It was torture. It was everything in between.
-
COLLINGS
- So after the thirty-nine shows, you didn't even consider renewing, is
that right?
-
GELBART
- No, I did. I did two seasons, so what is that, seventy-eight? No. No. I
didn't consider it because I think there was a dispute at the end about
next year's money. I remember getting angry, and I remember saying to
his representative, "Take a look at the phone number that you're calling
me from. That's what I want next time every week, those six numbers,
seven numbers." [laughs]But then I did come back and do two specials with him. He called me a
couple years later and he said that he was going to do two specials,
they were called, hour-long revues for Chevrolet, and he said, "Will you
do them? Will you be responsible for the writing?"I said, "But without everybody, Sid. I can't do the room anymore. I still
haven't gotten the cigars out of my clothes. I can't go back in the room
like that again. I love everybody, but—."So he said, "Okay. I'll write it with you, you and me."I said, "Okay, terrific." You know this story?
-
COLLINGS
- No, no.
-
GELBART
- Do you want to go back?
-
COLLINGS
- Was the room, sort of the energy of the room, an important thing for his
show?
-
GELBART
- Oh, sure, that energy. Well, first of all, there's his energy, and his
is the kind of energy that a dynamo has even when it's running very low,
or you know what I'm saying, even when it's not on full power.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, it's just kind of idling along.
-
GELBART
- It's just the strength of him. That's right.
-
COLLINGS
- And it's just there.
-
GELBART
- You're also talking about at least a half a dozen very high-powered
energy-type energized people. So that, those, combined with the time
factor, you've got to get it, you've got to get it, you've got to—
There's no, "What if we don't get it?" There's, "When are we going to
get it? And if we don't get it, let's start on something that's wrong
but that might kick us into something that's right." Yes, the energy.
That's why Sunday was—
-
COLLINGS
- Did he always work like that, with sort of this intense crew in a room
cooking the show all week?
-
GELBART
- Sure, sure.
-
COLLINGS
- Was that his method?
-
GELBART
- Well, he had been, a vital part of Your Show of
Shows. The linchpin there was Max Leibman, who was a very, very
experienced writer, producer, director, and he created the atmosphere
where people just came up with it, came up with it, came up with it. Show of Shows was far more remarkable than Caesar's Hour. They did, for I don't know how
many years, thirty-nine per year entire revues, sketches, monologues,
musical comedy, dance, ballet, modern dance, and classical music.
Incredible.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, vaudeville in a box, I think you said about something else.
-
GELBART
- When vaudeville died, television was the box they put it in. But Max had
had his training in the Mountains.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, in the Catskills?
-
GELBART
- In the Catskills, and he was used to putting on live shows. But nobody
ever put on thirty-nine in a row, in a row, with the manpower, the
womanpower, the thinking power. Incredible.
-
COLLINGS
- Actually, that reminds me of something else that you had said. Oh yes.
You said to Sid Caesar, "I wanted to write for the comedians who didn't
come out of movies and radios and was a pure television performer." I
was wondering why—
-
GELBART
- I said that?
-
COLLINGS
- It's in something.
-
GELBART
- Okay. I guess I said it. The nicest thing—
-
COLLINGS
- I don't know. If you did say it, what—
-
GELBART
- No, no. I'll take credit for it. You know that nice Bob Hope thing that
happened?
-
COLLINGS
- Which one?
-
GELBART
- The oil wells?
-
COLLINGS
- What do you mean?
-
GELBART
- Sid got a telegram from Bob Hope, just a gratuitous one out of the blue.
Because I'd left Bob and come to New York and done a couple of years,
and then I went to work for Sid. Sid got this telegram, he showed it to
me, it said, "Will trade you two oil wells for Larry Gelbart," which was
really nice, really nice.
-
COLLINGS
- Wow. Yes. Did he think about it? [mutual laughter]
-
GELBART
- No. No, he knew he got the best deal, because oil wells go dry.Energy, energy, energy. No? Are we past energy?
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, no, you can talk about energy.
-
GELBART
- No, no, no, no, no. I don't know what more to say. He just had some very
energetic— Well, look, if you're talking about energy, I'm still active.
Mel Brooks came up with that show [The
Producers], which is an amazing success. Neil Simon is still
working. Carl Reiner is always doing this book, the next book, the one
after that. Woody [Allen], of course, keeps turning out movie after
movie after movie. Only Sid, strangely, has been forced to slow up, but
that's physical.
-
COLLINGS
- Isn't he quite old, though?
-
GELBART
- Well—
-
COLLINGS
- But even before that?
-
GELBART
- He's eighty, Sid's eighty or eighty-one, but he got laid low by bad
backs, bad knees. Sid needs a walker. He's not in very good shape. But
those who are physically fit are still turning it out, pounding it out.
So I guess we had what we have now, plus what we didn't have then all
these years in between.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, it was also a very energized period, too. It was after the war
and—
-
GELBART
- Exactly.
-
COLLINGS
- —the economy is expanding.
-
GELBART
- Exactly, exactly, exactly.
-
COLLINGS
- The advertising business is booming.
-
GELBART
- And the industry is new, and that energizes you because—
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- And New York. New York is a Duracell metropolis. I mean, you're just
alive there, or you're dead.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. The United States is the king of the world.
-
GELBART
- Well, we did have the nuclear threat. That sort of hung over us. But we
had a desk to hide under, so how could that hurt us?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, you had "duck and cover," no problem.
-
GELBART
- Yes, right, right. [mutual laughter]
-
COLLINGS
- What about the blacklist? I mean, talking about the fifties, I know you
weren't blacklisted or anything, but—
-
GELBART
- I wasn't. The blacklist worked in New York, too. There was a writer that
was on The Red Buttons Show who had been
blacklisted. His name was Sam Locke, and I don't remember how it came
about that he was allowed to continue working on it, but he was
definitely— Didn't we talk about the blacklist last time?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- At all?
-
COLLINGS
- Maybe just mentioned it in passing or something.
-
GELBART
- My wife was in a Broadway show, in the original production of The Pajama Game with an actor named Stanley
Prager, and Stanley was called downtown to appear before some committee,
and somebody said to George Abbott, the producer, "Are you going to fire
him?"He said, "Hell, no. I just want him at night at eight-thirty." There were
some sensible people.
-
COLLINGS
- But it didn't operate quite the same way in the theater world?
-
GELBART
- No. But it was there. It was definitely there. had a firsthand
experience with it on A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum. Did I tell you this? Jerome Robbins?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, Jerome Robbins had named the wife of—
-
GELBART
- Jack Gilford's wife.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, and ruined her career.
-
GELBART
- Ended it.
-
COLLINGS
- Ended it.
-
GELBART
- Yes. But I remember, I may not have told you, when Hal Prince, the
producer of Forum, said to Zero [Mostel], "Will
you work with Jerome Robbins?"And Zero said, "The Left doesn't boycott," which was a great line. Then
he said, "Do I have to have coffee with him?"
-
COLLINGS
- Well, that's a different question, isn't it? [mutual laughter]
-
GELBART
- A little less grand. That's not on the statue.
-
COLLINGS
- Would you like to break now?
-
GELBART
- Sure.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay.[tape recorder off]
-
GELBART
- Regarding the atmosphere in the room, we who know it, we who experience
it, or anybody who experiences a very particular set of circumstances,
always finds it hard to explain that experience to someone else.
-
COLLINGS
- Sure.
-
GELBART
- In 19— I don't know the date, but about six or seven years ago, maybe
more, it generally turns out to be that way. What I think is last week
it will turn out to be 10 years ago. There is a tape, PBS has a tape, of
a show called Caesar's Writers. We assembled at
the Writers Guild of America on Doheny in our theater, and we had a
seminar which included all of the writers that we're talking about, as
well as Sid and Carl. Someone at the last moment thought, "What a good
idea to tape this," and it was a good idea. If you see this show, you
get a real sense of how it was in the room, the electricity. I may have
sent one over to UCLA, I'm not sure.
-
COLLINGS
- I'll take a look.
-
GELBART
- The connectedness, the what's often described as a feeling of almost a
jazz band, of people bouncing off one another, picking up a note, or in
this case a word, and everyone is totally in character. I mean Mel is
Mel. I know I'm stuck with being me. It's the only thing I know more so
than— Although Laughter on the 23rd Floor was a
damned good job of fictionalizing this factual experience. But here are
the real people being their real selves, and it's very much what the
room was like.
-
COLLINGS
- Have you ever had an experience like that since then, or was this
unique?
-
GELBART
- It was unique to be able to record.
-
COLLINGS
- No, the writing room, that intense writing room.
-
GELBART
- Oh, the writing room, have I ever had an experience that way?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Well, it's hard when you work at home. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- So you never gravitated back to that kind of thing ever again?
-
GELBART
- No, no, no. Once you do a considerable amount of work yourself, as much
as you're allowed to do in the city without people giving you notes,
it's very hard to go back into that. I think part of it has to do with
where you are in life and in terms of experience.
-
COLLINGS
- Age.
-
GELBART
- Age, certainly. That's it.
-
COLLINGS
- This is a very mundane question, but when the show was being shot live,
would they cut away to live performances of the commercials?
-
GELBART
- Oh, that's interesting. Yes, that has happened. That would have
happened.
-
COLLINGS
- That is how they did it.
-
GELBART
- I think so. There might have been prepared ones so that they were
perfectly what they wanted. I know there were many, many live
performances of a commercial.
-
COLLINGS
- Because if the commercials were live, they could kind of pick up a
little flavor of the—
-
GELBART
- The show.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Well, certainly. Yes, but they might not have been done in the same
studio.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I see.
-
GELBART
- They might have been done next door.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay.
-
GELBART
- I remember on The Red Buttons Show, which was
sponsored by Maxwell House Coffee, that Red held a cup with some instant
powder in the cup, and someone poured hot water in there, or poured a
cup of coffee. In any case, the cup cracked and broke. Right on
camera.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, my gosh.
-
GELBART
- So you can imagine. The longest recorded laugh in radio is the one that
happened on the Fred Allen Show.
-
COLLINGS
- Which is what?
-
GELBART
- Which is when he was interviewing someone who had a trained eagle with
him, or just an eagle with him, and he was talking about the eagle and
what he does and so forth, and the bird took off and circled the
audience and did what eagles do on several members of the audience.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, my gosh. The good old days of live radio and TV.
-
GELBART
- Right. You heard it here.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, you heard it here.
-
GELBART
- Remember SPERDVAC. That's the radio guys, in case you ever—
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, oh, yes. Okay. Yes.
-
GELBART
- S-P-E-R-D-E-V-A-C, something like that. They're on the Internet. Of
course, Google them.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I will.[End of July 12, 2005 interview]
1.7. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE
September 28, 2005
-
COLLINGS
- This is Jane Collings interviewing Larry Gelbart on September 28th,
2005. This is tape five, side one.Good morning, Larry.
-
GELBART
- Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
-
COLLINGS
- We ended up talking— Last time we sort of finished up your time in New
York.
-
GELBART
- Okay.
-
COLLINGS
- Unless you felt like there was something you wanted to add to that.
-
GELBART
- I have no memory of what we said.
-
COLLINGS
- We were talking about working on Caesar's
Hour.
-
GELBART
- We probably— It's such a lingering sort of memory that we'd probably
return to it when we're in another city or another time.
-
COLLINGS
- Sure. And you head off to London on the Queen
Mary.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- I've got a picture of the Queen Mary here for
you, just for fun.
-
GELBART
- Oh, my gosh. It was wonderful.
-
COLLINGS
- I was just wondering what it was like to—
-
GELBART
- Well, for me it was interesting because many years before, I'd gone over
on the Queen Elizabeth when I worked with Bob
Hope, so I had the privilege of being on both Queens, not that they were that much different, but just this was
nothing I would ever have dreamt I would ever do in my lifetime. So this
time— Did I tell you the whole getting there? Did I talk about coming
out here for Gary's Bar Mitzvah?
-
COLLINGS
- No, no, none of it, not at all.
-
GELBART
- Oh, so we're just on the ship when we left. Well, how we got to the ship
was this. There was going to be a West End production of Forum in London, of course, and we were living
at the farm. My stepson Gary [Markowitz] turned thirteen and had been
preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, which was going to happen in California,
because his father lived here and for a lot of reasons it was thought
that we would do it here. So knowing I was coming to California, I made
an arrangement with— I had been approached by Danny Kaye, who was going
to begin his series. Did we talk about that at all?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- CBS wanted to know if I'd be interested in working on the series, and I
said, "No, I wouldn't be," because for a lot of reasons, but I said I
was going to be in California for a limited number of weeks, and I could
work on the first one or two shows. So we made the kind of arrangement
where prior to coming to California, I spent about four weeks outlining
what I thought would be possible character situations. It was a variety
show, re-doable segments, departments, so to speak, for this one-hour
variety show. Then when I got to California, I actually spent four weeks
in the writing room.So we set off from New York, my wife, the five children, the youngest of
which was Becky, who graduated with honors from UCLA.
-
COLLINGS
- Just recently?
-
GELBART
- Not that recently. She's forty-two, I think, now.Anyway, to go from the little town of Ghent, New York, to California,
there was no way we were all going to get on an airplane, and we
were—
-
COLLINGS
- Why was that?
-
GELBART
- Well, we had our tickets for the Queen
Elizabeth. We were going to California for one month. I don't know
why. It was nothing like, "Oh, let's not all go on the same plane,"
because we'd never been like that.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Just wondering.
-
GELBART
- No. But I don't know why we did it. But here's the picture. We have to
go from Ghent, about a thirty-five-minute ride to Albany for the train,
for the train that would take us first to Chicago, and then you always
had to change trains in Chicago and with about a four- or five-hour
layover, and then you would take the other train, the second train, to
Los Angeles.So there we are, five children, the youngest of whom is Becky, she's
eight weeks old, she's on formula, so there's ice chests and what have
you, and forty-five pieces of baggage and two steamer trunks. It's the
first time and only time in my life I was charged overweight at a train
terminal. You can only imagine what it would have been had we flown. It
was really staggeringly crazy.But we got to California, I did my work, then we got on the train again,
went back the other way, spent one night in a motel on the West Side,
and then got over to the ship and hired—you could do that; I'm sure you
could still do that—a nurse to look after Becky, and not a governess, an
actual nurse, to sit with Becky, who wasn't old enough yet to put on
dinner diapers and sit at the captain's table with us.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you sit at the captain's table?
-
GELBART
- Once, yes. What made life comfortable—I think we must have covered
this—was the fact that I had for the first time in my life a show that
was running every week on Broadway; Forum, that
is.So we got to England. Now we can take it from wherever you want.
-
COLLINGS
- One thing I just wanted to ask you, which is not part of the chronology,
but you always seem to have been very involved with your family and the
kids and these cross-country trips with all the luggage and stuff. I
just wondered how you were able to kind of balance your writing life and
your work life with all of that. It's usually a question that women are
asked, but, I don't know, it's just like in your stories you always seem
to be mentioning the family, and I just thought I would ask.
-
GELBART
- They're the longest running show in my life, my family is, being in its
nearly fiftieth year, and you know you're much more involved with your
kids than you are with employers and co-workers. You put in more hours
with your family, if you're smart, and who is that at that age?But anyway, I think one of the things that helped was my early training,
primarily with Bob Hope, because that was always packing and unpacking
and writing under the most outrageous and disruptive kind of settings,
but you just learn to deliver, and I learned to deliver without warlike
situations going on, just because you have to— It's not that you have to
learn how to deal with your family, you have to just successfully kind
of shuffle these cards so that you're in the right place at the right
time.I know a man, a writer who lived in New York, and he was equally up to
his navel in family, and he fixed his attic as a studio where he worked.
He would have breakfast with his children, then put on his hat, which
people wore in those days, pick up his briefcase and go out the front
door. Then, when they left for school a minute later, he would sneak
back into the house. Then, he went upstairs, so they never knew that Dad
was home all that time or he probably wouldn't have gotten those private
moments.But, you know, I think people who do what I do, and there are a lot of
them, there's a lot of work that goes on consciously when you're with
your kids, and probably even a good deal more unconsciously, so that
you're present and you're attentive, but some part of you is working
anyway.
-
COLLINGS
- Do you think that you got material for your writing from your family
life?
-
GELBART
- I got plant food. I don't know. I can't point to any— I got a lot of
anecdotes, but I don't remember ever employing actual situations. In
fact, I rather resist those, because, for me, it's enough to live them.
I don't have to write them and then relive them.
-
COLLINGS
- Relive them over and over.
-
GELBART
- Or have somebody say, "You got that wrong." Anyway.
-
COLLINGS
- So we didn't talk about how you got involved in the Forum project. Something I read, you had said that it was the
work that you were most pleased with. I can't think when you wrote that
or if you would still stand by that.
-
GELBART
- I wrote— I became involved. When I first came to New York to work on the
Red Buttons Show, did we do all that?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Okay. There was a director on that show, the director of that show was a
man named Burt, B-u-r-t, Shevelove. You've maybe seen that name.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- I always say B-u-r-t, or whenever I say it, I remember that he was
always upset when people spelled it B-e-r-t. We once both shared an
honor, a Christopher Award, a kind of a prestigious prize for something
we had done in television, and Burt sent a note to the organization
saying, "Remember, it's Burt, with a U." When his prize came it said
"Bert, B-e-r-t, Capital U, period. Shevelove." [laughs].I envied Burt because he was very, very smart, educated, highly educated,
very sophisticated. Years before we met at Brown University—he was about
ten years my senior or maybe a bit more—Burt had done a— He always had
the notion that the comedies of Plautus could be adapted for a modern
audience along the lines of what eventually became Forum, and he did a college musical based on plays which he
selected for culling and expanding.He asked if I would be interested in writing a Broadway production based
on Plautus, and I didn't have a clue, did not have a clue what he meant.
But he was very charismatic and endlessly entertaining, and he also
enlisted Stephen Sondheim to work on the score. It was the first for
Steve. He had only done lyrics then, so he would do both. And Steve
didn't know much more about what Burt was talking about than I did, but
over a period of time, I began to get it, I began to get the assignment.
That was in, the late fifties, and we worked on the show for five years,
and it was a tough, tough— First it was a tough job realizing it as Burt
had envisioned it, and maybe some changes took place where he began to
see the students catching up with the teacher, but it became an even
harder sell because a one-set musical with a limited number of people in
it, not a big chorus line for those days, and smacking of the classics,
you know, togas, wreaths, kitons— People didn't really appreciate for a
long time how broad it was, how vulgar in the best sense it was. Time magazine called it a "good clean dirty
show".But it was really, really an education. I've said it before and I just
know that it taught me so much about writing something that lasted more
than twelve minutes or more than twenty minutes and plot. It is a cat's
cradle in terms of plot, a Rubik's cube, really. So it was educational,
it was profitable, and eventually became very prideful. How many people
still do it? It's in its fourth decade, fifth, actually. I tell people
we used copper plumbing in building that show.
-
COLLINGS
- Excuse me, I'm not a student of third century Roman comedy, but—
-
GELBART
- Go ahead. Pre-Christian third century.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Well, Titus, T-i-t-u-s, Maccius, M-a-c-c-i-u-s, Plautus, P-l-a-u-t-u-s,
was the most famous. Terence was famous, of course, but Plautus was
famous for comedies. Borrowing techniques from the Greeks and inventing
a great deal of his own devices, he invented comedy, if one can be said
to invent an entertainment form. I mean, people have always laughed,
probably laughed before we spoke, you know, and then we cried.
-
COLLINGS
- That's a funny idea.
-
GELBART
- Yes. Well, it's easier to do that than to say, "Darling, I'm leaving
you." I started with "Pass the ketchup," then I got on to more important
matters. [mutual laughter]If you'll make a note, I'll give you a piece I wrote for the most recent
production in London of the piece, in which I discuss what Platus did
and what our assignment was. I know you'd rather have it oral.
-
COLLINGS
- No, that's okay.
-
GELBART
- But it's just for you to know. It was daunting, and finally, although we
never boasted about it because we didn't want to put audiences off, but
I mean, it really was quite a scholarly work.
-
COLLINGS
- What from the comedy of that period were you able to keep and what had
to be changed for the twentieth century sensibility?
-
GELBART
- Nothing. Nothing. I mean, two Romans meet on the street in a Plautine
play, and one says to the other, "How's your wife?"The other says, "Immortal."
-
COLLINGS
- Now, is that actually—
-
GELBART
- That's an actual joke.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, I actually have this written down specifically, because I thought
is this really from that time?
-
GELBART
- Yes, that's really from that time.
-
COLLINGS
- Because that sounds so fifties.
-
GELBART
- Yes, of course. Because what changes? Marriage doesn't change. Men and
women don't change. Relationships don't change. They can be stretched,
stressed, strained, advanced, retarded, but basically it's somebody
getting along — or not— with somebody else.Steve used— You may have this down there, too, I don't know. But Steve
used an actual— We didn't use that joke, but Steve used an actual phrase
that's spoken by the braggart warrior in an old Plautus play, and we
used it, too. He used it lyrically where the guy sings, "I am a parade."
When the audience laughed at that, they were laughing at a line that
they had laughed at twenty-five hundred years earlier.
-
COLLINGS
- Wow, that's astonishing.
-
GELBART
- There is really nothing new under the sun— or the spotlight.
-
COLLINGS
- It also shows you the continuity of our particular civilization with the
Roman civilization.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Because if you'd taken something from, what, third century B.C. and some
other culture—
-
GELBART
- Yes, Mesopotamia.
-
COLLINGS
- —it might not have.
-
GELBART
- Exactly, exactly.
-
COLLINGS
- Actually, here's some of the lines from one of the opening.
-
GELBART
- From Comedy Tonight.
-
COLLINGS
-
Comedy Tonight, exactly. The reason I Xeroxed it
was because there's such a mix of themes, and it actually sort of
reminded me of, looking ahead, M*A*S*H, the way
M*A*S*H is.
-
GELBART
- Yes. You could look at anything I've done after this and see this in it.
In "The Wrong Box", definitely, yes. Well, it just talks about every
universal, timeless stupidity, cupidity, and, of course, like the best
social comment, everybody in the United States you're talking about
somebody else.
-
COLLINGS
- What was it like working with Stephen Sondheim, by the way?
-
GELBART
- Not pleasant, and he's the first to admit it. He was very young. When
the first production opened in May of 1962, nobody made much of a fuss
about the score at all or they didn't make that much of a fuss about the
book, to some degree. It was the Zero Mostel show. Then in '72, we had
revival, and without Zero Mostel's looming presence, people said, "Oh,
what a great book. What an astonishing book." Now, when it's played
anywhere, it's the Stephen Sondheim musical, because his fame has
increased so in the forty-year— plus interval.Usually, the problem with Forum as a musical is
that it works without the score. It's like a Marx Brothers movie, which
used to have musical relief rather than serious pieces which have comic
relief. Forum had musical relief, and Steve knew
that his songs were just really not all that essential. They didn't move
the plot. They might celebrate a moment, but they were not what he
wanted his music to be, his songs to be, and he was quite right about
that. But he's very generous in attributing a lot of credit to Burt, who
was, himself, an accomplished lyricist. Often he cites as his two
influences Oscar Hammerstein III and Burt Shevelove. With a U.
-
COLLINGS
- Burt, U, Shevelove, okay, I'll remember that.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- How do you feel about the film adaptation of the—
-
GELBART
- "Forum?" Very, very negatively. It was a terrible adaptation. They felt
compelled, as screenwriters often do, to in some cases earn their
salary, and others say, "I can improve upon this." I thought it was a
mess. When they show it on television, they invariably cut off the first
half hour in which all the exposition is laid out. So I don't know what
anybody coming to this show as a television show even thinks is
happening, can't imagine what's happening.
-
COLLINGS
- Now the title itself is something entirely contemporary, I'm
assuming.
-
GELBART
- That was Burt again. We worked on it for years with the working title,
A Roman Comedy. We didn't know what to call
it, and then Burt came up with this title one day because "A funny thing
happened" is a stock comedy line. I don't know if I told you Arthur
Leow, Jr., an old friend of mine and a very nice, nice, nice man, he
wanted to become a comedian, even though he was heir to the Leow
fortunes, the movie Leows, the MGM Leows, L-e-o-w-s. But he wanted to be
a comedian, and on one occasion he worked a flood benefit. Some things
just never stop, do they?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- In upstate California, there was a terrible flood, houses, everything
washed away, and Arthur's opening line was, "A funny thing happened to
the theater on its way to me tonight." But I think the musical kept the
phrase alive, because you see it used all the time now.
-
COLLINGS
- So it sounds like up to this point, your really seminal experiences
were, of course, Duffy's, which was like the
first one.
-
GELBART
-
Duffy's, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Bob Hope.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
-
Caesar's Hour.
-
GELBART
- No, Caesar— Yes, Caesar's
Hour. Right, I'm sorry.
-
COLLINGS
- And this. Those were kind of the main—
-
GELBART
- The peaks.
-
COLLINGS
- The peaks when you were really learning.
-
GELBART
- Right. Yes, and to this day, if anybody says, "What did you learn?" I
wouldn't be able to tell them, but I know whatever it was that I did
works in whatever I'm working on.
-
COLLINGS
- I was kind of struck by what you said when you were talking about coming
back to California for the Bar Mitzvah, and you said, "So I worked in
the room," the writing room, and it just seems like the writing room,
the atmosphere of the writing room is really important to you.
-
GELBART
- It was. It was.
-
COLLINGS
- I've got something from your files where you're talking about the Marty Feldman Show.
-
GELBART
- Oh, right.
-
COLLINGS
- You're writing to somebody and you're saying— You're writing to Lew
Grade, Sir Lew Grade.
-
GELBART
- Sir Lew.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. You're saying, "Contributing writers certainly, but a great number
of bodies all sitting in a room together and pitching material endlessly
is an absolute must."
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- So that sounds like a very important creative setting for you.
-
GELBART
- Yes, depending on the project. Yes, sure.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. So you also worked on—
-
GELBART
- I must have been asking him to bring some writers over, rather than just
having them send the material.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, you were saying that it's really hard to find like a really good
pool of writers. That's fine to pick up people here and there, but you
wanted to get a good stable of writers.
-
GELBART
- Yes. Grade accommodated us.
-
COLLINGS
- So what about The
Wrong Box? That's something you worked on with
Burt, U, Shevelove also.
-
GELBART
- A man named John Fernley, F-e-a-r-n-l-e-y, a friend of Burt's, but I
knew him as well, he worked for Richard Rodgers the composer, and he
said to Burt one night, "You know what you guys should do next?"
(Meaning after Forum.) You should do a movie based on The Wrong Box." Burt didn't know it, which surprised me,
because I thought he knew everything that had ever been printed.We got a copy of it and read it, and agreed that it was indeed the basis
for a comedy. It's written by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne,
with a U. Osbourne was Stevenson's nineteen-year-old stepson. He had
written a draft of a book called The Wrong Box,
and he showed it to the old man and he said, "You got any ideas about
this? Any notes?" So the guy wrote it— "The guy." Stevenson read it and
wound up collaborating. I guess he had a lot of notes. So Burt and I
wrote a screen adaptation. Burt wanted to call this one When Anti-disestablishmentarianism Was in
Flower.
-
COLLINGS
- That's a funny title.
-
GELBART
- Yes, but we thought The Wrong Box would fit on a
marquee a little more snugly.It didn't take long to write, and, again, our Forum training helped because it's got a lot of characters and
each of those characters has his own relationships, and then, of course,
the fun is in the confluence of all of these people, characters, and
situations coming together.We went to Columbia Pictures. They interested Bryan Forbes, who was a hot
director then. That created a bit of a problem, because Bryan wanted to
work with his wife in the film, and she was older and, shall we say, not
as comely as the part as written by Stevenson and Osbourne and the two
of us.
-
COLLINGS
- For the daughter?
-
GELBART
- Yes. And that meant we had to cast the leading man older. We had
originally thought of someone like Michael Crawford, who had been Hero
in the motion picture version of Forum. This is
pre-pre-pre-Phantom [of
the Opera], obviously. But we had to go to Michael Caine, who
was wonderful.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, he was.
-
GELBART
- Terrific, but a bit older, and so that got the whole piece a bit skewed
because this was really a battle of the innocence versus the—
-
COLLINGS
- But it sort of made it look as if she'd been in isolation for a rather
long time.
-
GELBART
- That, too.The show was a wonderful experience for me because I got to work with
some remarkable actors. I mean who would ever dream I would be standing
on the set with Sir Ralph Richardson and he's asking, "May I change this
maybe to a perhaps?"
He said, "It fits a little more trippingly on the tongue." And a host, a
host, of British people, many of whom I never ever heard of because
there was such local favorites, and not least of all Peter Sellers, who
did two scenes in the movie which are probably as good as anything he
ever did in any movies.The picture was not that well received in England. I think they're very
possessive of their literary rights, and two Yanks futzing around with
their authors, I don't think sat very well. But it was much better
received critically here. But of course, in typical Hollywood studio
bookkeeping tradition, Burt and I deferred some of our payment, and the
movie still hasn't broken even forty years on.But that was a good experience, a really good experience. What soured it
a bit was something that no one could have foreseen. Burt and I had a
private falling-out, and that took place during the filming of that
movie, which makes it a sad sort of asterisk. It's a droopy asterisk, if
somebody can come up with an icon for that.
-
COLLINGS
- Because it was the end of the working relationship.
-
GELBART
- It was the end of the work, and personal. It was so funny, Burt
Shevelove, Burt— I want to say "with a U" every time now. Burt with a me
and Steve, we said— No, Burt and I said, "What do we next after Forum?" And we both agreed that what might make
an interesting play was one that dealt with a couple of authors who had
a very successful show and then reunited a year later, or tried to, to
write another piece and found out that they really couldn't really stand
each other. And sure enough, that's what happened to us. We didn't have
to write it; we lived it. Not that we didn't stand each other, we
just—
-
COLLINGS
- Just the chemistry just wasn't there.
-
GELBART
- No, it wasn't chemistry. I had done something very destructive, and he
helped me, and so we blew the partnership out of the water.
-
COLLINGS
- So Marty Feldman. Do you want to talk a little bit about the
comedies?
-
GELBART
- Sure.
-
COLLINGS
- You're living in England.
-
GELBART
- I'm living in England.
-
COLLINGS
- There you are in England.
-
GELBART
- I'm not doing much of anything.
-
COLLINGS
- So you get over there, and I was just wondering if you could just
remember anything. You were over there and it was like mod, mod England
at the time.
-
GELBART
- It was fabulous.
-
COLLINGS
- What was it like to live over there at that time?
-
GELBART
- Well, if I ever get around to doing half the things I would like to do,
I'd like to write a film about that period, because it was sensational.
There were a lot of expats there, some because they'd been blacklisted
in America, some because they wanted people to think they'd been
blacklisted in America.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Well, Yes, there was a certain—
-
COLLINGS
- What an interesting phenomenon.
-
GELBART
- There was that phenomenon called subpoena envy, you know.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's so funny.
-
GELBART
- Not mine, but it's very apt.It was a wonderful time. We lived in Knightsbridge first for about a
year, and then we moved to an area called Highgate, which is right near
Hampstead, and we had a wide circle— Several wide circles, one the other
Americans that were there, and even more refreshing in a way, English
people with no connection to the business.We stayed in the UK for almost nine years. I didn't do much work there. I
was certainly not the first person anybody was going to call any more
than English people get calls here from American companies. I don't know
what I did.
-
COLLINGS
- You watched TV.
-
GELBART
- I watched TV. I watched TV, because it really was watchable and
listenable, given the appreciation of the language which they have. I
even read newspapers for the same reason.I came back here on a couple of occasions and wrote pilots for rent money
and put it in my suitcase and came back to England with it. But the
first real employment was Marty Feldman. An American company, headed by
producer Greg Garrison, who just died, but then I could say that about
almost everybody I know all too often, they came over there and—
-
COLLINGS
- Here's a picture of Marty Feldman, if you need to refresh your
memory.
-
GELBART
- I first met Marty Feldman— He needs no refreshing. Somebody once said,
"I sneaked up on Marty Feldman. I walked right straight up to him."
Marty was a comedy writer, with a partner named Barry Took,
T-double-o-k. They did some work for Frankie Howerd.Oh, my god. Are you going to leave these?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, you can have those, sure.
-
GELBART
- Okay. Marty Feldman—Marty wrote for Frankie Howerd, with an E, Howerd with an E, very famous
British comedian, who starred in Forum in London
and also did some radio work, and Marty worked for him. I met him that
way, and we were friends for many, many, many years, because he
eventually moved back here. Marty had been in a BBC television show
called At Last in 1941 Show, with John Cleese
and some of the other future Pythonites, or Pythons [Monty Python's Flying Circus]. He was a good writer, a good
comedy writer, and of course he had this bizarre face, which led him to
performing.How it became the Marty Feldman show is a little bit tortured, and I
don't know, boring, I think, but we did thirteen one-hour shows financed
by Lew Grade in London for ITV and co-financed by the American
Broadcasting Company here. We did thirteen, I think, very original
shows. A compilation of them won a rather prestigious award in
Switzerland called the Montreaux Rose [Rose d'Or].I think you know I imported Barry Levinson and Rudy De Luca as writers
from here, a fellow named Shelly Keller.
-
COLLINGS
- You wanted to have an American face in each show, too, right?
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- You wanted to sort of pitch it to an American audience in that way?
-
GELBART
- Yes, you're right. I remember. So we'd have a guest such as—and I just
saw her name in the paper in connection with Don Adams' death—Barbara
Feldon. She did a show. Groucho Marx did a show. Orson Welles did a
show.I think the highlight of my life, absolutely, and if I ever have to fill
in a questionnaire, whichever gate I'm in front of, the hot one or the
cold one, we had Orson Welles on the show, but this was Orson Welles in
his "Give me a check and I'll say anything or do anything" days.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, at least it's clear what the ground rules are.
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes, that's right. It said, "whore" right over his door.But anyway, there was a scene he was in, sitting down, of course, and he
was getting it wrong. He was getting the line wrong. So I said, "I
wonder if you could maybe get a little more—."He said, "Give me a reading." Now, you know that's something you're never
supposed to do with an actor. You give an actor a reading, and they say,
"What am I, a parrot?" "What am I, a ventriloquist's dummy?" "I'll say
the line. I'll interpret it." But he was so on the money and for the
money, he said, "Give me a reading." Well, that was as good as Cary
Grant saying to me once at an Oscar ceremony, "I love your tuxedo." So I
can die now.
-
COLLINGS
- Boy, now you've got two highlights.
-
GELBART
- Two, two highlights, one sartorial and one creative.So we did the shows. They were good. They were ambitious. They were
different. We talked Terry Gilliam into doing the credits for us and
even the odd spot. He was a little reluctant to do that because he felt
he owed his—and he did—his allegiance and his creativity to the Python
show, which was on at the same time. In fact, Eric Idle was one of our
original writers on the Feldman show, and he backed off, too, because it
was a little like them and not enough like them and whatever.
Interesting experience.
-
COLLINGS
- It sounds like it was fun.
-
GELBART
- It was fun, and Marty would do anything.
-
COLLINGS
- For some reason, it doesn't sound as tortured as the Caesar Hour.
-
GELBART
- Well, it wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't. No, it wasn't as tortured. It was
much— Well, Sid's show was very New York nervous.
-
COLLINGS
- That's what I'm thinking. I'm wondering if it has something to do with
the sort of the light kind of brittleness of English humor, versus that
dark undercurrent that you can find in American humor.
-
GELBART
- Yes, it did. Yes. Well, just look at the stars. Sid was a— I mean Marty
was no less complicated, but one was a kind of a clown, Marty, and Sid
was a— There was a broodiness. He was a brooder. But there's no question
which was the better one, which was the better show. It was certainly
Caesar's Hour.
-
COLLINGS
- Why do you think it was better?
-
GELBART
- Better written. I mean, Marty just couldn't take one step away from
getting out from behind his face. I mean, Marty was Marty, and there was
no losing that. Sid could cross his eyes, but he could uncross them. Or
Sid could be walleyed, and then he could knock the wall down.
-
COLLINGS
- He could do a lot of different things.
-
GELBART
- Marty was— They say somebody's a one-joke comic or a one-trick pony.
Marty was a one-face face, so you couldn't get much variety.
-
COLLINGS
- I'm going to flip this.
1.8. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO
September 28, 2005
-
GELBART
- Marty was a solid movie buff. He really loved the balletics, and tried
to emulate them as often as he could. There was one show we did near the
end of a brief series of thirteen where he broke his hand, and being a
very thoughtful person, the first thing I did was give him some brandy,
which means he couldn't have any pain injection for about four hours.
[laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, god.
-
GELBART
- I should be a second responder, never a first. [mutual laughter] I
should give second aid.But yes, he was very physical, and he's— I don't know all the
circumstances, but I don't believe he should have died in a hotel room.
He had a heart attack in Mexico City, and it was forty-five minutes
before a doctor got to him. So one thinks he probably should have gotten
a better break.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, certainly. That's terrible.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that's very sad.How did you as a writer deal with all of the physical comedy in the show?
I mean, was that something that you were—
-
GELBART
- You write business.
-
COLLINGS
- You wrote for those scenes as well?
-
GELBART
- Oh, sure. You worked out what they used to call gags. You stand here,
the building falls down, and you're in the opening and you don't get
touched on either side. You write that, sure, and Marty could, too,
which was wonderful.
-
COLLINGS
- Because I know how interested you are in language and plays on words and
things, but writing gags and sort of positioning people physically is
something that's also an important part of what you do?
-
GELBART
- I think so. There's a lot of it in M*A*S*H,
actually, a lot of business. I mean, you're obliged to, although I—
Woody Allen said that— St. Woody said that Groucho [Marx] is the only
American comedian who developed two styles, physical and verbal, the
walk and then, of course, his wit. But usually it's one or the other
with comedians.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that's what I think, yes. I don't have a particular question about
this particular scene, but I just Xeroxed it. It's called "Nude Love
Scenes," and it's about—
-
GELBART
- Was this in the Marty Feldman show?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. It's at the time when people are starting to do nude scenes, and
this is a takeoff of that.
-
GELBART
- Peter Starkers. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- Because it's discussing doing scenes—
-
GELBART
- I remember that, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- —fully clothed and how daring it is. I just thought it was really quite
sardonic and—
-
GELBART
- Good. I hope so.
-
COLLINGS
- Very droll and witty. So I enjoyed it and I Xeroxed it.
-
GELBART
- Thank you very much. I'll tell you an example of Marty's imagination and
the irony of someone being so visually distorted.
-
COLLINGS
- He has a thyroid condition, right?
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes. It was a failed operation.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, how terrible.
-
GELBART
- Yes, they weren't supposed to do that.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- But with that, he had this wonderful visual imagination. I guess I knew
at the time how we accomplished it, although I can't remember now. But
Marty envisioned this sketch, and we executed it successfully, wherein
he played a silent movie star being interviewed on a television show. Do
you know what I'm saying?
-
COLLINGS
- No, I haven't seen this one.
-
GELBART
- Everything on the show was in color, and he was in black and white. I
guess we shot him in another studio and put him in there, popped him in.
And not only was he in black and white, but he was kind of like—
-
COLLINGS
- Wavering, flickering.
-
GELBART
- —wavering like an old film, like an old lamp was flickering. It was
brilliant.I remember Peter Starkers. Thank you.
-
COLLINGS
- You're welcome.It really sounds like it must have been absolutely fantastic time to be
working in television, like there was a lot of freedom.
-
GELBART
- More.
-
COLLINGS
- More?
-
GELBART
- More freedom, more receptivity to different ideas. But now you can't say
there's not more freedom with cable, and you can't say that some
companies aren't very bold, but—
-
COLLINGS
- I guess I meant like freedom to do this sort of absurd kind of
off-the-cuff comedy, which—
-
GELBART
- In England, certainly. In England, certainly. I mean American shows were
much more earthbound. Show of Shows, good as it
was, was really vaudeville and the [Catskill] Mountains and opera and
dance, theater, all presented on the tube. The Bob
Hope (TV) Show was the Bob Hope radio show, but they really
did— Well, they did a lot of crap, too, when I think of it, but they're
more imaginative.
-
COLLINGS
- You have a really funny letter from Spike Milligan in your files.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- "Dear Larry, you will be hearing from my solicitor about this. If you
think you can bribe me to writing with crummy meals in renovated coal
cellars, you are wrong. Regards, Spike Milligan."
-
GELBART
- Oh, Spike came on the Marty Feldman show. He was a regular. 1971.
-
COLLINGS
- It's just a funny letter.
-
GELBART
- Yes. Well, of course, he came on and he was on the show and he was
funny, and for Marty to work with Spike Milligan would be the equivalent
of a young comic today working with Jack Benny. I mean, Spike was an
icon. He was one of the Crazy Gang. No, The Goons. The Goons with Peter
Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Michael Bentine and a guy named Harry
Secombe.Spike lost me, unfortunately, later on in a social situation, in which he
was so openly anti-Semitic, I almost hit him. I mean, he did kind of a
Fagan-ish thing. He said, "What are you back in England for some more
gelt?" Just terrible. And he was pretty mad, but fun until that, one
thing popped out. Spike Milligan.
-
COLLINGS
- So it sounds like you didn't get along that well with him.
-
GELBART
- No, we got along. We got along. He was fine. He was fine. He, too,
wanted the gelt. I mean, he, too. Like Orson Welles, I mean, here's a
very— The most iconoclastic comedian in England, and here's a chance to
pick up thirteen checks, which were generous, I believe, coming from an
American company as they did. That doesn't happen often, then, and not
everybody was Benny Hill with their own— Although Spike did have a
number of his own series.
-
COLLINGS
- So there you are over in England. What were you thinking that was going
to be the next chapter in your life? Were you thinking that you were
just going to stay there a while or was there a plan brewing?
-
GELBART
- There was a whim brewing. No, there was no plan. There was no plan. I've
never been one for thinking ahead, only making the present the most
entertaining I could.
-
COLLINGS
- So you liked it over there in England?
-
GELBART
- Oh, yes, I liked it very much. I liked it for a lot of reasons. I mean,
American was in turmoil, the Vietnam War was on, our sons would have
been drafted, or could have been drafted.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, how old were they at that time?
-
GELBART
- Old enough to register for— And did register at the US Embassy.
-
COLLINGS
- Were they protected by being in England?
-
GELBART
- Yes. They were members of— They were part of the draft board in
Washington, D.C., where many diplomats and other people are registered.
Anyway, they were.
-
COLLINGS
- So was that your primary reason for staying over there?
-
GELBART
- No, we didn't go over there— When we went over there, there was no—
-
COLLINGS
- No, but for staying?
-
GELBART
- We stayed, we continued, yes. We were just well set up there and we
liked it.
-
COLLINGS
- But the draft thing, was that a key reason?
-
GELBART
- That became a consideration, certainly, yes. Eventually, our three
oldest children came back to America, and we stayed there with the two
youngest, in case you can't do the math. I don't know how long we would
have stayed if M*A*S*H hadn't come up, but we
did stay.
-
COLLINGS
- When M*A*S*H does come along, that's something
that you write without a writing room, initially, isn't it?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Was that the first time?
-
GELBART
- No. No, I had done a lot of stuff. I had done a lot of stuff, the odd
things, without a writing room or a partner. I guess you could say it
was the first most important— I wrote a play while I was in England
called Jump, which was adored when I tried it
out in Nottingham. Why they liked it in Nottingham, I'll never know.
-
COLLINGS
- Interesting.
-
GELBART
- I brought it into London at the Queen's Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue
and they hated it. They said, "We don't know why this ever got to be a
success in America." Well, it never did because it never played in
America. But it was a very angry, funny play, funny.I did a number of other things while I was in England. I would do the odd
movie script or the odd rewrite. I remember being asked to punch up the
script that Terry Southern had written for Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr
called the Magic Christian.
-
COLLINGS
- So this was your first rewrite job then, is that right?
-
GELBART
- No, not my first. No, the first rewrite job started back in the Hope
days when his writing staff would take his movie scripts and ruin them.
And then there was Notorious Landlady, which was
a rewrite, essentially. No, I was used to that, but I was nobody's first
choice to do anything, as I just said, because I was the odd man out, or
one of the odd men out. I wrote a movie over there with a man that— I
just wrote about this on a— There's a website called Writer Action, and
I just finished a month of being asked questions in writing about
career. I'll send you a copy if you want that.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, please.
-
GELBART
- I'm going to print that out because the end of the month is nigh upon
us. So that's two things I have to send you, Forum and W.A.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- It's a movie called Not With My Wife You Don't,
and what's odd about that is the other writer listed, two other writers,
one is Norman Panama, who was the producer, director, and the other is
Peter Barnes, who became a very, very prestigious author in England. His
best play was The Ruling Class with Peter
O'Toole. Fabulous writer.I did the odd things, and then, as I said, I would come back here. I
wrote a pilot for Phil Silvers, which they considered putting on the air
that actually went on— Everything went on the air. For Tim Conway, funny
little jobs, and then I got the call to do—
-
COLLINGS
- Did you feel like your career was going along as well as you—
-
GELBART
- I never thought of a career.
-
COLLINGS
- You never thought about it.
-
GELBART
- I thought of how much money do we need, what do we need, what's the
family situation? I never thought career. I knew I was missing steady
work, not so much for the— Just to create work. It was in those years
that Neil Simon established himself and Woody began doing a lot more
than just writing jokes, and I thought, "You know, I should be doing
more. I should not be just having pleasant walks on the heath."
-
COLLINGS
- That sounds nice, though.
-
GELBART
- It was nice. It was terrific. Well, I managed to have it both. I managed
to be in sort of semi-retirement for seven or eight years and then I got
the opportunity to write M*A*S*H and then I
swung back into action. To say my batteries were recharged is to reflect
the gift of understatement I picked up in England.The way that came about— Do you want to know how that came about?
-
COLLINGS
- Sure, yes.
-
GELBART
- A guy I've known for a lot of years, and still do, named Gene Reynolds,
G-e-n-e, who was a child actor who went on to become a very, very, very
successful television director/producer, he would come through England
from time to time. Gene loved to travel. Whenever he got to London, we
always had a meal, and on one of those occasions he said, "Is there
anything that could bring you back, or would you come back for
anything?"I said, "It would have to be something really, really special, and then I
don't know about actually moving back there, but if you ever hear of
something very, very special, give me a ring."Not too long from then, just a short while later, he said, "Have you seen
a movie called M*A*S*H?" which was then in first
run. I guess it was about ‘70, right, '71?I said, "As a matter of fact, I saw it last night in Leicester Square."He said, "What did you think?"I said, "I thought it was very, very good," the kind of movies that you'd
see several of during the year in the old days on a Saturday. It was
brave. Somebody said, "fuck," and somebody was anti-government. I said,
"On that score it was quite different, but it's okay. It's good work."So he said, "Well, Bill Self," William Self, who is the head of, then,
television for 20th Century Fox, "has asked CBS if they'd be interested
in financing a pilot script based on the movie," which was kind of
surprising because as a first-run movie, it's doing very well.I said, "On that one?"He said, "Yes."I said, "Yeah, yeah, that would be appealing, only if we can do the
television equivalent of the freshness of it and the audacity of it. If
they just want another kind of hijinks series about life in the service,
we can't do that. We're in Vietnam. It's another climate."So he said, "Well, put that in the script."So I said, "Okay." I was working on the Feldman show. Have you read this
somewhere? Am I repeating myself?
-
COLLINGS
- No, no. I mean I know the chronology, but you're filling in details.
-
GELBART
- Okay. So he said, "Well, why don't I come over, make you a deal, and
then I'll come over and let's kick around planning the pilot episode."
Gene was very good at story. "And we'll do it. You'll write the script,
and then they'll decide whether they want to actually finance the
filming of that script."So he came over, and I was working on a daily basis on the Feldman show,
and much more so than I would have ever done just as the writer. I was
the producer, blah, blah, blah. So he came over and we would meet
between takes, for dinner, we walked the same pretty place on the heath,
and we came up with this. I worked out a scene-by-scene breakdown of
what the pilot episode would be.I remember we called CBS, a man named Allan Wagner, who was in charge of
whatever, of getting long distance calls from people who were just
walking the heath in North London.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that's a very important position.
-
GELBART
- Yes, that's right. And he said, "Good, I like it. Go. Do it."So Gene said, "Okay," and Gene left for America. And he was very, very
patient. He never, never called and said, "How's it coming? How ya
doing? What's happening?" Very good, wonderful, except about two months
later.
-
COLLINGS
- "Is it done?"
-
GELBART
- "Is it done?" I'm in the control booth working with Marty, and it's Gene
and he says, "How's it coming?"I said, "I just mailed it."He said, "Oh, great."But then I called up— I can't remember her last name, but her first name
was Laurie, a woman that served as a secretary for a while for me at
home. I said, "Come to my house. I have to write something very fast."
So she came there, and in a couple days I did have a draft and I went to
the all-night post office in Trafalgar Square and, in fact, mailed what
I said I had mailed two days earlier, and I put two days' earlier date
on the envelope or whatever, of the draft.
-
COLLINGS
- Is this something you had a lot of stock in at that point, or was this
just sort of another project at that time?
-
GELBART
- Oh, I liked what I did. I didn't have a lot of stock in it. I didn't
think it would go. Again, it was a very, very healthy fee. I liked the
subject very much. It gave me a chance to say things about the war,
Vietnam, of course, not Korea, that I was sort of denied the opportunity
to, living in England. I could be at the odd protest about the Vietnam
War, but this felt good. This felt like I was making some contribution
to the anti-war movement.But I mean, we all know how many pilots are written, how many scripts are
written, how many scripts are shot, how many scripts are shot down, how
many— I didn't think, "Oh, boy, this is the one." Not at all.That was in late fall, and then CBS liked the script. They asked for
certain modifications, not serious ones, I made them, and then they
provided the funds to Fox to cast it, to make it.Gene said, "Would you come back for the shooting?"I said, "I'll come back for the reading with the cast and maybe a day or
two of rehearsal, but I've got to get back." I don't know why I had to
get back. Christmas, I guess, with the family was a good enough reason,
and so I did.Oh, I think I made a deal with— I made a deal with CBS, and included in
that deal was the writing of the script. I also promised them, or they
wanted me to act as a consultant on two other shows, and I said, "I
won't. Yes, but this way. Give me the scripts and let me make notes
about what I think about the script. I don't want to be on the set. I
don't even want you to tell the people where these notes are coming
from. Let them be yours." And they agreed to that.But before I said yes to the whole thing, I called my wife and I said,
"Let's come back here. Let's come back." I said, "Everybody says, ‘Have
a nice day.'" I was that naïve again about my own country. They say that
now in a carjacking as they drive away, "Have a formerly nice day." I
said, "It feels right, and it's sunny, it's bright." I was talking to
her in the fall. It must have been pissing rain at her and as it always
does, and gray. I said, "Come on, let's come back here." Three of the
kids were in the states already, which was her— That's all she needed to
know, really, as enough motivation.There was no such thing as a sure sale of M*A*S*H, I said, "But I do have this other work that I'll do for
CBS," and this meant— We still had the farm in New York. This meant
bypassing New York and coming back from England to California, and I
think more than anything it was how physically comfortable California
was after nine years, that is to say, eighteen winters in London. Is
this chronology clear?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, yes.
-
GELBART
- So she said, "Yeah, let's do that."So we had the cast reading, Gene did put the show up on its feet, and
then I did come back to England and then— I never saw a DVD. There were
no DVDs. There were no cassettes. I'd just heard that they'd done a
wonderful job and that everybody was very, very happy and that CBS would
decide whether or not they would include it in the fall schedule, fall
of 1972.I guess somewhere around March— No, February or January, they said,
"Yeah, we're putting it on," famously and infamously, "at seven-thirty
on Sundays."
-
COLLINGS
- This was against another program which was very popular.
-
GELBART
- It was against This is the FBI and The [Wonderful] World of Disney.
-
COLLINGS
- That's right.
-
GELBART
- So we came back. We came back here on March 20th, and we moved into the
Chateau Marmont with two little kids—the other three were somewhere
else—two Filipino maids, and two old English sheepdogs. We said, "We've
got to get out of this hotel. This is not a group to stay in a hotel.
"Let's rent a house," and then we heard what they were asking for rents,
and we said, "Let's buy a house." So we bought this house on March 25th,
1972, and then a couple days later they picked up M*A*S*H. They had scheduled it, and they wanted to date the
contract for the series on April 1st. I said, "No, let's make it April
2nd."
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, so you are superstitious.
-
GELBART
- Well, in that case I was. So the rest is history in this family.
-
COLLINGS
- But it's just interesting that going into it, it wasn't anything that
you had any sense would snowball into a—
-
GELBART
- No. When I finally saw the episode, the pilot episode, I thought, "Nice
job." But as I told you before, I'd been watching marvelous television,
quality television in England, so it didn't surprise me. But people in
the business, writers that we were showing the pilot to with the idea
that they would write future episodes once we knew the show was
scheduled, they would say, "They're going to let you do this? Are you
kidding?" This is whatever, whatever. "This is brave." This is that. And
I was glad to hear it, but I thought, "What's all the hollering?"
-
COLLINGS
- What was the evolution of your thinking about the Vietnam War?
-
GELBART
- Well, I think I was never for it. I mean, I certainly recognized the
difference between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, neither of which,
as we know, was a declared war. One was called a police action. I don't
know what they ever called Vietnam, just Vietnam.
-
COLLINGS
- To tell you the truth, I don't know either.
-
GELBART
- Yes. They never defined it. They did call the Korean War a police
action, and seventeen nations participated. In Vietnam, we were there
alone. I was as against that as I am against where we are now in G2.I was part of one large, large evening that protested the war with some
very famous British names, Vanessa Redgrave, as you can imagine, being
at the head of it. She was so emboldened by my appearance that she
called me sometime later and asked if I would donate money to buy
bullets for Palestinians to kill Israelis and I said, "No, no, no. No, I
will not."Anyway, I didn't move very far from being against to being even more
against it. That was always the way I felt, where I stood, as if that's
important.
-
COLLINGS
- You were attracted to the theme song.
-
GELBART
- I was.
-
COLLINGS
- What was it that you liked about that?
-
GELBART
- Well, it's got that curious combination of a beat, it swings, and it's
sad. It's written in a minor key, and I'm a sucker for that. I'm sucker
for the particular composer, a guy named Johnny Mandel. We go way back.
We both courted the same girl once.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, how interesting.
-
GELBART
- Yes, I loved it. We never put the lyrics on, as they did in the film,
because we didn't want to do a commercial for suicide.
-
COLLINGS
- No, no, that you wouldn't be able to get that on TV, I'm sure.I was interested to look at some of the early episodes and noticed that
the title sequence changes. I don't know. The title sequence in the very
first episode—
-
GELBART
- The graphics?
-
COLLINGS
- Where they're like running across the hills to the helicopters that are
coming in. It's just probably not significant, but—
-
GELBART
- No, tell me.
-
COLLINGS
- In the first episode, and perhaps like a couple others after that, the
nurses and things are sort of running out of the tents in a kind of a
disorderly fashion, like it's— There's just a sort of a greater sense of
emergency.
-
GELBART
- Is it still the one about the four of them running across?
-
COLLINGS
- I think that that shot is in it, of the four?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I believe that shot is in it as well.
-
GELBART
- From the beginning?
-
COLLINGS
- Maybe the title sequence is just shortened.
-
GELBART
- There was a sequence where, I think, where somebody came out of a shower
or a man came out of a woman's shower? Gene shot all of those. We were
shooting material even before we were on the air, naturally, and no one
director ever captured as well as Gene did those four women running
across. For many, many years, people would write and say, "Who was that
brunette nurse, the one that's so—?"
-
COLLINGS
- So ready to go.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, I think that's the striking thing about the title sequence,
because— And the sequence twinned with that music.
-
GELBART
- With that music, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Especially sort of looking backward, it is very sad, because you kind of
think that the only thing of value that was taking place during the
Vietnam War was with the actual fixing up of the people that were
wounded and that there really isn't much else that you could say for the
whole thing.
-
GELBART
- Yes, I know, I know, and I remember when they finally approved, Congress
approved, funds and plans for a Korean War memorial, the New York Times said, "It's about time that this
series M*A*S*H was not the only memorial to that
war."
-
COLLINGS
- Interesting. So in what ways were you able to sort of blend your
concerns about the Vietnam War with the Korean War setting? I mean, you
were talking about them both simultaneously, I presume.
-
GELBART
- Well, it was an odd situation. We're writing about a war that took place
twenty years before and a war that was contemporary at the same time.
There was a lot of mixing and matching of emotions because there was not
that much protest. There was no protest about Vietnam. We understood why
we were there.
-
COLLINGS
- About Korea.
-
GELBART
- About Korea, I'm sorry. See, to this day. And for that reason, Dr.
[Richard] Hornberger, the writer of the book, didn't like our show
because we had a very liberal bent, you know, and he recognized it.
Everybody did. But he was personally affronted by the fact that we were
putting anti-war sentiments into the mouths of people who were
pro-police action.There's another interesting footnote, deserves more than a footnote,
maybe, about M*A*S*H, and that is what a
curious, again, confluence of artistic events and real life events,
political events, personal events, because M*A*S*H the movie owes its life to the fact that Ring Lardner,
Jr., who was a very, very good motion picture writer, sometime in the
late sixties, I would think, picked up a book in an airport in New York.
He was on his way to California, and there was a paperback called M*A*S*H, and he picked it up and read it. When
we got off the plane, he called Ingo Preminger, who was a producer, and
said, "I think this would make a wonderful film," and Preminger went to
20th Century Fox, and they agreed.Now, Ring Lardner, Jr., was one of the Hollywood Ten. He was blacklisted
for many years. He couldn't work. At an age when he would never have
been called to serve in the United States, he served a year in jail,
actually, and at an age no one would have ever thought the United States
Army would take somebody, he volunteered and went to Korea.
-
COLLINGS
- Really?
-
GELBART
- Really. And worked for Stars and Stripes as a
writer.
-
COLLINGS
- After he had been in jail?
-
GELBART
- Uh-huh.
-
COLLINGS
- That's surprising.
-
GELBART
- I think so. I think the chronology will bear this out. So he showed his
patriotism, and he didn't do it to show his patriotism. He went to war,
wrote about war, and then wrote this film for a studio, which probably
had blacklisted him in his screenwriting days, and they did, in fact,
want him to write the pilot for it.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, did they?
-
GELBART
- Yes, I found that out many years later, which would have been fair and
right.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- But he didn't have any faith in it as a series. I didn't have any faith
in it as a series. The worst thing they can do after you write a pilot
is to say either, "We're not going to do it," or, "We are going to do
it." What do you mean, you're going to do it? I just did it. What else
is there to say? And that was probably his frame of mind. But he was
always very generous whenever we met, which was not often, but in
saying, "You really did a wonderful job with that material," and he did
a wonderful job with the material, although Robert Altman forever says
or says always that it's 90 percent improvised, that Lardner didn't
deserve the Academy Award that he received for the screenplay of M*A*S*H.
-
COLLINGS
- That seems kind of picky.
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes, a little bit, considering the amount of work that he probably
did that we'll never know about under a pseudonym or no name at all.So what point was I trying to make? Just this M*A*S*H stew, you know. But I was lucky in the fact that CBS was
doing the show, because Walter Cronkite was the one who really attacked
our participation in Vietnam.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. "Now that we've lost Walter Cronkite, we've lost the war," this
is what [President Lyndon B.] Johnson said.
-
GELBART
- Johnson said that, that's right. Well, they would say to me, "We don't
want to be so anti-war," and I would say—
-
COLLINGS
- Who would say that?
-
GELBART
- Somebody in Program Practices, or probably not Program Practices. They
were just looking for four-letter words. Some representative of the
network would say, "You know, ease up a little bit."I would say, "If Cronkite, on your network, can attack the war at six
o'clock, why can't I do it at eight?" And they would always yield to
that argument, which was amazing, which was just amazing. It was another
universe.
-
COLLINGS
- Another time.
-
GELBART
- Another everything. So they gave us that freedom, and that's what I
think was M*A*S*H's greatest achievement.
-
COLLINGS
- Did they get much mail that was objecting to the anti-war?
-
GELBART
- I think we really thought of it as though they were the letters that
said "pinko commie" and all that. I never saw a lot of the letters.
-
COLLINGS
- I was just wondering if you heard about it.
-
GELBART
- No. There were people who thought we were. Yes, there were people who
definitely thought so. Phil Rizzuto, the old "Scooter" of the New York
Yankees, was part of the Right Wing was very, very— They had nothing
near the power it's got today, but they would raise their tiny little
voices. They were sopranos then.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, they were the Silent Majority.
-
GELBART
- Yes. How can we get them to be silent again?
-
COLLINGS
- That's the question. [laughs]One thing that I was noticing from your files was how much research you
had done.
-
GELBART
- On M*A*S*H?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Oh yes.
-
COLLINGS
- To do the show.
-
GELBART
- Tons.
-
COLLINGS
- Tons?
-
GELBART
- Never-ending.
-
COLLINGS
- You're conducting interviews with doctors who had served in Korea.
-
GELBART
- Doctors, nurses, pilots, orderlies.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you actually conduct interviews yourself?
-
GELBART
- I did. Gene did.
-
COLLINGS
- I thought I saw some that you had done.
-
GELBART
- I did, Gene did, Burt Metcalfe did, the three of us did, or any
combination thereof. You know Gene and I went to Korea after the second
season and went to the 4077th, I mean that was the fictional of the
real-life 5088th, and spent a week living with a MASH unit, which was no
longer mobile, and in that unit was a man named Mr. Kwan, a Korean who
had served in the Korean police action and was there to remember
stories.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, great. That's great. Now, you had never done this kind of extensive
background research for something before?
-
GELBART
- No. Well, ancient Rome had crumbled so many years before, I couldn't ask
them to put it back together again.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. One of the themes that is in the interviews that it looked like
you conducted were a lot of discussion about back-door ways of obtaining
medical supplies.
-
GELBART
- Scrounging.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, and ways that authority is subverted, and I was just wondering, did
you—
-
GELBART
- Does that come through a lot?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Yes?
-
COLLINGS
- I was just wondering, did you go into these interviews with a sort of an
idea of—
1.9. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE
September 28, 2005
-
GELBART
- No, I think anybody we approached, anybody we interviewed, it was
completely open-ended. We were not trying to make a point. It's enough
for an interviewee to say, "We just lived to go to the latrine. You
know, the latrine was our friend. We would write letters in there, we
would read letters in there, we would read books and magazines in there.
We could shut out the war." That suggested endless references or even
maybe a show about the latrine. We didn't care where they took us. But
when something just sort of flagged itself in conversation— Scrounging
would be part of it, anything. Of course, audiences love capers and
clevernesses, and that all goes back to Plautus, you know, the crafty
slave who's using his wits to accomplish something he shouldn't be
accomplishing. The whole Bilko show is based on beating authority, and
letting them know it or not letting them know it, just beating the
system.
-
COLLINGS
- So the show, I mean even if you take it out of the setting of Korea or
Vietnam and put it into like an office setting—
-
GELBART
- Absolutely, absolutely.
-
COLLINGS
- —you've got all of these levels of authority and control.
-
GELBART
- Absolutely.
-
COLLINGS
- So it becomes very universal.
-
GELBART
- Pecking order, the worst and the best in people coming out because
they're in such tight circumstances. Romance never goes away or the need
for it, the absence of it, the profusion of it. The food, that's always
on everybody's mind.I remember asking Becky, my daughter, who was about eleven at the time,
she was going to Hawthorne Grammar School, and she said, "My friends
love that show."I said, "What do they love about it? What do young people— What do your
friends love about it?"She said, "The insults." They liked people being rude to one another.Doctors love it because I show them unshaven, sometimes drunk,
egotistical, on the make, on the prowl, filled with self-doubt
sometimes. They loved it, and that was a great compliment. You get a lot
of prizes, sometimes you wonder why, but a couple years ago, I think,
the AMA [American Medical Association] gave me one of the rare
non-physician prizes just for the series.
-
COLLINGS
- Wonderful.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- It looked from the photos like you used a lot of focus groups as well to
vet the authenticity.
-
GELBART
- We used focus groups?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, is that right?
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- I thought I saw something like that. No?
-
GELBART
- No, no, not this show.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, must have been something else then.
-
GELBART
- Maybe somebody was doing it. I wasn't there.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, must have been. Maybe it was something else.You have some notes of a conversation with Ron Glasser who wrote—
-
GELBART
- Oh, yes, 365 Days.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, and he was a doctor who had served in Vietnam.
-
GELBART
- Yep.
-
COLLINGS
- He's sort of commenting on the character of Hawkeye, and he's saying,
"Among the doctors, there are very few Hawkeyes." He's sort of finding
Hawkeye to be a very iconoclastic—
-
GELBART
- A little too good to be true.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. One of the things that strikes me about Hawkeye is how very
competent he is, how underneath all of this, there's a sort of recurring
theme that he's a topnotch doctor and he really knows his stuff. And I'm
just sort of wondering—
-
GELBART
- Well, my own physician now is like that, at UCLA. He's the top, top, top
of his field and funny as hell, and he'll make fun of what he's
charging, what other people are charging, what the system, whatever, and
he just can't be a better doctor.Incidentally, Hawkeye was modeled on a real guy, with a few other guys
thrown in. There is a Dr. Eugene Hesse, H-e-s-s-e, who lives in, I
think, Arizona, and he has a reunion every year of the MASH guys, and he
thinks last year was it, and if not, this year will be it. The Hawkeye
guy, the last time he had to come out in a station wagon spread out in
the back, stretched out, he's just in terrible shape. But I guess we
started going another way with Hawkeye so that he was a finally a brew
of a lot of Hawkeyes, but the original guy was both competent and
devilish.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, it seems to me like that's the thing that makes it allowable for
television, that they can be irreverent, they can basically be anti-war,
they can walk around the base in their dressing gown. However—
-
GELBART
- When the time comes…
-
COLLINGS
- It's shown explicitly that he's the one who saved this person's life,
he's the one who noticed something, and it just seems like it's an
anchor and it allows so much other stuff to go on.
-
GELBART
- Yep. Well, we forgive great people for shitty behavior, as long as they
can give us our lives back or our music or whatever, our
entertainment.
-
COLLINGS
- Hawkeye name comes from the book, right?
-
GELBART
- It's from the book. It's from The Last of the
Mohicans.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, it is? Because I thinking of it as being like something from James
Fenimore Cooper. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- It is. You're right on the money. Hawkeye says in the book, he says it
comes from The Last of the Mohicans.
-
COLLINGS
- Leatherstocking.
-
GELBART
- "Which is the only book my father ever read." That's what he says. It
was wonderful. I inherited so many fantastic elements, the characters,
their names, Trapper John, Hot Lips, whatever, not whatever, Radar, and
that locale, that background, which we always kept in the foreground. We
never let it get to be just another half hour, and again I think it owes
so much, the success of the show, the longevity of its success, to Gene,
who really understood the value of feature film texture, because we shot
it with one camera, there was no audience sitting three feet away with
the actors pitching their voices in a stage projection to get a laugh,
but rather relating to the situation and the player they're with. It
just made it a very, very— I've used the expression before, but I think
when somebody says, "Why is Forum still so— Why
does it work today so many years later?" I say, "We built it with copper
plumbing." I think the same is true of M*A*S*H,
it's just in there. Or not. Or it's a flash in the pan. It's a
half-century flash in the pan.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, I think that—
-
GELBART
- No. I never go on about this so much, but since I'm a prisoner here and
I have to speak. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- What do you think you would do if you had to do something like about the
first Gulf War? You wouldn't do it about the war that is going on now,
because M*A*S*H is sort of one of those things
where you're safely removed.
-
GELBART
- Well, it's interesting you say that because for a long time I've
resisted doing anything about a war situation again, but I wouldn't do
anything about Gulf 1. I just think it was similar to the Korean
experience. I won't say Korean War. I mean I'm so spooked.There was a— What did we call it? What was that thing that—
-
COLLINGS
- [Operation] Desert Shield?
-
GELBART
- No, the alliance. Wasn't there some kind of—
-
COLLINGS
- The coalition?
-
GELBART
- The coalition. There was a coalition.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, yes, there was.
-
GELBART
- Of 1.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, of 1, right.
-
GELBART
- That's right.
-
COLLINGS
- It's not a coalition of toga and—
-
GELBART
- No, they were major. There were French, there were countries you could
spell. Not to give it any more glamour or anything, but they had invaded
Kuwait and, you know, there was— You can hate war, but you can
understand why some are fought and others are— And we understand why
this one is being fought, and because it is such a rogue war, it is a
declared war, for the first time I've been talking to a couple of people
about a way to do this war, and the last thing in the world I want and
they want is to think we're ripping off M*A*S*H.
It would reflect how it is now. There wouldn't be a Hawkeye. There
wouldn't be a Trapper John. It would reflect today's realities and
today's technology, which is a whole other thing. There are no MASH
units today and there's a whole lot of other—
-
COLLINGS
- So it would be a medical thing?
-
GELBART
- It would be a medical thing, but from another point of view. It's so
early in the process that I don't even know that it will even happen,
but it's the first time I've been moved to write about it. I mean write
about what's going on in that way, and I would only do one anyway. I
would not be around, I may not be around for four years anyways, but I
certainly would not be there on a day-to-day basis.But what were you going to ask me?
-
COLLINGS
- To tell you the truth, I forget.
-
GELBART
- I can do that.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Would you like to break for today?
-
GELBART
- Sure.
-
COLLINGS
- Does that sound good?
-
GELBART
- If you're for—[End of September 28, 2005 interview]
1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE
October 12, 2005
-
COLLINGS
- Last time we left off, we were talking about M*A*S*H.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- And I thought I'd follow up with a few more questions about M*A*S*H—
-
GELBART
- Please.
-
COLLINGS
- —if you aren't completely sick of talking about it.
-
GELBART
- Over-M*A*S*Hed, right?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. The pilot episode has the title "Korea in 1950: A Hundred Years
Ago."
-
GELBART
- It doesn't have the title. That's an art card.
-
COLLINGS
- No, the subtitle, yes.
-
GELBART
- It just only to imply that it seemed a century ago that we were engaged
there.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I see, that so much had changed.
-
GELBART
- So much had changed. It wasn't, of course, meant to be literal. In time,
I guess people will say, "Well, that was a hundred years ago."
-
COLLINGS
- I think we talked a little bit about the credit sequence last time. I
was saying, did it change, because it seemed like it changed, and then I
went back and looked at it again, and in the beginning it doesn't have
those four nurses.
-
GELBART
- It doesn't?
-
COLLINGS
- No. No.
-
GELBART
- The pilot does not have them?
-
COLLINGS
- No, no, it doesn't. The credit sequence is more— It's like everybody
running out of tents and things, and it has a more disorganized feel
that kind of goes more with the sort of laissez-faire attitude that's
shown in the pre-credit sequence. We were just talking about that
before, so I thought I'd—
-
GELBART
- Well, you tend to get a little tidier as you do things and probably at
some loss to the quality of what you're doing, maybe in a sense you get
not too good at it, but too sure of it, and you miss some of that early
energy that only ignorance can give you.
-
COLLINGS
- Because when the credit sequence changes and it has those four nurses,
it is a much more professionalized M*A*S*H
unit.
-
GELBART
- Was there a pre-title sequence—
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- —where they hit the ball—
-
COLLINGS
- Into the minefield?
-
GELBART
- —into the minefield.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Then do we go to M*A*S*H?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Then do we have the running nurses?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, because Radar is part playing in a game of some sort, I think.
-
GELBART
- Oh, and he says, "Wait for it."
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, and then he looks up and then you have the beginning of the title
sequence of the helicopters coming over the—
-
GELBART
- I guess when we knew that we were a series, we went for the more
conventional opening credits, no action before that. But now that I am
reminded of what we did, it would have been nice to do that kind of
thing every week. However, maybe if there's M*A*S*H after death.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. After-M*A*S*H, although—
-
GELBART
- Yes. We won't talk too much about that, or as much as you want.
-
COLLINGS
- Then you say, I think it's in your archive notes, "I think as we got
more confidence in the scripts and the series itself, they got darker,
but we were finding our way. I think the truth is that we didn't really
find our way until about six or seven weeks in," which seems like a
pretty short time to find your way, frankly.
-
GELBART
- Well, actually, it was— I'm always amazed to find out that the episode
"Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" was, in fact, number seventeen. So we
were floundering a bit longer than I gave us credit for.
-
COLLINGS
- When you found your way, what was the "way"?
-
GELBART
- Well, the way was that we could get a whole lot darker, that we could
afford to be less superficial, and then, of course, the bounce-back with
humor, which was not planned, it's just something you do to taste, was
all that much stronger when we went literally from tragedy to comedy.
But we didn't really have a tone. We didn't really have a feel for what
we were doing. We might have done it on an individual episode basis, but
rarely as an underpinning that we all recognized.[tape recorder off]
-
COLLINGS
- So, sort of the darker it got the more you kind of compensated with kind
of—
-
GELBART
- Yes, without saying, "Hey, this is getting pretty dark. We need a laugh
here," there's just something about your own reaction to sadness that
tells you, that allows you to make light of something, to restore your
own other side, the helpful, the whatever endorphins that are released
by comedy that knock down some of the less attractive ones that
unhappiness brings out.
-
COLLINGS
- Were there times when you were kind of like responding to the headlines
about the Vietnam War, like—
-
GELBART
- Oh, sure, always, basically, which was double-edged because—I think
we've covered this ground—the resistance to the war, to the Korean
experience was nowhere near as extreme, nowhere near, as it was to the
Vietnam War.
-
COLLINGS
- But I mean if there would be like some particularly bad set of affairs,
would that mean that M*A*S*H would be
particularly dark that week?
-
GELBART
- No, not really, not consciously, no. You tend to write those scripts
three or four weeks in advance, so you didn't ever want to do anything
that seemed topical, especially with war, where the color of it can
change so quickly.What I really had fun with was not so much— And only a few instances, not
so much talking about the real war that was going on in Vietnam as we
talked about the war that went on that many years earlier in Korea, with
planting in the episodes references to French Indo China and the war
there, not mentioning Vietnam by name because it wasn't Vietnam then, I
don't think, yet. Well, maybe it was. But anyway, it was kind of sneaky
and only for people who really were looking for those kind of layered
meanings.
-
COLLINGS
- How would you say that the show kind of developed overall while you were
there? Sort of in twenty-five words or less, how would you describe the
arc of the development while you were there?
-
GELBART
- I don't know. I really have to leave that to others.
-
COLLINGS
- I noticed in your file, all of the script pages were like heavily
rewritten and crossed out and written over, to the point that they were
just layers upon layers upon layers. You talk in your autobiography with
the fictional Sidney Freeman about the obsessive rewriting of M*A*S*H.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- Was it just M*A*S*H that you did this with?
-
GELBART
- There's a process where you actually do rewrite. That was mainly what I
did with work that other people did. In my own work, I consider the
rewriting to be just part of the writing process. I consider it a
constant shaping and improvement, hopefully. Sometimes you can improve
something right into the ground.But there was a lot of rewriting on M*A*S*H, not
because I was better than the writers that I was rewriting but— I may or
may not have covered this subject, but clearly—and this is the pattern
in television—the people who are responsible for a show, and usually one
show only, are much better, in the end, suited to exercise the kind of
quality control that only they can. The writer of any given episode
might be working on three different episodes for three different series
at that time, and only you have sole responsibility for your own series.
Now, they're called show runners, but only the person responsible for
the script, I think, in a series staffing can do the kind of work that
lends consistency to the scripts.
-
COLLINGS
- That was you in that case then?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- You were the sort of the point person for that?
-
GELBART
- I was the staff.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. What's it like to go through the read-throughs on Monday
mornings? I mean what kind of surprises would you come across?
-
GELBART
- Well, the read-throughs, the table reads, held on the sound stage were
either joyous affairs or a trip through a very dark tunnel. Some scripts
you could see were going to have to be doctored even beyond what you had
done at your desk. Others were joyous experiences.We had a rule that we would read the script without stopping, because
everyone has a question, everyone, some people have suggestions. But we
didn't want that to interrupt the flow of what it was that they were
reading, and so we'd go through it once without stopping. It's not too
long before you recognize the difference between genuine laughter and
kind of accommodating laughter.
-
COLLINGS
- Of the cast.
-
GELBART
- Of the company and—
-
COLLINGS
- Assembled—
-
GELBART
- —the assembled personnel. After the usual, "That's terrific," "That's
great," "That's wonderful, but nope, save it, we'll talk about it
later," then we would read it again, and then anybody could say, "Should
I be saying this? Do I really know that that's going to happen?" Or,
"Why would I say that? I don't know that's going to happen," and I would
accommodate— I and/or Gene [Reynolds], usually, would accommodate the
questions and the suggestions.I must say it was really— First of all, it was a compliment to all of us
that we understood that the script, the play was the thing, and there
were some that were trashed, literally, some we just threw out. They
were no good. But by and large, the cast trusted what was on the page.
They respected what was on the page. They were largely stage-trained
actors who were not accustomed nor expected to ad lib, to improve on
lines on their feet. In fact, we were very rigid about them being
slavish to the text.So after we had that second read, which, as I said, could be both sides,
comedy and tragedy, I would go back to my office, which was just about
twenty pumps away on my bicycle, and implement those changes. Sometimes
I could make them quickly. Sometimes we would be into the shooting when
these changes would take place, and they would incorporate them. At the
end of the first day, which started with the reading, the actors went
through the scenes with their scripts in hand. No one, obviously, knew
their lines yet. Some never knew their lines. [laughs] But the director
would show Gene and I how he was blocking those scenes. It was a very
full day, because the next day they had to report in makeup and start
shooting that script.
-
COLLINGS
- The Tuesday?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—
-
GELBART
- Then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday they would shoot, then Friday we would
sit down and read the script for the next episode. Then they would shoot
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then Thursday we would read the next
script.
-
COLLINGS
- I see. It was kind of a slipping, a sliding.
-
GELBART
- Sometimes a director would not quite finish shooting the script
completely, and sometimes after we cut a show we would find that we were
a minute or two under, so we had one kind of a makeup day a month in
which we would finish those scenes which had been slopped, for the shows
which had not been completed, or we would shoot a completely new little
bit to make up for that minute we lost by paring the show down to what
we thought was its best.
-
COLLINGS
- You said, "For me, the least satisfying episodes were the ones that we
knew would work." I was just wondering how would you know what would
work versus what would not?
-
GELBART
- Well, if the situation wasn't all that unique, or situations, or if we
were just really falling back on kind of our own clichés. It was always
better when we were doing something that we were a little nervous
about.
-
COLLINGS
- So, like what? Can you think of something? I know it's kind of a long
way back.
-
GELBART
- Well, "The Interview" is certainly the best example of a show that we
were making up as we went along, literally. The actors were improvising.
The script changed depending on what we said. We would decide to shoot
one thing, and instead we would shoot another, so there was a nice kind
of energy that comes from doubt. Nervousness, I guess that's called.
-
COLLINGS
- I think that would probably stimulate the whole cast as well.
-
GELBART
- It was stimulating.
-
COLLINGS
- You'd said somewhere that Hawkeye was the character that you'd written
that was most like yourself. Is that the character—
-
GELBART
- My idealized self.
-
COLLINGS
- —the character most like yourself in M*A*S*H or
in your whole work to date, to that point?
-
GELBART
- Just me, my personality whatever personality is, or my point of
view.
-
COLLINGS
- Which is what? [mutual laughter]
-
GELBART
- Well, why don't you sit down and watch the episodes. Which is what,
depending on— It depends on what subject. If it's about war, it's one
thing. If it's about men and women, it's about— I like to think I've
grown some in that latter category. I think I had kind of a freshman
approach to man-woman relations at that point.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, that probably fit for the period, too.
-
GELBART
- I guess so, and so was I.
-
COLLINGS
- So what can you do?
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- Why did you invent the Klinger character?
-
GELBART
- We just wrote it— I just wrote it as a bit. I think that character
appears in a script called "Officer of the Day," and the premise called
for a general to visit the camp, and I wanted to show just how mad
things were in this very nonmilitary military unit. So in writing it, I
remembered Lenny Bruce the comedian, who in real life, in order to avoid
being drafted in World War II, joined the navy. Then he found out he
wasn't any crazier about the navy than he would have been about the
army, and so he started dressing as a WAVE [Women Accepted for Voluntary
Emergency Service], a female sailor with a skirt and specially cut
blouses and jackets. In short, he was in drag, naval drag. And I thought
that might be funny for one of our people, and so I had this private on
guard duty wearing a WAC, WACs being World War II Women's Auxiliary
Corps, stopping the visiting general as a way of demonstrating to the
general how out of control things were at this unit. It was only about a
half a page, about three or four speeches. We never thought of him as a
continuing character. But we were so pleased with what we saw on the
screen, that he hung around until the very end of the series.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay.
-
GELBART
- Except Gene went back and redirected his half a page, because the
original director had him being extremely gay, and the whole point of
Klinger was that he was not gay, it was that he was pretending to be a
cross-dresser to get out of the service.
-
COLLINGS
- But nobody believed it, so they kept him on, apparently.
-
GELBART
- Right. If you're smart enough to do that, then you're sane enough to
stay in.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, the Catch-22 thing.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- How would you kind of characterize the political viewpoint of M*A*S*H? Because I mean a lot of the themes have
to do with the ineptitude of the military, whereas now, and of course,
today people sort of look at George Bush, for example, and say, "Oh,
well, he's so stupid," but I have doubts about that, frankly, but
actually sort of point the finger and say, "There were no weapons of
mass destruction. It was a trick. It was sort of criminal," and that
kind of thing. Whereas the Korean stuff doesn't seem to question the
military's motives. It seems more to address—
-
GELBART
- It just attacks the establishment. I can't believe that even George
Washington didn't complain about army food. I mean, that's what it was
more about than it was about anti-war. It was about leadership and how
often it messes you up as it leads you. So in that way, it's no
different than Gulf 1, Gulf 2, WWI and II, Korea, Vietnam. It was just
about the inept— Well, the first ineptitude belongs to the politicians
who cannot solve things in a reasonable manner, and then the next one
belongs to what happens invariably when you have so many details that
can go wrong, and if they can, they will, and they did and they do. So
that's what was such great fun, kidding army officers, kidding army
directives, army custom, certainly the cooking, and in a sense, you
could make a list, I guess, about what's given the script, the show, its
longevity, but surely that's one of them, the timelessness and the
universality of military screw-ups.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. Also, it's a nice showcase for what seems to be a theme of yours,
which is the primacy of the individual over the institution, because
you've got this situation where there are all of these— The ineptitude
of the politicians, the ineptitude of the people running the war,
running the camp, and then in the actual instance of performing a
surgery, it's a human making creative choices and decisions, and on the
level of their human activity they are able to succeed as sort of an
individual.
-
GELBART
- Only on an individual, yes. The primacy too often takes the form of a
scream. We're so dominated by these people who make a mess of things
that while we may be able to do it on an individual basis, we rarely
seem to be able to exercise it— I can't say on a mass individual because
there is no such thing, but we don't seem to be able to collect
ourselves to take that action in a way so that we win out over those
forces.
-
COLLINGS
- So that Hawkeye can come up with some tricky way to save somebody's
life, but he can't stop the war.
-
GELBART
- He can't stop the war, and by saving his life, there's every chance that
that saved soldier will be sent back to battle and they'll take another
shot at him.
-
COLLINGS
- So it's a nice metaphor.Were you surprised by the reaction to the death of [Henry] Blake?
-
GELBART
- Yes, I was. I was surprised. We heard from people in great numbers. Have
you read what I wrote about that? Shall I repeat it?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, that you were sort of shocked because at the exact same time one
of those orphan flights taking off from Vietnam had crashed.
-
GELBART
- Yes. In fact, Gene and I wrote a lot, a lot, a lot, hundreds of
handwritten letters, not photocopied, to the people who wrote, because
we felt if they had been moved to write, we should honor their feelings,
and that was part of the copy in each letter that said we hoped that
they felt as badly about this fictional death as the actual death of
these babies, youngsters. I gave those letters— They weren't mine, but I
took it upon myself to— I gave them to the Smithsonian Institute
[Institution] and that's where they are.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, did you?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- The letters that you wrote or that you received?
-
GELBART
- That we received. I'm sure there's at least one copy of what we
responded, of how we responded in with those letters.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's very interesting. Do you think that one of the reasons people
were so shocked was because Blake was a kind of an unlikable character
and they felt—
-
GELBART
- Likeable.
-
COLLINGS
- Unlikable.
-
GELBART
- I don't think they thought he was.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay, all right.
-
GELBART
- No, I think they were shocked because he was so likable.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay, because personally I would have felt bad because every time he
comes on, I'm kind of like, "Oh, what a jerk." Then he dies and then you
feel bad for thinking poorly of him. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- Well, it works on every level. No, Henry, I always thought, was a great
example of the Peter Principle, upward failure. He was a perfectly good
small-town doctor in Bloomington, Illinois. He was just never meant to
run a medical unit in a war situation right at the front.
-
COLLINGS
- Right.
-
GELBART
- Then we did have that really romantic, affectionate farewell to him
during all through that last episode so that to then drown him was very
upsetting to people.
-
COLLINGS
- You did that because he was just leaving the show, right?
-
GELBART
- Well, he was leaving the show, but we felt that let's not just make it a
case of just another actor leaving just another show, let's let it work
for the series, and it did. It may have even worked against the series,
but I don't think anybody noticeably stayed away after that season.
-
COLLINGS
- I have to say that I was really interested in the speech that Father
Mulcahy made about—
-
GELBART
- The open wound.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. I thought that was such a great metaphor for what drama is, I mean
in many instances. You warm yourself over the steam of an open
wound.
-
GELBART
- It's probably the best single speech in the series, and written by no
one. It was said to us in an interview with a doctor. Did we talk about
this last time?
-
COLLINGS
- About the interviews?
-
GELBART
- About this line?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- Oh, I just have a memory of having talked about it recently. Yes, it's a
brilliant line, and it's one of those lines that just got stuck in one
of those notebooks, and poring over it day after day, it just jumped out
as if not an episode, certainly worthy of mention, worthy of repetition,
worthy of repeating—Sorry. Did somebody say the unedited life is not
worth living?But I was surprised. Recently I saw a rerun of an early episode, well
before this, in which I think it was Trapper [John] and it was bitter
cold and he says—the line is almost this—he said, "I don't know whether
to operate on this guy or crawl inside of him." Either I had had that
line said and I was converting it or I had hit upon the same truth
myself, which is what I like to think when I'm in a back-patting mood,
but anyway, it was better in its original and it's a wonderful line.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, it is, and it's very visual, as well.
-
GELBART
- And he tells it beautifully.
-
COLLINGS
- Do you go on to the M*A*S*H chat rooms, is that
what I—
-
GELBART
- Mm-hmm, less and less.
-
COLLINGS
- What happens there?
-
GELBART
- Well, who's your favorite character? What's your favorite joke? Do you
think somebody's better than somebody? Do you think that—
-
COLLINGS
- Do you answer questions?
-
GELBART
- I do answer questions. I'm really sort of at the tail end of that, I
think, because the news group used to meet in AOL. AOL had a news group
site, and they dumped it. So now it's Google or something, and the
format's different. It's not as good. It's down to three or four real
diehards, and I like the people who say it's a communist, lefty, pinko,
Jew show.
-
COLLINGS
- I was just wondering what kinds of things you had run into there.
-
GELBART
- Well, you know why it's fascinating to me? Because during the four years
I worked on the show, I never saw any fan mail, except the Henry Blake
letters.
-
COLLINGS
- They didn't give them to you or—
-
GELBART
- Well, Gene took care of that. I just didn't think to look at them. So I
never really had much contact with the fans, but now that I don't have
to get a script out every five minutes, it's nice to see that. It's nice
to communicate with them.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. And the people are still watching the reruns, I presume.
-
GELBART
- They certainly are. To me, one of the nicer rewards, although I never
got a bad reward, is that— I think I've said this to you. I'm beginning
to think I've said everything to you. As a kid, I mean I remember coming
home and quoting the Marx Brothers and quoting W.C. Fields, and it's a
great sense of satisfaction knowing that there are young people quoting
stuff that I've written. Nice.
-
COLLINGS
- You said that M*A*S*H was a cross between the
Marx Brother and All Quiet on the Western
Front.
-
GELBART
- Somebody else said that.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay.
-
GELBART
- I wouldn't have had the pretension. I have other pretensions, but that's
not one of them. Yeah, somebody. I thought that was perfect, and in
fact, the Marx Brothers did do All Quiet on the
Western Front in Duck Soup. They did
this fantastic war sequence where every time you cut to them, they're in
another uniform, in another period.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I don't remember that.
-
GELBART
- Wonderful, wonderful.
-
COLLINGS
- Is that the one where he marries the wife—
-
GELBART
- Who knows? Margaret Dumont?
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, and she's the—
-
GELBART
- Maybe. I don't know.
-
COLLINGS
- She's the empress of Dynatopia or whatever the name of the country
was.
-
GELBART
- Fredonia. "Hail Fredonia."
-
COLLINGS
- "Hail Fredonia." Yes, is that that one?
-
GELBART
- Maybe.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, could be. Oh, I love the Marx Brothers.
-
GELBART
- I was pleased to learn that Groucho loved M*A*S*H.
-
COLLINGS
- I bet you were.
-
GELBART
- Yes, I mean from Groucho. Anyway, go.
-
COLLINGS
-
AfterM*A*S*H is not in the chronology but—
-
GELBART
- "Why did you do that?"
-
COLLINGS
- No, no, I wasn't going to say that. I was just mainly I just really had
one question.
-
GELBART
- Please.
-
COLLINGS
- I haven't seen it.
-
GELBART
- You're in good company or in large company.
-
COLLINGS
- "The message will be the same. People are more important than the
system." Then you say—
-
GELBART
- Is this me saying that?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Then you say in your notes that "These are people for whom all the
corners are back," and that that's what makes them different than—
-
GELBART
- All the corners?
-
COLLINGS
- All the corners are back.
-
GELBART
- You mean everything's nice and neat and square?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I guess that's what that means.
-
GELBART
- I don't know what I meant.
-
COLLINGS
- So I was just wondering what was different writing for this— Some of the
same cast of characters that—
-
GELBART
- It was not the same cast of characters. It was a mistake and one of the—
First of all, I learned about that specific show, was that I think it
would have had a better chance had it been an hour show with a dramatic
base and comic relief rather than a half-hour show and the opposite in
format. We truly didn't have— We had good supporting people, but we
didn't really have stars, and when I say "stars," I don't mean for box
office, I mean for the kind of strength that a leading character gives
any ensemble. We didn't have that. But that wasn't their fault.
Everything about that was my fault. I fell in love with this AfterM*A*S*H title and I should have thought it
all through a lot longer and said, "Thanks, but no thanks."
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Your next steps after M*A*S*H, you did Karen.
-
GELBART
- Wasn't that during? I think that—
-
COLLINGS
- 1975, was it?
-
GELBART
- I think it was during M*A*S*H. Well, that was a—
I was one of the few people that had never seen Karen Valentine work, so
I didn't understand when people said, "You're doing a show about Common
Cause with Karen Valentine?" They thought that was really a
contradiction in terms.
-
COLLINGS
- Why was that?
-
GELBART
- Well, because she was not especially known for being a political
activist or even interested in that. She's a pretty, pretty, pretty
woman, and a personality that really— I mean who's to say what an
activist should look like? But I think we thought more in stereotypes in
those days, and she just didn't seem to fit the subject, and nothing she
had done before made anybody think that she could do it. It wasn't
Karen's fault; it was our fault. We took something very tough to do.
This was a show based on—
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I've got the synopses here. I think it's very impressive, to tell
you the truth.
-
GELBART
- Yes, it is impressive. Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- These are like very political, very forward—
-
GELBART
- They really were.
-
COLLINGS
- —thinking topics.
-
GELBART
- Well, Gene—
-
COLLINGS
- Particularly for 1975, it's amazing.
-
GELBART
- Yes. I like this, "A M*A*S*Her and a head of a
redwood logging operation."
-
COLLINGS
- I mean, who was thinking about redwood logging operations in 1975?
-
GELBART
- I know, I know.
-
COLLINGS
- Obviously I'm not in television, but I would think that you would need a
pretty-star-type female for something like that.
-
GELBART
- Well, we had that, but this was not the only show we tried while we were
doing M*A*S*H. We tried a show called Roll Out, which was based on the Red Ball
Express, which was a motorized unit in World War II that was almost 100
percent black, and that had a chance, too. We just couldn't— M*A*S*H, in fact, the cast was quite upset when
it was announced that we were going to do Roll
Out. They thought they were going to be neglected. They weren't
neglected and neither were the other episodes, the other two series, but
we just couldn't be as committed and passionate and smart as we were
with M*A*S*H.
-
COLLINGS
- So what made you want to do a series with a main female character?
-
GELBART
- ABC said, "We want you guys to do a show with Karen Valentine, no pilot,
on-the-air commitment, thirteen weeks." We couldn't say no. We could say
no, but greed and whatever else or just— You know, when you're kind of
flying with a hit series, there's a certain kind of rush that— I hate
using that word since it only means one person these days [Rush
Limbaugh]. There's a certain kind of, I guess, power and euphoria that
takes over and you say, "Yeah, sure, I'll do that and I'll do that and
I'll do that," and not really realizing that you're going to rob the
resource that got you to be that desirable to an ABC or whatever. So
that's what got us to do it and we never got off the ground.
-
COLLINGS
- Did they know that you were going to do all of these very social
themes?
-
GELBART
- They didn't care. They didn't care. "Just give us Karen Valentine."
-
COLLINGS
- That reminds me of this woman that I interviewed with did films for
Roger Corman.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- And she did all kinds of very progressive themes, and he didn't care as
long as the girls were all wearing bikinis.
-
GELBART
- [laughs] Exactly, exactly. Well, we couldn't wear bikinis, but we did
have Karen, and that's all they wanted. If it had worked— And they
figured, "These guys know something." I mean who would figure a show
about surgeons, war, and all that? "That works. Maybe this will
work."
-
COLLINGS
- So even if it had been a story about Karen and like a domestic comedy,
that would have been fine, too. They really didn't—
-
GELBART
- For them, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- They really didn't care.
-
GELBART
- But that wouldn't have been for us.
-
COLLINGS
- Around that time you were also working on Sly
Fox?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Actually, I got the—
-
GELBART
-
Volpone.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. I found the original playbill online if you want to take a look at
it. The cover is on the front page.
-
GELBART
- Oh my.
-
COLLINGS
- So with this, you said that you were trying to bring— Oh, no, no, it
wasn't. I'm sorry. I was confused about that.
-
GELBART
- What was I trying to bring, again, to the—
-
COLLINGS
- I'm sorry, I was thinking about Forum. I was
thinking about Forum.
-
GELBART
- Okay.
-
COLLINGS
- How did you bring your experiences in Chicago into Sly Fox? You mention a character called Itchkey the
Goniff—
-
GELBART
- Goniff [pronunciation].
-
COLLINGS
- —in an interview with—
-
GELBART
- Goniff is Yiddish for thief, Itchkey the Thief. How did I bring him into
Sly Fox?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. In an interview in the New York Times, you
were talking about how your experiences growing up in Chicago—
-
GELBART
- Well, yes, there were a lot of Runyonesque, and worse, characters. There
was an element of— There were a lot of criminals, but small-time
criminals, although one guy made it to the electric chair. Itchkey the
Goniff was a very colorful guy because he was very handsome and he
worked with a gang. The way it went was he would take an attractive— Or
she didn't have to be attractive. He would take a woman out to dinner
and romance her, kind of, and while he was out doing that, his gang was
in her apartment stealing her jewels or her home. But anyway, Sly Fox, as was Volpone,
naturally, filled with shady characters, with greedy people after other
people's money, so God knows I knew enough of those.
-
COLLINGS
- From your childhood?
-
GELBART
- Uh-huh.
-
COLLINGS
- And from the TV business? [mutual laughter]
-
GELBART
- Well, yes, part of which was spent— My childhood was spent in that. I
don't know when the snowflakes melted on my eyelids and I saw all these
crooks and gangsters around me in blue and white collars, but I was
pretty well— I knew about bad guys, not the kind of bad guys that are in
Sly Fox, because these are just people who
are usurers and they're poseurs when it comes to confidence men. I knew
some of those, but I really knew guys with guns, I mean hardened
criminals.
-
COLLINGS
- In Chicago?
-
GELBART
- In Chicago. I remember once, more than once, I knew of guys who were on
the lam, hiding from the law, who would sneak into my family apartment
so my dad could cut their hair, because they may have been gangsters,
but they were very vain, too. That came from the movies, you know,
movies teaching gangsters that they should all look like George Raft
or—
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Can you point to a time when gangsters started spiffing up like
that?
-
GELBART
- In my life?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- I was aware of them from the time I was seven, eight, nine years old,
hanging around the barbershop. I told you, I'm sure, that one of my
father's clients in his barbershop there was a man named "Sparky"
Rubenstein, who became Jack Ruby. I mean we had that kind of violent
lowlife element, and I remember them very well. And the sporting world
boxers and—
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO
October 12, 2005
-
GELBART
- And bookies.
-
COLLINGS
- Did that seem frightening, or was that just kind of like par for the
course?
-
GELBART
- No, colorful, colorful. Not frightening, no.The first time I saw a guy with a gun in his holster, I thought he was
telephone lineman. [laughs] I didn't understand what all that equipment
was for. Well, rather than frightened, you felt kind of— You felt
protected. At least you knew they weren't going to do anything to you.
And I remember learning that people that I really liked were
professional hit men. I don't say this with any pride.I remember my uncle, my father's uncle, which I guess would make him my
great-uncle, I remember him. He was babysitting me one night, and I
remember him crying like a baby because [John] Dillinger had been shot,
one of his heroes.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that's right. Dillinger on a slab. I've seen newsreel of that.
-
GELBART
- Mm-hmm, the woman in red.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that's right. Did your dad ever worry that they might not like
their haircut?
-
GELBART
- No, no, he never worried, and they always did.
-
COLLINGS
- That's good. I think I would be a little worried.
-
GELBART
- No. Don't forget, he was the one with the razor at their throat.
-
COLLINGS
- So would you say that Sly Fox was the one thing
that you've written that really drew on that childhood?
-
GELBART
- No, I don't think so. I think there is a line in Sly
Fox where Foxwell J. Sly says to his apprentice, Simon Able, he
says, "Never think too little of people. There's always a little bit
less to be thought." So it's more about human nature than it is about
any criminal activity, because there's a lot more you can do to people
than either physically assault them or take their money, and we do as
often as we can.
-
COLLINGS
- So I suppose next on your list of laurels, it's Oh,
God!
-
GELBART
-
Oh, God!
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
-
Oh, God! I was asked to work on Oh, God! by David Susskind, who was a very
prolific producer, television producer, one of the pioneers for the talk
show on television called Open End, and it was,
because it went on from when it started to whenever. David and I had
done some television work together, series of specials, and he had an
option on the book by Avery Corman, Oh, God! I
read it and I thought it was very entertaining. I saw it as really, if
not an homage, certainly akin to Mel Brooks' and Carl Reiner's 2000 Year Old Man, and David and I planned to
make a movie of it.By the time it got made, David was out of it. The book had been around a
lot. The book had been around so much. So many people had loved it and
had a pass at it, but with no reception in any studios, that finally you
could option the book for no money, which is very rare. Corman or his
representatives said, "Yes, please, just get it done."
-
COLLINGS
- "Just take it." GELBART: So I wound up with it in kind of in that
fashion, and I remember my plan was— Have you read about this somewhere
around?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- My idea was that I would write an adaptation, a screenplay, and that I
would ask Mel Brooks to play God and Woody Allen to play what became the
John Denver part. So I suggested it to them, and Woody responded by
saying that— Woody's response was— I'm writing something with such
convoluted or inane language that I can hear it spilling it over into my
own speech. Woody said no, he was working on—
-
COLLINGS
- He had his own deal with God.
-
GELBART
- He had his own take on God, and this wasn't it. And Mel, I've said, Mel
didn't want to play God because he didn't want the demotion, and so it
crashed, that prospect.I had a very enterprising manager named Howard Rothberg, and Howard got
it to— I think that's how it worked, I'm pretty sure. He got it to Jerry
Weintraub, and Jerry Weintraub represented John Denver, and he was
looking for something for John for motion pictures. I said, "Fine." I
would have said fine to anybody, but that did sound like a good idea. I
said, "And there's only one guy to play God; that's George Burns," and
he said yes. George was enjoying this second renaissance. Is there a
second renaissance? Just his renaissance, having substituted for Jack
Benny and winning the Oscar in Sunshine Boys.So that's how it went forward, and Carl Reiner directed the script, which
is interesting inasmuch as I thought it was about Carl and Mel anyway.
To me, it was very successful critically and commercially. It made an
enormous amount of money. It cost about— Not about; it cost 2.2 million
dollars to produce, and has made much, much more back, of course. But I
always felt that they shot a first draft, that I would have enjoyed
making a second pass at it, but then I probably would have ruined it, it
probably wouldn't have—
-
COLLINGS
- So what would you have changed?
-
GELBART
- Well, I just would have been a little tougher on God. I would have asked
him some tougher questions and maybe not have him answer so glibly.
-
COLLINGS
- So they didn't shoot your script?
-
GELBART
- They did shoot my script. They asked Carl and I to do Oh, God II, III, IV. We didn't. I said, "You know, if God
comes back, it won't be for a miniseries."But that took place. I was not really connected with it in terms of the
casting, in terms of the shooting, and when it was nominated for an
Academy Award, I thought, you know, sweet, but it won't even be close
enough for a cigar, you know, because it just was too lightweight,
really. In fact, it lost to a wonderful picture called Julia, which was written by Alvin Sargent. So
that was my Oh, God!
-
COLLINGS
- Have you ever wanted to direct one of your scripts, by the way?
-
GELBART
- Not really, not really. I did a few M*A*S*H
episodes, but that was like making home movies, you know. No, I don't
think I'm a very good director. First of all, I don't handle contention
very well, and there can sometimes be some of that, as there was when I
did a play in London, directed it. No, it's never—
-
COLLINGS
- That's just not what you do.
-
GELBART
- It would have saved me a lot of headaches, because as a director, there
are any number of situations where I wouldn't have brought another
writer on to fix me when I wasn't broken.
-
COLLINGS
- But you just don't think visually then?
-
GELBART
- I do think visually. I think very visually, and I include a lot of
visual material in the scripts, but there's more to being a director
than there is the visual. There's the politics, there's the whole
process of production, postproduction, editing, and the social aspect of
being a director on the stage. I mean a writer, as often as not,
concentrates on some privacy, whereas a director is a sitting duck out
there, small talk and distractions that as a writer I can create my own
distractions. As a director, I'm prone to other people's ability to do
that.
-
COLLINGS
- That story about how in M*A*S*H when you were
trying to think of a solution turning to the wall and just thinking for
a moment.
-
GELBART
- The reason I turned to the wall—
-
COLLINGS
- To get rid of the distractions.
-
GELBART
- That's all. There was no little man in there.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh yes. But I was just thinking as a director it would be sort of hard
to shut yourself off like that.
-
GELBART
- Yes, you can't isolate. That's right. That's right. I wouldn't
discourage anybody who writes from wanting to direct, because it's your
last chance for you to get it right, and I would be daunted by taking on
someone else's work and giving my version of it.
-
COLLINGS
- Moving along here, Movie, Movie—
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- —got a Christopher Award.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- It was, quote, "Judged an affirmation of the highest values of the human
spirit."
-
GELBART
- God knows why.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, I was going to ask you that.
-
GELBART
- They must have had a surplus of awards.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I see, okay.
-
GELBART
- Well, Movie, Movie was— I love Movie, Movie. I co-wrote that with a writer
named Sheldon Keller as I was co-writing Volpone
with Ben Jonson. I had made one of the few determinations, conscious
ones, that I can ever remember making when I knew I was going to leave
M*A*S*H. I thought after I leave is not the
time to think about what I want to do next. I think it would be better
to do what I want to do next while I'm doing that, so I don't fall off a
cliff.So I worked on that with Keller, and there was a time when movie takeoffs
were very popular as movies themselves, and I always thought that a
feature-length satire of a feature-length film was far too long. So I
thought how about two and make it a double feature as we knew as
children, using the same actors, sometimes the same sets, same moods. So
Movie, Movie was born.We were very lucky. Stanley Donen, who directed it, was very, again,
respectful of the text, knew what he had, which is not to say that there
weren't suggestions for it, can this be this or can that be that? But
not so much to make it different or his way, but to make our way better,
and we were lucky to have George [C.] Scott again, who I just worked
with in Sly Fox and who brings a lot to
anything, brought a lot to anything he ever did.It was distributed by Warner Bros. at the same that they distributed, I
think Superman III and some other big, big
movie, so we got kind of lost in the dust of those big, big guys. Lord
Grade thought enough about it to give me the money to write a follow-up
to it, and I did, but nothing ever happened with it.
-
COLLINGS
- In settings and themes, I can see the similarity between Movie, Movie and Sly
Fox. It sounds like you have a lot of these kind of characters that
are trying to make their way in a—
-
GELBART
- I mean that's almost— I mean that's Forum.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, yes, that's Forum, too, yes.
-
GELBART
- Sure, it's Forum and I guess the characters in
M*A*S*H want to go be someplace else, too,
you know.
-
COLLINGS
- But as far as like drawing from some kind of experience in a 1930s era
neighborhood.
-
GELBART
- Well, I mean that era is, yes, neighborhood, and the most important
place in the neighborhood, the movie house and being exposed to those
kinds of stories, it was a great chance to write the kind of movies that
I grew up on.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, exactly. One of the people in the preview cards writes, "It was a
breath of fresh air. It was like going to the movies when I was a child.
It was full of American things."
-
GELBART
- Is that what they say?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Yes, sure, yes. Well, the first movie in Movie,
Movie is, what is it, it's Dynamite
Hands.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, the boxer.
-
GELBART
- The boxer. Well, that's Rocky, right?
-
COLLINGS
- Right.
-
GELBART
- I mean thirty years after we saw those kinds of movies, here we have it
in real life, forty years maybe, and the backstage musical is forever
green. Frank Rich, in the review when he was still drama critic of the
New York Times, I remember he said on the
opening night of 42nd Street, he said, "What
this really needs is the book from Movie, Movie,
and it would be a big success." But that's the stuff I grew up on, and
we all did, obviously. Certainly that person who wrote that card grew up
on it, too.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. I mean do you find that when you are writing, that you are
writing for a specific group?
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- Do you have a—
-
GELBART
- Yes, me.
-
COLLINGS
- You're writing for yourself?
-
GELBART
- Yes, the group that is me. And less and less am I inclined now to send
valentines to that part of my memory that grew up watching those movies.
I think I'm more in touch with what is now than I was when I was writing
about what was some prior then, you know.
-
COLLINGS
- So is Movie, Movie the only instance where you
were writing about some— And also, I suppose, Sly
Fox.
-
GELBART
-
City of Angels.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, and how is—
-
GELBART
-
City of Angels is about a screenwriter, a
novelist, actually, who comes to Hollywood to adapt one of his novels
into what is a film noir, so I could feed into the process my own
experiences with studios and studio people who want to change your work
and my love of a certain kind of movie from the forties, and an extra
plus there was with a very, very swing- and jazz-oriented score, which
is a carryover from my days as a kid just loving big bands.
-
COLLINGS
- So it sounds like you almost went through a kind of a nostalgic period
with the—
-
GELBART
- The only thing wrong with that sentence is the tense. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- Why?
-
GELBART
- Well, I think despite my statement of two seconds ago about being very
much in the now, there's a part of you that's always back in one then or
another, you know.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Well, is it a particular then that has to do with a particular
period in show biz history?
-
GELBART
- It depends. It depends. If we're talking about music, it is a certain
period. If it talks about movies, it goes back even farther. If it's
about comedians, it goes way, way back. But as I say that, I realize how
much of it is about the entertainment business, and I get a little bit
embarrassed that those are the highlights of my life.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, that's your career.
-
GELBART
- That's right.
-
COLLINGS
- You are what you are.
-
GELBART
- Or that I'm proud.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, be proud.
-
GELBART
- Now I'm embarrassed about being proud. [mutual laughter]
-
COLLINGS
- Actually, this kind of raises a question. When you were on Caesar's Hour, for example, which is the very
early days of—
-
GELBART
- Oh, you met with him, huh?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, yes.
-
GELBART
- He's a piece of work, huh? Oh, we'll talk about it. Okay.When I was on Caesar's Hour—
-
COLLINGS
- When you were on Caesar's Hour, early days of
television, did you have any sense at all that TV was going to go on to
dominate the minds and souls of every American?
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- You did?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- How did you know that?
-
GELBART
- I'm smart. [mutual laughter] Well, it just seemed obvious. I mean here's
one of those things in everybody's house, telling you what somebody
wants you to hear, showing you what somebody wants you to see, selling
you. It was a no-brainer. Not only that, I mean if I were the dumbest
person, if I were the dumbest person in the world, which I am nominated
for several times, you could just see it growing by leaps and bounds
anyway. You could see more shows, more sets sold, and more commercial
investment. You saw it burgeoning.
-
COLLINGS
- You couldn't miss it, I guess.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- So when you do look back toward to sort of the early days, the comedy,
that you were aware of the comedy—
-
GELBART
- Wouldn't it be nice to look forward to early days?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, of the thirties and forties.
-
GELBART
- Not thirties. Oh, the comedy of the thirties? Yes, as a spectator,
sure.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, yes, exactly. What do you think were the key turning points in
terms of changes of tone and—
-
GELBART
- Well, it's pretty apparent that in more innocent times, which weren't
all that innocent, but we weren't as aware of what was not innocent
because there were fewer people lifting rocks and showing us what might
be underneath them then, but the comedy was always reflective of the
society. I mean, comedy is not a leader. Comedy comments, and so it
needs a subject matter. I don't think anybody ever thought it would get
to where it is now, but then I don't think— It would have been very
difficult to imagine a society which is as tough and as rough,
outspoken, angry as the one we live in.
-
COLLINGS
- So when you say got to where it is now, how would you characterize
that?
-
GELBART
- Society? The American society?
-
COLLINGS
- No, the comedy, when you say comedy's got to where it is now.
-
GELBART
- Well, comedy, comedy, comedy, comedy. Comedy, a lot of it is protest,
whether it's a joke about your mother-in-law, which is a form of
protest, and probably the most primitive form, and you can go back to
Plautus for those, or race.What's the question?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you were saying nobody would have ever anticipated that comedy
could get to where it is now.
-
GELBART
- Yes, our society is so volatile. You know, you grow up as a kid thinking
history is something you study. Everything that's happened has happened,
and all you've got to do is remember the dates when it happened now and
why it happened. It takes a long time to understand that there's history
being made in your lifetime and that these enormous changes are taking
place, and whereas the study of history leads to some conclusions, the
relentless daily history-making has yet to reveal those solutions, and
so you feel a bit adrift.As for the practical side, I would not be pleased if I were starting a
career in this industry, in this business, next Tuesday. It, too, has
gotten meaner, competitive to a vicious degree, different standards,
different values. It was never an easy business to get into, always one
you could get out of very quickly if you failed with any sort of
regularity.[telephone rings] Saved by the bell.I don't know. Can you get me out of that sentence somewhere, dot, dot,
dot. Would I what, I'm sorry?
-
COLLINGS
- You were just saying that it was a business that you would never wish to
be beginning right now.
-
GELBART
- I wouldn't, I wouldn't. I mean, I was lucky. I mean, I was almost
storybook, somebody saying, "Hey, kid, here's a pencil. Write
something," and I did. I guess that could happen today, but—
-
COLLINGS
- Do you think that your sensibility jibed with what the country was
looking for at that time, sort of urban immigrant up and coming,
upwardly mobile?
-
GELBART
- Well, my sensibility was formed by what I actually experienced in
hanging around barbershops and going to school with people from a
similar, more or less, background.
-
COLLINGS
- This was a time when people from the countryside were moving into the
city in great numbers.
-
GELBART
- They may have been, but more importantly for me, people from Europe had
been moving in great numbers. I don't think I ever knew anybody who
wasn't a first-generation American when as a kid. We are so in flux in
what is an American, who are Americans, and never more so than in the
last five years have we changed so drastically, dramatically. I don't
know. My hesitation only comes from knowing that anything you can say
about any subject can be total poppycock the next.
-
COLLINGS
- There's a book about your work called The Classically
American Comedy of Larry Gelbart.
-
GELBART
- Jay Malarcher.
-
COLLINGS
- So do you think your comedy is classically American?
-
GELBART
- Well, he does. That's good enough for me. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, just wondering.
-
GELBART
- No, I was quite— I was pleased, of course, but startled by his selection
of a title. But he seems like a very— No, he is a bright guy. I know
Jay. But he sought me out. I mean, this is not something I even knew was
going to happen.
-
COLLINGS
- No, I just wondered if you would—
-
GELBART
- Do I think it's classical? Well, what else is classical? Then I'll tell
you if it fits. I don't know.
-
COLLINGS
- We'll think about that one, then.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. You also worked on United States—
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- —which I've got the synopses of it here.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- That sounds like really rugged material.
-
GELBART
- It was. It was visceral.
-
COLLINGS
- I mean, just stuff like this, "The Chapins panic when they think that
their daughter is pregnant."
-
GELBART
- Really?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Well, that must be a later script that we didn't ever do.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay. "Libby finally confesses a shocking childhood secret."
-
GELBART
- Oh, that was a great script.
-
COLLINGS
- I can only imagine what that is.
-
GELBART
- No, that was called "Touching Story," and she talked about being
molested by her uncle and how it colored how she felt about men and
about sex. We had a wonderful first-act curtain which they made us
change, "they" being NBC. She was telling him about this experience as a
girl and she used the expression, she said, "He was trolling with
M&Ms." But, anyway, and she's telling her husband Richard about
this situation, and he comforts her by taking her into her arms, and she
says, "You bastard. You've got an erection." She's horrified that that
turned him on. So we had to finesse that a little bit there somehow. But
oh, it was good stuff, really good stuff.NBC was then run by a man named Fred Silverman, and I worked with Fred at
CBS on M*A*S*H. He was vice president in charge
of programming. Then I think I worked with him briefly at ABC on Three's Company. I don't know if we're going to
talk about that or not; it doesn't really matter. Now he was at NBC. It
was his third network. And he said, "Do whatever you want. Do a series.
No pilot, no nothing, just do a series."I said, "One condition. Let me prepare thirteen scripts. Let's not do
anything. Let's not hire anybody. I want to be able to sit down on
thirteen different days and read thirteen different scripts and make the
changes, make the fixes. Then when it comes to shooting them, that's all
we'll have to do." And he said yes. It was very brave of him. They took
out full-page ads in New York Times. I remember
it was an incredible campaign. Then they saw the product, and it was so
much darker than they imagined that they put us on at ten-thirty at
night, which was terrible. So it was kind of, I call it— I don't know
what I call it. That's some kind of television euthanasia. I mean we
really— Crib death. But it was a good series.
-
COLLINGS
- Do you think this series would go now?
-
GELBART
- They repeated a few of them on Trio. There's some series there they
called unscripted— No, not unscripted, Brilliant But
Cancelled. They've shown three or four of those. I mean it
would still be. You what, I'm sorry?
-
COLLINGS
- No, go ahead.
-
GELBART
- You want to see some?
-
COLLINGS
- Sure, yes.
-
GELBART
- I might be able to dig some out.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, that would be great, yes.
-
GELBART
- I think it was the forerunner, without any question, of a lot of
different shows. I mean thirtysomething.
-
COLLINGS
- That's right. That's what's Ed Zwick somewhere says, "Oh, well, we're
doing United States with thirtysomething," although this sounds darker, actually.
-
GELBART
- It was dark. It was about the one divorce, and maybe that's in there, I
don't know, about the one marriage in two that doesn't end in divorce.
Well, if it doesn't end in divorce, is it all that smooth? No, it's this
and it's this, but people learn to live through and with these problems.
It was wonderful. We covered dyslexia, we covered virility, we covered
infidelity, we covered— Oh, Jesus. I just realized something. This is a
case of life imitating TV art, anyway. We did an episode in which Libby,
that was the heroine's name, Libby's ex-husband comes to stay for a
little— Spend the night or something with the Chapins. Richard was
played by Beau Bridges. We have a scene where the three of them are in
bed, not in any kind of salacious or— They're just sitting around like
old friends. Not in bed; on the bed. I just realized that in real life,
my wife's ex-husband some weeks ago suffered a stroke, and she said to
me, "Could he come stay with us for a while until he gets back on his
feet?"
-
COLLINGS
- Recovered, yes.
-
GELBART
- So he's here now. So—
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, is that who that is?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- I thought maybe that was your dad or something.
-
GELBART
- No, my dad is not with us. He's ninety. He, this fellow, not my dad. So
I'm either living it and writing it, or writing it and then living
it.
-
COLLINGS
- Life imitating art.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- This sounds like it was a really brave series.
-
GELBART
- Well, the other writer involved, Gary Markowitz, is my stepson, so it
was kind of interesting giving your own kid kind of a glimpse behind the
door that he may not have realized or without— You're showing him
something he doesn't know about.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, I hope he was over eighteen by that time.
-
GELBART
- He was. He was.
-
COLLINGS
- Would you like to break for today?
-
GELBART
- No. What time is it?
-
COLLINGS
- It's twelve-thirty.
-
GELBART
- No, we can go another fifteen if you want.
-
COLLINGS
- I'm going to—
1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE
October 12, 2005
-
GELBART
- So United States went on the air. Lots of mail,
"Can't watch this in the same room with my wife." Or, "When did you
start looking into my bedroom?" No rating at all, impossible in that
position. I'm not saying it would have been better anywhere else,
because so often in television it's what's in front of you and what's
behind you, and there was nothing in front or behind that would work for
them. So we shot thirteen and we were cancelled after eight on the air,
because nobody came.
-
COLLINGS
- Was there anything else on the air at that time that approximated it in
any way?
-
GELBART
- Like this? Not yet. I mean, there's being ahead of the curve, and then
there's being—
-
COLLINGS
- So what would you point to after that that—
-
GELBART
- That came close?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- I don't know, because— And that's not to say there weren't any, it's
because I watch TV of that kind so infrequently. I guess the show
with—the something of Molly—
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, The Education—
-
GELBART
- Not education. The trials, the travels, the something, with Blair.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Brown?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, and she lives in New York, I think.
-
GELBART
- Yes. [The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd] That
was the closest. It was kind of meditative and lifelike without trying
to be real, and then thirtysomething.
-
COLLINGS
-
thirtysomething, did you like that show?
-
GELBART
- I didn't watch it. For that matter, I mean, M*A*S*H, when people are prepared to talk about it, I mean St. Elsewhere, so much that followed in terms of
medical shows. So there's some, I can't even say satisfaction, some
interest that you do something that other people pick up on and find
repeatable.
-
COLLINGS
- Would you consider doing something like that now?
-
GELBART
- Which?
-
COLLINGS
- Like United States?
-
GELBART
- No. I can't write about it. I don't want to write about love and
marriage now.
-
COLLINGS
- So what do you want to write about now?
-
GELBART
- I want to write about scoundrels.
-
COLLINGS
- Back to Volpone.
-
GELBART
- Back to Volpone. I'm working on a number of
things. I wrote a screenplay with my son Gary about gentrification of
our cities and what happens to less fortunate participants in that,
those dramas. I'm writing a— It's not a follow-up, but it's in the mode
of Mastergate. Did we talk about Mastergate?
-
COLLINGS
- No, no.
-
GELBART
- Well, I'm working on a radio play for the BBC called Abrogate, which is an investigation of this administration,
three or four administrations down the line. And I'm working on a— This
will just be for one night, but people are free to do it if they think
it's worth doing again, a play— Not a play. Again a congressional
committee investigating what I call Floodgate,
so I have a gate trilogy going.
-
COLLINGS
- Great.
-
GELBART
- I do a lot, but I find it's harder and harder to get stuff on these
days. Maybe not for other people, but—
-
COLLINGS
- Why is that?
-
GELBART
- I don't know. It would depend on the project. I did a play— Not a play.
I did a musical revue out here called Like Jazz
last year at the Mark Taper Forum with Cy Coleman, with whom I wrote City of Angels, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman,
who are very prestigious lyricists, and we're getting that ready for
Broadway. We have financing and all of that, so that's another
project.
-
COLLINGS
- So do you think that the theater and radio are more satisfying for
you?
-
GELBART
- Radio, no. Radio only because of the BBC and only because I'm writing
something that is so tough on this present administration that I know no
one else will put it on, but I know that if it finally exists in play
form that maybe it will get done here.Motion pictures are almost impossible for me because a lot of reasons. If
we're going to meet again, I'll try to come up with those reasons. All
right?
-
COLLINGS
- All right. Okay. Do you want to break now?
-
GELBART
- No. Do you have another question?
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay. Well, I didn't sort of prepare anything on Tootsie, which you probably don't even want to talk about. Is
that correct?
-
GELBART
- We can talk about it, but let's do that next time when I might have some
fresh answers. What else did you want to?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, we could talk about Blame it on Rio—
-
GELBART
- Okay.
-
COLLINGS
- —which I really enjoyed.
-
GELBART
- Me, too. Me, too. Well, that's a colorful story. When I was doing Tootsie, when I was working on Tootsie, and not having an easy time with Dustin
Hoffman, he said, "Why don't you go see a movie called—." And I forget
what the title was, but it's what Blame it on
Rio was based on. It was a French film (Un
moment d'égarement), and it was playing in a little art house
in Santa Monica. I saw it and it was very amusing, but I did not want to
work with Dustin Hoffman again.So I said to my friend Stanley Donen, "If you want to see a cute movie,
not with the idea that you want to make it, there's this thing called—."
Which I'll find.So Stanley saw it. He said, "I love this. And I know the Frenchman who
wrote it and directed it. Why don't we do it together?"I said, "Well, I would feel funny, because Dustin put me on it and I
don't want to feel that I passed it off to some—," blah, blah, blah.So Stanley went ahead and made a deal, got the rights to it, assigned a
writer (Charlie Peters), and by that time I had fallen out with Dustin.
So when Stanley called me and said the script can use some help, I said,
"I'm available." So I did a lot of work on it, and I think it is funny.
I mean, it's one of the few things that I have seen that I've written or
been part of that I laugh at now because there's some wonderful lines it
in.One of the nice things about it was I got to go down to Rio for a couple
of weeks and spend some time there, ostensibly working on the script and
working with Michael Caine again, with whom I'd worked way back in The Wrong Box.But then the movie came out, and it was a shit storm. I mean people were
so offended at the— Well, I think Stanley made a mistake, although I was
part of it, in having someone so pneumatic play the leading role. I
won't mention her name, but she's a young woman that was just— I mean
she would have been over-endowed for a statue in the most scandalous
times in Rome, and it would have better, I think, if we hadn't played
up— Or played less on her physicality. That said, it was funny, and Joe
[Joseph] Bologna is very funny.When it got as shot down as it did by the critics, I remember Michael
Caine saying, "I've never seen such mass hypocrisy, because we know this
goes on, and why can't people have a sense of humor about it?" But it
was the wrong picture at the wrong time, I mean. When a country—
-
COLLINGS
- What was the year on that?
-
GELBART
- I don't know, but and it wasn't as bad as it got to be in our
society.
-
COLLINGS
- '84, I believe?
-
GELBART
- Was it '84? I think that's right. Well, then I'm shifting. Then that's
an anachronism. I mean we weren't as aware then of how many people prey
on young girls, so maybe I'm giving it an importance—
-
COLLINGS
- When I read the synopsis before I saw the movie, I was wondering, and
then when I saw the movie, I mean Michael Caine comes off as so somebody
who is just dragged into this by the energy, the insistent youthful
energy of this girl. We all know how insistent young people can be and
how hard it can be to fend them off, whether they want to buy some
ridiculous thing or what have you, and that really comes out for me.
-
GELBART
- Well, then good. I think you're very discerning, because a lot of people
would say we were making Michael the victim rather than the girl, but
clearly what you've just said plays a great part in it, that he is swept
up by her enthusiasm, and his defenses are not all that strong to start
with. But anyway, despite it all, it remains a memorable experience
because it was fun to write, it was fun to see. Just the criticism
wasn't fun to take.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, going into it, I mean, were the cast discussing what might be some
of the possible reactions to the film?
-
GELBART
- No, I don't remember it, because I only stayed the two weeks, and then
we, my wife and I and my son Adam, we were down there, and we left. So
whatever discussions took place, I was not privy to.It was also Demi Moore's, I think, first sort of major role. She didn't
look too comfortable in it, but she got very comfortable naked and in
front of the cameras later on. I don't know what else to say about
it.
-
COLLINGS
- You said that Forum was really sort of one of
your favorite pieces, and M*A*S*H, I presume, in
terms of television is probably your favorite?
-
GELBART
- In television?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- No. Oh, sure, I mean, god, four years of a personal soapbox. You'd have
to be pretty ungrateful to not— What are my favorites?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Well, it's not so much a favorite, it's a surprise to me that I was able
to do Barbarians at the Gate. I am so unsmart
about finances that I never thought I could do a comedy based on high
finance.
-
COLLINGS
- In terms of your thing that you're doing now with the—I think you put it
somewhere—straight from the spleen, regarding the present
administration—
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- —is this the first administration that you've really felt you needed to
go out of your way to write about specifically?
-
GELBART
- Oh yes. Oh yes. Will Rogers used to joke about senators, and Plautus
joked about senators in the first Senate, so they've always been fair
game. And I was making jokes about Harry [S.] Truman and whoever in M*A*S*H, and certainly every week in Bob Hope we
would talk about Washington. But feeling as I do that we've never had a
more destructive group of corrupt officials and dangerous ones in
Washington, this is from the spleen. Those others were not from the
spleen. Those others were some kind of detached conventional observation
of politicians as a group being what we all think they are. But this
bunch, I mean, they're threatening the planet.
-
COLLINGS
- I think that's what I was trying to ask you before when we were talking
about M*A*S*H, because Will Rogers' humor, for
example, is always sort of based on the idea that those inept
politicians don't have as much common sense as the common man.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- Of course, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington plays on
that kind of thing.
-
GELBART
- Well, now we have the— Yes, I'm sorry.
-
COLLINGS
- So in M*A*S*H, it was kind of like oh, how inept
the politicians are.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- But now you've made a switch, and you're saying it's not that they're
inept, it's that they're dangerous. It's that they're corrupt. Those are
the words you—
-
GELBART
- They're dangerous, they're corrupt, and in order to demonstrate how
inept government is that really all, all society benefits from corporate
or private enterprise, they have done their best to strip any "eptitude"
from government. We see it. We see it on the news.
-
COLLINGS
- So this is another level of magnitude compared to what the kinds of
criticisms you were making in M*A*S*H?
-
GELBART
- I think so, because I think what they're doing is much more important
than picking a pocket or going on a junket. They are threatening,
literally threatening our lives. Some people are no longer threatened.
They have been deprived of their lives because of FEMA [Federal
Emergency Management Agency] and other exercises. And with the avian flu
looming, we don't know the quality. I've already heard the quality of
some of the people in charge of this study being suspect in terms of
qualifications of what they're doing.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, god, more like Friends of George Bush or something.
-
GELBART
- FOBs, Friends of Bush.
-
COLLINGS
- Right.
-
GELBART
- They used to be Friends of Bill's, right?
-
COLLINGS
- Right, it used to be Friends of Bill's, yes.
-
GELBART
- No, I think I would have been—I know I would have been as worked up as I
am in any event, and I'm one of millions, hopefully. But because of the
children, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren, it makes it even
more, as you know from your own personal experience.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. I don't know if you want to make this a part of your oral history,
but we haven't really talked about your kids and what they're doing.
-
GELBART
- Whatever's fine.
-
COLLINGS
- I know that you've mentioned your stepson's in the entertainment
industry.
-
GELBART
- Right, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- What other kinds of things do the kids get into?
-
GELBART
- Do other kids do?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- My son Adam, he's forty-five now, when he was eighteen he said, "Don't
make a job for me. Don't call your friends and have them give me some
kind of a position. I don't really want to do that." What he is is an
absolutely brilliant model maker and radio control artist.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, neat. That's very interesting.
-
GELBART
- It is interesting, and he's worked on some amazing assignments. I mean
the most recent one— He does it all the time, but his most recent work
was in The Aviator. He built that Spruce Goose
and he flew that. It's just extraordinary. So he does that. I'll tell
you about the rest next week.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Do you want to break now?
-
GELBART
- Yes. It's my back. It's not—[End of October 12, 2005 interview]
1.13. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE
October 26, 2005
-
COLLINGS
- This is Jane Collings interviewing Larry Gelbart in his home in Beverly
Hills on October 26th, 2005, and it's tape [nine]— I'll get back to you
on that.[recorder turned off]
-
COLLINGS
- Good morning, Larry.
-
GELBART
- Good morning, Mr. Chairman.
-
COLLINGS
- Are you going to take the Fifth [Amendment]?
-
GELBART
- Yes, tell me.
-
COLLINGS
- Is that your light?
-
GELBART
- No, no.
-
COLLINGS
- Before we get back into the chronology, I had a few kind of like thought
and opinion questions. You had said last time that you didn't know
anyone who wasn't a first-generation immigrant growing up, and of course
you must have known a lot of second-generation immigrants like
yourself.
-
GELBART
- Well, when I say that, I mean in my earliest years.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, earliest.
-
GELBART
- Plus a lot of immigrants.
-
COLLINGS
- Was there a point where you began to feel like that environment for you
changed? I supposed when you came out to Los Angeles.
-
GELBART
- I think when I came. Yes, when I went from places named after Polish
generals to places named after Mexican or Spanish generals.
-
COLLINGS
- So that was a big change with that.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- I was watching a documentary about Caesar's
Hour, and Mel Brooks make the comment, he says, "He assumed that
everyone in America was a little nutty."
-
GELBART
- Mel did?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Mel assumed?
-
COLLINGS
- No, Mel said that about [Sid] Caesar.
-
GELBART
- Oh. Oh, that Caesar thought that everybody in America was a little
nutty?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Only someone supremely nuts himself.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Because I just wanted to ask you, I mean the Caesar's Hour show has such a—
-
GELBART
- Glow.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, glow, and kind of like a frenetic edge.
-
GELBART
- Oh, yes, very urban, very Jewish-family show. I don't mean it was a
family show. I mean the people in it all were clearly raised by neurotic
Jews.
-
COLLINGS
- Actually, that goes actually to another question that I had. Maybe we'll
skip ahead to that. Your name comes up in works discussing what is now
being called Jewish comedy or Jewish humor.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- This is one of the books, The Haunted Smile: The
Story of Jewish Comedians in America, Funny Already: A History of
Jewish Comedy with Television Program; A Gift for Laughter: Comedy
and the Jews.
-
GELBART
- You mean I've been outed?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. But what I'm trying to say is that this is sort of a way of looking
at film and humor and comedy that's really something from the eighties
and nineties.
-
GELBART
- A look back at or a summing up or a revelation or—
-
COLLINGS
- At that time, I mean did you guys say, "Oh, we're doing Jewish
humor"?
-
GELBART
- No. No. I don't think anybody that's being himself or herself ever says,
"I'm doing this as a representative of a group," or, "Gee, I'll bet all
this is adding up to something." No, I don't think so.I think we probably have gone here. So much of popular writing; that is
to say not literature, radio and television, came from people who are
generally acknowledged to have a point of view that borders on the wry
or the satirical. Jews, we sort of had a corner on that market, or a
cornerstone on that market, as I heard someone say recently.Do you have a pencil?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Thank you. I just wanted to use that somewhere, not as mine, but—
-
COLLINGS
- You're just going to start writing right here and now.
-
GELBART
- Yes, in front of you, he exposed himself.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. This is probably a silly question, but was there also any kind of
sense after World War II, do you think, of a kind of an acceptance of a
more perhaps sort of like offbeat or even noir-ish sensibility which
perhaps faded as the war years faded in memory?
-
GELBART
- I don't know. I would leave that to social—
-
COLLINGS
- Just wondering what you would think about that.
-
GELBART
- No, I don't think so.
-
COLLINGS
- Because I was just really struck by some footage of the Lawrence Welk Show in comparison with Caesar saying that the Lawrence Welk Show had pushed Caesar's
Hour off.
-
GELBART
- Well, if I'm being repetitious, stop me as soon as it gets so, but it
pushed it off because it was, as most, as many things do, for an
economic reason. Once the price of sets came down, more people bought
them, and the wider the audience, in fact, the less educated, and so it
was a lot easier to understand "and a one and a two and a three" than
some of the more esoteric paths we may have taken with Sid.
-
COLLINGS
- Did Caesar and your group ever consider changing anything?
-
GELBART
- No, no. No. You can't. I mean, there are those people who do watch the
market and try to keep up with it, adapt to it, change for it, which is
adapting for it, but no. We were all trapped in our own, happily,
ways.
-
COLLINGS
- You were off the show before it was cancelled, right?
-
GELBART
- I try to do that as often as possible. I try to jump ship even before it
sails.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Okay. Another question. Lucille Kallen, right, was the sole female
writer for Your Show of Shows?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Then Selma [Diamond], you didn't work with her?
-
GELBART
- No. I did work with Selma Diamond, who I knew from radio days. We had
been on Duffy's Tavern together for a short
time, and I knew Selma. She was kind of a fixture.
-
COLLINGS
- How did the women fare in the writer's room? It sounds like it was
pretty crazy place, kind of like locker-room-like.
-
GELBART
- Well, yes, but insanity has no gender. We didn't think of them so much
as the woman in the room as another writer in the room, and if she said
something that made the cut, fine. If not, it wasn't, "Oh, women are bad
drivers and bad joke writers."
-
COLLINGS
- But what about all the high-jinks, like Caesar trying to throw Mel
Brooks out the window and—
-
GELBART
- I think there's some who might have joined him. [laughs] No, it was
either Selma was one of the guys or all of us were one of the girls, but
it was fine.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Just wondering about that.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- I think that it's time for us to get into what's probably been called
your reportage trilogy.
-
GELBART
- My reportage trilogy. Oh, the HBO films?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, Barbarians at the Gate, Mastergate, and Weapons of Mass Distraction.
-
GELBART
- And Pancho Villa.
-
COLLINGS
- I was going to ask you, yes.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- The work leading up to that sort of celebrates the individual in the
face of the institution in many times. How would this other work, which
seems in some ways to be quite different, continue that theme, or are
you on to something else with that work?
-
GELBART
- It's only in hindsight that a pattern emerges. It's like being in a
darkroom and suddenly something you didn't know was there is there as
the liquid brings it into view.I was drawn to Barbarians because it was a very
difficult but a wonderful yarn with incredibly colorful characters. It
was meant to be a motion picture first.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, it was?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- After the book, you mean?
-
GELBART
- After the book, it was optioned by quite an astonishing man named Ray
Stark, who made motion pictures at Columbia Studio, and Ray— I read the
book. I didn't read the book. First I read a review, and I thought,
"That's the book I want," so I sent for it and, of course, it started
immediately to gather dust on my bedstand because that's what happens
these days when you can get them so easily and still don't have any more
time to read them.But he called very soon thereafter and said, "Do you know of a book?"I said, "Yeah, I'm looking forward to reading it."He said, "Please read it, because I'd like to make it into a film."So I did and I realized, generally, it's good to be frightened about an
idea rather than thinking it's going to be a slam-dunk, which is
probably something I've said before with you. Columbia Pictures put up
the money, and after a few drafts decided that it was not really a good
investment to spend the kind of money that would have been required to
make a motion picture with probably a very limited audience. Certainly
wasn't going to be a date movie, all this talk about leveraged buyouts,
none of which I understood when I started to write the script.So Ray went to HBO, a company that had expressed an interest in buying it
even as he was doing it and said, "Would you like to make it as an HBO
film?" And they jumped at the chance, so we went over there. Again,
looking back, I realize it was a tremendous challenge because I don't
know anything about it.
-
COLLINGS
- What drew you to the material, besides the character?
-
GELBART
- Just the power, the power of those people, the recklessness of those
people. A couple of the characters were just irresistible, real-life
people, and I resisted meeting any of them because I didn't want them to
have to— And they would have sort of campaigned for themselves, and I
wanted to be able to treat them from a distance and from the record,
rather than how they might want to influence my portrayal of them. But
it was a terrific experience, just terrific.
-
COLLINGS
- Did any of them talk to you after they saw the piece?
-
GELBART
- Any of those people?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- No, but I got word about it.
-
COLLINGS
- What did they think?
-
GELBART
- Well, some were extremely unhappy, but not knowing them, it didn't
really matter what they thought because I never wanted to know what they
thought. Anyway, that was the first, and as I said, I really wasn't
thinking about— I just thought it was a chance to write a very good
movie. It turned out to be a good movie, but for the small screen.Weapons of Mass Distraction, a gentleman named
Bob Cooper, who was one of the people in charge at HBO, came to me and
he talked about the tabloidization of America and how much people were
into reading the rags, as we call them, the tabloids. So I got this take
on it, which it turned out to be successful, I think, and I liked it
because it was an original and, looking back, I've done an awful lot of
adaptation, so I always welcome the chance to do something which at
least I think might be original, and so we did that one.The third one of the HBO films was a case, again, of HBO coming to me and
saying, "We have this enormous research about the Mexican revolutionary
general [Francisco] Pancho Villa and his flirtation with the early movie
industry." I read the material and I was hooked, and so I did that for a
couple of years.
-
COLLINGS
- That seems like a strange thing for a movie conglomerate to be
interested in.
-
GELBART
- Well, they're interested in everything. I mean, they have such an
unfillable maw, that everything is grist. But movie people, as a rule,
like nothing better than stories about other movie people.
-
COLLINGS
- That's true, yes.
-
GELBART
- This one had it all, it had war and it had the birth of Mexico and the
birth of pictures, modern Mexico, and so it was irresistible.The other one, Mastergate, actually, Mastergate began life back in, I guess, the late
eighties. I had an invitation from Robert Brustein, who was then the
artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge at
Harvard [University]. I always say "at Harvard" because it lets me say
me and Harvard in the same sentence. It's not part of their address.But he said he wanted to do a political play, and he mentioned a play
called Peace by, I believe it was Aristophones,
and I read it and I couldn't make head or tail of it because it's very
hard to read a classical piece by yourself without the help of others,
and all the notes in the world don't really help. I just felt I
underprepared, unprepared to tackle something like that.But it was around that time that the Iran Contra hearings were going on
or just had finished, and I was, as always, glued to my set for those
kinds of things. I think what I love mostly is just how they corrupt the
language, how they— It's not true that it's a first casualty. It's
really grammar and anything to do with the word, public speaking.So I said I would like if he would— Instead of that, I would like to,
instead of Peace, I'd like to take a try at
doing a full congressional committee hearing looking into some
government abuse. And so it was inspired by two things, one, the Iran
Contra situation and the other thing was there was a moment at that time
when there was a great deal of heat on 20th Century Fox, the studio. It
was owned by Marvin Davis and a man named Marc Rich. Marc Rich later
became even more infamous than he was, because he became a tax fugitive,
and he was one of the first people that President [William Jefferson]
Clinton pardoned.But Marc Rich was subpoened by some branch of the government and refused
to come home to testify, and he was being fined something like a hundred
thousand dollars a day for every day he ignored the subpoena. One of the
remedies which the government, or penalties which they thought they'd
impose, was that they would take over his half of 20th Century Fox. So
the notion of Washington bureaucrats running a Hollywood studio, again,
was kind of irresistible, so I married the two things. I was looking
for— I wanted to get "gate" in the subject, in the title, and so I said
to my wife one day, "What can I call this thing? I want something-gate."She said, "How about Mastergate?" Of course, I
sparked to it immediately and named the studio Master Pictures, so as to
justify the use of Mastergate.So we did it at the American Repertory Theatre, and Frank Rich, who was
then the drama critic for the New York Times,
paid me the great compliment of coming up from New York to see the show.
As it turned out, his review was printed on February 14th, Valentine's
Day, and it was just that. It was just a glowing, glowing, glowing,
incredibly wonderful review of the show, and he said it had to go to New
York, but by way of Washington, because they should see this.
-
COLLINGS
- Did it ever play in Washington?
-
GELBART
- I submitted it to the Kennedy Center, and they said it was too
political. But I did open it in New York and, unhappily, Frank gave it a
far less enthusiastic review.
-
COLLINGS
- Because it was longer at that point, right?
-
GELBART
- No, it wasn't so much that it was longer. I think the surprise was over,
for one thing, and it really was. I call it a play. It's really a very,
very, very extended sketch. It's a satire, although it had its own
little storyline, which was quite a good one, actually. I had the
mechanics of the scandal were that the government having taken over
Master Pictures, used the shooting of a film in Central America as a way
of getting money to the Contras. So I was mirroring—
-
COLLINGS
- They could just shovel endless amounts of money and nobody will—
-
GELBART
- Exactly. They added it all to the budget of the movie, which was
eventually, I think, 1.3 billion dollars with catering.It ran on Broadway. It ran on Broadway for sixty-seven performances, I
think, had a very small following, enthusiastic but small following, and
I remember it taught me a fantastic lesson, and I don't even remember
most lessons that I've thought I've learned.But the play closed too early for my taste on, I think, December 9th of
'89, and December 10th, City of Angels, which I
was also working on at the same time, opened. So it was really that
thing about one stage door closing and another one opening, and not
ignominiously, but as the show was kind of put to death, the next one
was so highly praised, City of Angels, that I
kind of learned to not be too up or too down about anything, because
there was only a day that could separate comedy from tragedy.
-
COLLINGS
- It seems like you've kind of enjoyed the theater more than the movies.
Is that—
-
GELBART
- Oh yes, oh yes, because I never aspired to direct. The end of a movie,
usually, for me was putting the brads in the script and sending it off
and then having other people do their stuff, whereas in the theater,
without directing, you're there every moment. You're there with the
actors. You're there with the audience.
-
COLLINGS
- So you don't tend to do that on the set for one of your scripts for
film?
-
GELBART
- No, no, no. No. And scripts tend to be taken away from you anyway. They
tend to be passed on to the next writer, the next writer, the next
writer. That doesn't happen— It didn't happen at HBO, happily. It
certainly didn't happen at the American Repertory Theatre, and it didn't
happen on Broadway.
-
COLLINGS
- So how do you work with actors in the theater when they're putting on
one of your scripts?
-
GELBART
- Well, you don't work directly with them. Certainly you're there and
you're available, not so much to explain what you mean; that's the
director's job. First it's the script's job. I get along well with
actors because I need them and I like them, but not all of them any more
than you like everybody in every way that you're involved with people.
But I'm there to clarify if they want clarification, and more
importantly, or just as importantly, I'm there to see if I can't make
their roles better as a result of knowing them, knowing their strengths,
their weaknesses, giving them more, changing what they have, because
you've written the concerto and now the pianist is working on it, and
you see that you can make a better marriage between your work and
theirs.
-
COLLINGS
- So have there been instances where as the actor works with the part,
that it's actually changed in really significant ways?
-
GELBART
- Yes, I think it has. I think that happened in Sly
Fox, working with George C. Scott. It took on his darker real
malevolence or maybe it wasn't real, maybe it was just his public
malevolence. But that got shaved very much as a result of having— The
role, as a result of working with him, and then he had— Another good
thing about the theater is when a movie plays, that's it. Nobody goes
back and re-cuts it. But with a play, which is plastic forever, after we
finished the New York run, it wasn't done in L.A. for perhaps a year,
and when we were rehearsing a Los Angeles company, George again
starring, George had another idea for the ending, and it was wonderful.
You just put it in right then and there. You don't have to rebuild sets
and you don't have to do the movie madness, and it works.Again, and best of all, though, you get to work with an audience. You
don't get to work with an audience with a movie unless you play the
picture for them, check their reactions, go back and fix it or change
it, but this is so— I mean you hear them breathing and you see them. You
see all kinds of people, real live people. [laughs]I remember watching a performance of the revival of Sly Fox, which we did a couple of years ago in New York, and I
was standing in the back of the theater. I can't sit during a
performance of anything I've ever—
-
COLLINGS
- Why is that?
-
GELBART
- I don't know. I need to walk away from it. I need to look somewhere
else. I can't be trapped there. I just can't. But during the
performance, I heard [imitates noise], and I thought, "My god, what is
that sound?" Then again, like a [imitates noise], this terrible—
-
COLLINGS
- It's like a leopard in the audience.
-
GELBART
- Yes, I thought somebody was dying or something. It was an animal, it was
a seeing-eye dog. [mutual laughter] This woman had come to hear the
play, and the dog was having a bad dream or listening too carefully and
registering his own opinion.There was a time in England, I directed, or misdirected, a revival of A
Funny Thing Happened in a city called
Chichester, and on opening night there was a contingent of people from
an asylum there. There was all this inappropriate laughter and crazy
sounds now and then. But, oh, god, but that's the theater. You're part
of it. It's part of you. It's not a process that takes place someplace
else and you need a parking permit to go visit your work.
-
COLLINGS
- It sounds so much more satisfying than making movies—
-
GELBART
- It is.
-
COLLINGS
- —that you sort of wonder why anybody makes movies.
-
GELBART
- Because they don't know how to do the other thing, or they don't want to
do the other thing. They think that's archaic, and of course, you can't—
In movies, talent is a special effect— I mean in the theater. But in
movies, it's a giant erector set or train set, as Orson Welles called
it.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, they really are very different—
-
GELBART
- Animals.
-
COLLINGS
- Animals. Very different, yes.
-
GELBART
- One is an animal and the other one is a special effects animal.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. What was the ending that George C. Scott innovated?
-
GELBART
- I don't remember. It was just an extension of a conversation between his
character and his servant, Mosca in the original Volpone, and Simon Abel in the adaptation. I wish I could
remember it, and it's somewhere in the archives. There's a copy of the
play as it ended in New York, and then there'd be a copy of how it ended
in Los Angeles.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. That's something good to look for.By the way, you were talking about how you had seen the Ollie [North]—
The Contragate hearings.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you watch the Clarence Thomas hearings as well?
-
GELBART
- Yes. Oh, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Did that spark any thoughts?
-
GELBART
- Yes. Well, just how stupid people are. I mean I still remember Senator
[Patrick] Leahy saying, "Judge Thomas, Miss Hill says that you—" what
she said he said, you know, that he was always making these lascivious
references and so on, so on.She said, "Yes, yes, Senator."And he said, "And he says they're not true."She says, "I know, Senator."He said, "Well, why would he say that?" I mean is that really good
lawyering? Is that really— "Why would he say that? Why would anybody be
dishonest?"
-
COLLINGS
- Gee, I've never heard of that.
-
GELBART
- Well, actually, I was lucky. I was in on the very first of the televised
hearings, and that was the [Senator Joseph] McCarthy hearings, and those
were riveting.
-
COLLINGS
- What were you thinking about during those?
-
GELBART
- Just how much better this is than anything anybody can imagine or write.
But I'm just thinking, when was that? Like that was early fifties, so
I've been a junkie now for—
-
COLLINGS
- What were you working on? Do you remember what you were working on at
that time?
-
GELBART
- It would depend on when the McCarthy— If you can find out when the
McCarthy hearings—
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I can. I don't have the exact date.
-
GELBART
- Yes. It would have been Caesar or somebody. No, it wouldn't have been
Caesar, because I remember being home a lot and able to watch it.
-
COLLINGS
- Home at the farm.
-
GELBART
- No, home in New York, watching, watching, watching. Fantastic.
-
COLLINGS
- I remember one of the lines from Mastergate from
your book, "The extent of my involvement is—."
-
GELBART
- "Was limited to extent of my participation."
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- Some good stuff in there. This one is called Floodgate.
-
COLLINGS
- The one that you're working on now.
-
GELBART
- Yes. It's about Washington being inundated with— Being overrun with
outrage, and just the breach in the public faith is such that there's
been this torrent of destruction, so much so that the city government
has been changed to Colorado.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, interesting.
-
GELBART
- So I can do all the [Hurricane] Katrina stuff, but I do it in the
context of Washington having become an emergency, a disaster.
-
COLLINGS
- A disaster area.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- A federal disaster area.
-
GELBART
- Exactly. Then I'm doing one for the BBC. They've commissioned a radio
play, called Abrogate, which is about a
committee of the future examining the events or the responsibility that
this current administration has for abrogating law as many times as they
did. I'm on a "gate" kick.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, you are. Now, is Floodgate for the
theater?
-
GELBART
- It's interesting you should ask, because I don't know where it's for. At
the moment I had the possibility of doing it at the Geffen Theater for
one night as a benefit, just with some actors sitting on stools and
reading, but I'm seeing if— They can't do it until, I think, March, and
that's a long time to wait, especially in these fast-moving times.
-
COLLINGS
- That's right, yes. We'll be on to the next thing by then.
-
GELBART
- Exactly, the next gate or two.
-
COLLINGS
- It really does seem like once you start the ball rolling with these sort
of political shows, that that's a whole new era in your work.
-
GELBART
- It does seem that way, doesn't it? And yet it doesn't have to be
political, whatever it is I do, but it has to be about something,
something I care about.
-
COLLINGS
- In your autobiography you wrote that Weapons of Mass
Distraction is much darker than you expected, that you were
expecting to write something lighter.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- But that you found that you were just a lot more angry about the subject
matter than you realized.
-
GELBART
- Yes, but I really sort of didn't— I really didn't address what I was
angriest about in Barbarians.
-
COLLINGS
- In Weapons of Mass Distraction?
-
GELBART
- Oh, in Weapons?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Oh, Weapons was darker, yes. But there was
something in Barbarians that I didn't
concentrate on enough.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, well, let's hear of it.
-
GELBART
- And that is the fact that tobacco and the fact that so many people got
and get rich killing so many other people, and there are people
connected with the Barbarian situation who give
whole wings to museums and whole wings to hospitals, and yet they really
do kill people and lie to Congress and get away with it. That, I've
never really been able to— Well, I did in a way about a project that you
don't even know about that ever went anywhere, but we can talk about
that later, if you remember to ask me about: C-Scam.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay.
-
GELBART
- But, yes, I didn't realize how angry I was when I wrote Weapons of Mass Distraction, about this sort of
mental hijacking that goes on that where our attention is either— Where
we either were distracted or were diverted and ultimately, I think, we
pay a very high price for that.
-
COLLINGS
- I remember when, I think it was in the eighties when suddenly everywhere
you went there was a television set. You'd go to the airport, they're in
the departure lounges, they're in doctors' waiting rooms, they're in
restaurants. It seemed like it happened very suddenly.
-
GELBART
- I think maybe you're suddenly aware of it.
-
COLLINGS
- Maybe I was, yes.
-
GELBART
- I think it happened gradually, but it did. Yes, we're just not allowed a
moment to concentrate on whatever it is we want to concentrate, even if
it's nothing, even if it's just to really blank out, to meditate, to
think. We're just assaulted by people after our money and after our
minds.
-
COLLINGS
- And the advent of the Entertainment Tonight
kinds of magazine shows.
-
GELBART
- Yes, the parasitic shows and the parasitic publications run by, staffed
by people with no real achievement of their own, only there to report on
the achievements and the naughtiness or the privacy of others who do do
something.
-
COLLINGS
- It's an interesting aspect of globalization, because it means that
people are aware of things going on around the world.
-
GELBART
- Mostly breasts are breasts in every country.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, yes.
-
GELBART
- And handsome is handsome and kissing is kissing. It just cuts down on
the need for any thinking. It's just so primal or atavistic.
-
COLLINGS
- It's interesting. So what is the story of Weapons of
Mass Distraction?
-
GELBART
- The story of Weapons of Mass Distraction?
-
COLLINGS
- I've read it, but let's hear it from you, because it seems like it's
very multilayered.
-
GELBART
- Well, it's about what happens when the rivalry between two men permits
them to do to each other what they're so busy otherwise doing to others,
that is, saying, outing someone's sexuality, revealing the most intimate
parts of another person's life, pandering to prurient curiosity. These
two men are rivals, each has his own media empire, and because they lock
horns over the purchase of a football club, they begin to use all the
weapons at their disposal to attack one another, to the great
appreciation and further distraction of their audience.There was a real-life counterpart at that time. Ted Turner, before he
sold out his interests in CNN and MGM and whatever else he had interests
in, he and Rupert Murdoch had a tremendous battle, and they were always
slamming each other, each in his own way, each in some different part of
the media, and it finally extended to the— I mean, it finally reached
the point where each one had a baseball club, the Atlantic Braves versus
the Brooklyn— The Los Angeles Dodgers. Brooklyn Dodgers. And, you know,
people said at the time, "Is this about them?"I said, "Well, it's about people like them, and we see it all the time."
"My media is bigger than yours."
-
COLLINGS
- Wasn't there another story about a family?
-
GELBART
- Yes. I wanted to show that what goes on in first class affects the
people down in the boiler room. I'm talking ships, of course, not
aircraft.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, right.
-
GELBART
- So I invented this couple, Rita and Jerry. He was a telephone linesman,
went out and worked on those poles doing whatever they do, and when his
company was bought by one of the media giants' companies, he lost his
job and so his life went down, down, down, down to robbing his kids'
piggybanks to go buy a beer because he was drinking because he had
nothing to do. The last job he has on the show is he's one of the
workers who cleans out the portable toilets at the new stadium that's
being constructed by one of our two protagonists. Eventually— Well,
specifically, he gets so drunk and he becomes sexually inactive at home,
looks for sex in other places, is completely de-balled. Eventually he
winds up in a freeway car chase, and his wife is at home watching him
being chased and finally coming through the goddamned living room wall,
and they wind up as two unfortunate Jerry Springer types on a television
show owned by one of our two moguls, who eventually join forces to buy
the team that they were both killing each other to get.
-
COLLINGS
- Is there an accident with a bus?
-
GELBART
- Yes. When Jerry, the telephone man, is at a bar, he picks up a young
woman at the bar, and they go out to his car, both drunk, and they're
making out in the car when his sons' bus, school bus, stops at the
corner to drop some kids off, and the boys see their dad being serviced
by the woman, and he is in such a panic that— Oh, I don't think he ever
sees it. No, he doesn't see it. He doesn't see it. I'm sorry. They just
observe dad in this scene in flagrante, and he
does, going home, cause the school bus that they're on to turn over, to
his reckless driving because he's being— Oh, no, I'm sorry. I forgot the
sequence.He spends the money, the grocery money, on some beer. Then he picks up
the girl, then his sons see him, then he goes to a supermarket, but he
hasn't got any money, and so he goes around the back and he's looking in
the dumpster, and while he's doing that, some provisions men are
bringing some foodstuffs into the market. He steals some of this, they
chase him, the police become part of the chase, they chase him on the
freeway, and as they're chasing him, as he comes off the freeway, the
bus is in front of him, a truck swerves, the bus goes over, catches on
fire, and then he crashes through his own living room. It was a fiery,
literally—
-
COLLINGS
- All the kids on the bus—
-
GELBART
- All the kids on the bus are fried.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, my god.
-
GELBART
- It's a long way from "Thanks for the Memory," right?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Let me flip this over.
1.14. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO
October 26, 2005
-
GELBART
- It was pretty purple.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, it certainly— So, number one, what brought all this out? I mean I
don't see anything in any of your other work where a busload of kids get
burned to a crisp.
-
GELBART
- Well, the director added that, but I liked it so. No, so, no, I won't
deny that I could have said, "No, they don't burn." But I thought,
"Yeah, of course let it all come down on him."It's just that I am not for one moment, not for one millisecond,
comparing myself to anybody like Goya, but look at his first works and
then look at the darkness that crept into his painting, and I'm just one
of many people far less gifted than Goya who finally sort of let the
disappointment, let their frustration, let their anger be expressed
through, in his case painting, in mine HBO.
-
COLLINGS
- So this was a particular anger, frustration, disappointment with the
media business?
-
GELBART
- Yes, because I'm one of the— This being such a young business in such a
young country, we've been around to see the birth of the movies, we've
been around to see the birth of the airplane, we've been around to see
the birth of jazz, popular music, and certainly television and radio,
too. I remember how it started, and—
-
COLLINGS
- That must have been so exciting.
-
GELBART
- It was exciting, but I mean, I don't know whether I said it before to
you, but it's the same as I'm certain the Wright brothers didn't think
anybody was going to drop a bomb on other people from their little
invention, or their very big invention. It's not this disappointment of
what happened to the media, it's disappointment in a country that so
celebrates greed, tries to emulate it, and what the greedy people who
have it all do to everybody else.
-
COLLINGS
- So this all started, this turn for the—
-
GELBART
- This dark turn.
-
COLLINGS
- This dark turn begins with the cycle, this kind of documentary cycle,
because it's not really there in Tootsie.
-
GELBART
- No, it's not there in Tootsie. It's not there
in— Which means that it probably wouldn't have happened if not for cable
television, which is a good— And even that's not what it was, cable
TV.
-
COLLINGS
- No, and you could have done it for the theater, too, right?
-
GELBART
- Yes, but not with the scope. I mean, how do you burn children on the
stage, unless you're doing The Crucible, where
nobody gets burned.
-
COLLINGS
- Also you said in a commencement speech at USC [University of Southern
California], "Commissions have replaced commitment, regarding the film
industry, packaging has replaced passion," and I guess this is all sort
of grist—
-
GELBART
- Citizen Kane is being replaced with Candy Kane.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. This all sort of grist for the mill of Weapons
of Mass Distraction then.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- So that sounds like it's probably like a really important plot point in
everything that you have been doing.
-
GELBART
- Then maybe it is.
-
COLLINGS
- I just wondered if you thought so because—
-
GELBART
- Well, again, I liked it because it didn't exist until I made it exist. I
didn't have a set of characters. I didn't have a plot. I was able to
take just what I saw around me and turn it into something that worked,
sort of worked.
-
COLLINGS
- Have you built from that point? Is the Floodgate
kind of along those lines?
-
GELBART
- Oh yes. Well, it gets angrier. It gets angrier and angrier and probably
a little too word-bound, as in muscle-bound. I start playing with words
to such a degree that maybe sometimes nobody knows how what they thought
was going to be a brilliant sentence ends up to be so loaded and larded
with other meanings that I might even sink that thought with just too
much baggage.
-
COLLINGS
- Is Weapons of Mass Distraction funny at all?
-
GELBART
- I think so. Well, it's black comedy. I mean it's very dark comedy, but I
think it's— I think the scene where [F.] Ross Johnson—
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's in—
-
GELBART
- Oh, sorry, that's Barbarians.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- I got my monsters mixed up. I don't know what's funny about Weapons. I don't go for funny. I just go for
wherever there's an opportunity to comment on something and with
something of a curve or something that's wry. Fall-down funny, I don't
know.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you see when you were a kid what are now called Hollywood social
problem films?
-
GELBART
- Sure.
-
COLLINGS
- Did those make an impression on you at all?
-
GELBART
- Everything in the movies made an impression on me. The short subjects
made an impression on me.
-
COLLINGS
- Because we talked before about how you loved vaudeville and this kind of
thing. Then I was thinking, well, yes, all of those social problem films
were on, too.
-
GELBART
- You loved them. You loved them all, but I mean— Oh, I don't know. It's
the comedies I remember. But the comedies, some of them were of very
high quality, really literate.Go ahead, I'm sorry.
-
COLLINGS
- Absolutely. No, that was a good time. That was a good period, yes.In looking through your files, I was finding all of this evidence of
nascent political activity from your early days.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- You have what appears to be a note card signed by JFK, is that correct,
thanking you for attending an event honoring the arts, hosted by JFK?
The envelope is addressed to you at this address.
-
GELBART
- Well, yes, I think that is a— After he'd been in office a short time,
there was a big— I lived in New York at the time. There was a big
celebration, probably a fundraiser, in the Armory, maybe it was the
first hundred days, I'm not sure, in Washington. A fellow I worked with,
Burt Shevelove, and I were asked to write the continuity for the show.
It was a wonderful, wonderful show. So that was probably it. It was
thanking me for— It would have been a form.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, sure. But did you meet him?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- What was that like?
-
GELBART
- Like terrific.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, tell me what he's like in person.
-
GELBART
- Well, first of all, he glowed. We didn't know it was his liver. He did
have some kind of— He had more medical problems than we can imagine, but
he was kind of almost amber. He looked suntanned, and he was handsome as
hell. I remember after the evening, after the show at the Armory, we
were invited, those of us who helped prepare the program were invited to
a party at the residence of Perle Mesta, who was famous. They used to
call her the hostess with the mostest. She was a big contributor to the
Democratic Party, and her house became the official residence of Vice
President Johnson and Lady Bird, and so we all went over there. And I
remember going to a bathroom and seeing a can of Ajax underneath the
sink and thinking, "My god. Just folks. Was that here or did they bring
that from Texas?"We met him and his wife in a little line, and I remember this so clearly,
and my wife does, too, he met her and he gave her the old MRI, you know,
just scanned her from top to bottom.
-
COLLINGS
- Wow.
-
GELBART
- That was our JFK.
-
COLLINGS
- Wow, how interesting.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Maybe that was just like he just—
-
GELBART
- It was pro forma.
-
COLLINGS
- He did that? That's just what he did?
-
GELBART
- That's right, and then he did the other thing. [laughs]I remember her voice. I thought, "My god, she sounds just like Marilyn
Monroe."Then my partner, Burt Shevelove, was standing next to me, and he gave him
a real, "Hi, Burt, how are ya?" because one of Burt's best friends, who
became one of my really best friends, was a man named Chuck Spalding,
who was very close to the Kennedys, and Burt had obviously met him at
some time when he was senator or whatever. Burt was so— I could hear the
wind go out of him. He got so drunk so fast because he couldn't believe
the President of the United States had said, "Hi, Burt."It was a wonderful night. All the acts did a little impromptu show in the
living room, and you could see he was hitting on— The president was
quite clearly hitting on Mary, of Peter Paul and Mary.
-
COLLINGS
- Really? What was he doing?
-
GELBART
- Well, just you could— He was a flirt, you know.So that note would have been "Thank you, Larry," for whatever you did.
But I told you, it's not that I met him, but I felt somewhat connected
to him because my father used to cut his hair when he came out here,
when the president came out here.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, right, right. Did you see him at that time?
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- How did you get involved in writing that particular show?
-
GELBART
- There was a man named Richard Adler, who was one half of a team called
Adler and Ross, who were songwriters. They wrote only two shows and then
Ross died. They wrote Pajama Game, and then they
wrote the score for Damn Yankees. Adler was a
funny guy. He didn't know he was, but he was. He said to Burt and I at a
meeting about the show, he said, "This is wonderful. This is wonderful,
you guys. And I'm telling you, you're going to get a nice credit on the
program. I saw it this morning, and it says ‘Program written by Larry
Gelbart and Burt Shevelove,' and it's in italics, you know those letters
that slant?" [mutual laughter]We said, "Ooh!" They slant.But, you know, you get asked that a lot, "Will you do this? Will you do
that?" I used to say no to practically everything, but now as there are
fewer friends asking fewer favors, I do more than I have ever done, but
only on the condition that I don't get any credit for it.
-
COLLINGS
- And it has to be in italics, right? [laughs]
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes, but that's easy now.
-
COLLINGS
- What made you want to do this one?
-
GELBART
- JFK. The magic.
-
COLLINGS
- For one of the events, there's a speech that's in your handwriting
labeled "Peck," so this was a speech that you had written for Gregory
Peck?
-
GELBART
- Gregory Peck. Yes, I think— Did he deliver that in Washington?
-
COLLINGS
- It's with that whole packet, and it's in—
-
GELBART
- Oh, that's another thing, though. That wouldn't have been then. Oh,
maybe. Maybe he was on the program. Really? Is that a JFK packet from
then?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, it's a whole folder that's got— No, it's like stuff from a whole
bunch of events.
-
GELBART
- That would have been Peck somewhere else, Gregory, yes, who I also met
in my father's barber chair and then who I got to be friends with later
on in life, played poker with every Sunday.
-
COLLINGS
- Was he a good player?
-
GELBART
- Sort of.
-
COLLINGS
- Sort of, okay.Now, there's also some notes in that folder that look like [Michael]
Dukakis speech notes.
-
GELBART
- I think I wrote some stuff for Dukakis, and I wrote an op-ed piece for
the L.A. Times for him.
-
COLLINGS
- Do you remember that speech that he gave? I think it was at the
convention. There was this kind of continual refrain, "Where was
George?"
-
GELBART
- No, I wasn't part of that.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay, because this speech has got— It's not "Where was George?" It's
"Where was Bush?" It's sort of a refrain.
-
GELBART
- Maybe I did do that. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- You know what, I'm not asking the right person.
-
GELBART
- You should have asked the old me.
-
COLLINGS
- No, I'm just kidding. Yes. No, I'm just kidding.
-
GELBART
- Can you pull my plug there a second? I just want to use the men's room
for a second.[recorder turned off]
-
COLLINGS
- In that folder there's also some testimony before Congress on the
hearings on sex and violence on TV.
-
GELBART
- Oh yes, I remember that.
-
COLLINGS
- In 1976.
-
GELBART
- Yes. I don't think that was in D.C., I think that was downtown L.A. But
it was a congressional committee or whatever.
-
COLLINGS
- Your testimony is kind of interesting because you said that you blame
the networks—no surprise there—and you say that their concerns are
different from yours or ours.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- But your point of view seems to be that there is not enough frank
examination of sexuality as part of the range of human behavior, which I
think was probably not the point of the hearings.
-
GELBART
- I'm sure. [mutual laughter] Right.
-
COLLINGS
- You use the example of that show Phyllis where,
I guess, the daughter had been out all night and there was some question
about whether she had slept with her boyfriend or not.
-
GELBART
- Did she or didn't she, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Then finally Phyllis decides that she hadn't, because her daughter told
her that, and then there was the line, "Unless she's lying," and that
was cut out of the show.
-
GELBART
- I'd forgotten that completely.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, this is part of your testimony. I just thought it was sort of
interesting because it points to the problem that a lot of the 1970s
shows were presenting.
-
GELBART
- Yes. Did you find any of the Family Hour lawsuit?
-
COLLINGS
- No. Could you tell me about that?
-
GELBART
- That would be interesting.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, all right, let's hear about that.
-
GELBART
- That's just that's seventies, I think '77 or '78, and that was at a
trial. I was a plaintiff along with Grant Tinker, I think, Norman Lear,
some other production companies, Danny Arnold, I think, and we sued the
three networks over something called Family Hour. They were instituting
a— They had instituted a policy of not allowing certain words that might
be considered— It was probably a bow to early, very right-wing
conservative pressure. That was good testimony, and we won the case.
-
COLLINGS
- So they were putting— That was when they were starting that sort of
prime time family hour, which was anything before nine p.m.?
-
GELBART
- No, no. Like seven to nine, seven to ten, maybe, you couldn't— That's
where the whole virgin thing came from on M*A*S*H, that situation where—
-
COLLINGS
- Which is what, the virgin situation? They weren't allowed to use the
word "virgin" on—
-
GELBART
- They wouldn't let me use the word "virgin." So I had the guy say he was
from the Virgin Island.
-
COLLINGS
- —virgin rum and, yes.
-
GELBART
- Yes, but that was a result of that. It was terrible. We can joke about
it now, but it was really, really quite awful.
-
COLLINGS
- What were some of the restrictions that it put on your work, do you
think?
-
GELBART
- Well, it had a very chilling effect. You couldn't— The sexuality issues.
I was never concerned with violence, because no one ever hurt anybody
laughing too hard. And it was all verbal. We didn't ever show any body
parts. I guess that didn't start until— And you still don't see a
breast, but you can see a man's bottom, I mean. It's just so crazy and
random and stupid.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you can see dead, cut-open bodies in a morgue, but you can't—
-
GELBART
- Yes, that's right. Yes, exactly.
-
COLLINGS
- Like on CSI or something.
-
GELBART
- Well, yes, that's reasonably— Look at the ads for Nip/Tuck, I mean, you see a naked girl go by you on a bus, and
then she's in— Anyway, I don't know. I think I'm burned out on that
subject.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. All right. Well, I guess I just thought it was interesting,
because it just makes you really wonder if you could do a film like Oh, God! today, for example, or even something
like Tootsie because it's—
-
GELBART
- It's so— It's quaint.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. But also I mean something like Oh, God!,
it's got like the sort of individual responsibility for deciding
religious questions, which—
-
GELBART
- Which is a no-no, right?
-
COLLINGS
- Which is like sort of a no-no today. I mean on the one hand, it's very
quaint, but you sort of even wonder if in the context of the
conservative movement that was getting going at that time, if you could
even do it now.
-
GELBART
- Oh, I think you could. I think you could do that, but I think as you
were doing it you would probably— Well, I think there was some heat even
about the first one where— And it was a line from the book, I think,
where God said—He's asked "Was Jesus your son?" and he said, "Yes, so
was Moses, so was Buddha. They're all my sons." I think someone took
exception to that. But you're always asking for trouble with that. It's
always, now, has been forever, in terms of stepping on somebody's
beliefs.
-
COLLINGS
- I just find it that it would be hard to have a film that has so much
relativism, so much religious relativism in wide release in malls and
across America.
-
GELBART
- Well, if it didn't get made, if it's not—
-
COLLINGS
- Today.
-
GELBART
- Yes, if it's not made today, it's only because the big companies are
afraid of having that kind of pressure brought against them and
jeopardizing their investment. They had no trouble at all finally with
releasing Mel Gibson's blood-drenched [The] Passion [of the
Christ].
-
COLLINGS
- But this one, that one hues more closely to a specific text.
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes. I'm probably not answering your question. I have a feeling of—
I have the feeling I'm not answering your question.
-
COLLINGS
- That's okay. That's all right.Oh, by the way, talking about Oh, God!, what was
it like to work with George Burns?
-
GELBART
- I didn't work with him at all. Again, this goes back to what you said
about the theater, yes. George, happily, was my idea. I suggested that
they cast him, and he was more than happy. There are not a lot of parts
floating around for an eighty-seven-year-old man then. But I didn't work
with him. I just wasn't around for the filming, but I'm sure it would
have been fine. He was funny.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I mean he's perfect.
-
GELBART
- He was wonderful.
-
COLLINGS
- I think the film, one reason the film really works, is because he is not
acting. He's just like unimpressed with the whole—
-
GELBART
- That's right.
-
COLLINGS
- He's just who he is, and John Denver is being the same way. He's a
singer, and he's just who is. Then everybody around them is kind of
acting because they're in a film, and yet John Denver and George Burns
are just kind of—
-
GELBART
- It was wonderful chemistry. It was terrific.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that was nice.We never talked about Tootsie at all. We've kind
of skipped over it.
-
GELBART
- All right.
-
COLLINGS
- I was just wondering, do you think that all of the wrangling that seemed
to take place over Tootsie was sort of typical
of the movie business, or do you think this subject matter presented
special problems?
-
GELBART
- No, the subject matter never, never mattered at all.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I see.
-
GELBART
- No, it was emblematic of an aspect of the picture business where certain
people are indulged to the point where they make it very difficult for
other people, specifically Dustin [Hoffman]. Dustin is very hard to work
with. I accept that he wants some say in how he appears on the screen,
that he just doesn't want to be handed pages and told where to stand. On
the other hand, he's sort of like the kind of officer who doesn't care
how many bodies are at the foot of the hill as long as he takes the flag
off the top if it. He's willing to sacrifice relationships, goodwill,
sensitivity, almost anything, to get his way.
-
COLLINGS
- That's interesting, because that's what the character in the film is
like. How did that happen?
-
GELBART
- That's called Hello, Columbus. [laughs] With all
the wrangling, with all the bad press, with all the speculation, with
all whatever surrounds that picture, I take pride and comfort in knowing
that the central theme is mine. That's not to say that pages and pages
and pages of dialogue aren't and plotting isn't, but when I was first
asked to work on the film, I thought, "You can't make a better
man-in-drag movie than Some Like It Hot, and I'm
not about to try to compete with Billy Wilder," and Iz Diamond, who
wrote the original, based on a German original. So I thought, "What can
this one do that that one didn't?" It was the notion that being where we
were in terms of a new consciousness about the genders, I thought of the
idea of a man becoming a better man because he had found out what it was
like to be a woman and a certain kind of woman.So that was the keystone of the movie, and I think that's what— Well,
first of all, I think despite the difficulty of working with him off
camera, I think on camera he was superb, and I think he really should
have received the Academy Award on several accounts, one, that he was
wonderful, and to break that down, he was wonderful as Michael the
actor, and then he was wonderful as Dorothy, and then he was wonderful
in the role that Dorothy played.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I loved that character.
-
GELBART
- He did a wonderful, wonderful job. I forgot how that sentence
started.
-
COLLINGS
- I was just saying he sounds very much like the character of Michael
Dorsey in the film.
-
GELBART
- Oh, right. Well, there was a lot of what it's like to be an actor in
that movie, and but it just got completely out of hand. Sidney Pollack
and Dustin each relied on other writers to bring in material that
supported their visions, and it got to be a battleground, an absolute
battleground.
-
COLLINGS
- I'm not really trying to like sort of like dig out Hollywood dirt here
or anything.
-
GELBART
- No, that's okay.
-
COLLINGS
- But I'm just really fascinated by the theme of the film itself. I think
it's very interesting that he has this very assertive personality, which
is so unpalatable when he is a male, but when he turns around and he is
this female character, he can be just as assertive and yet people think
it's like surprising and admirable and they like it.
-
GELBART
- Well, they like it because—
-
COLLINGS
- Of course, he tones it down a bit with that southern accent and
everything, but— I'm sorry, yes.
-
GELBART
- No, that's okay. He toned it down not so much— He adapted, he adopted,
he took on the southern accent not so much for that reason, to tone it
down, but to soften his delivery so that he could lose some of the
masculinity that was inescapable when he spoke as a woman. Dorothy
Michaels gets away with stuff because nobody really wants to kiss
her.
-
COLLINGS
- That's interesting.
-
GELBART
- You know?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- If Dorothy was sexually desirable, I think guys would have had a bigger
problem with her.
-
COLLINGS
- That's interesting.
-
GELBART
- Because they would have thought, "She's going to eat me alive." But I
think they recognized what they think was their own masculinity in the
masculinity that underlay Dorothy.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, in a way what you're doing here is— Okay, here it is 1984, which
is still—
-
GELBART
- Early.
-
COLLINGS
- Still early days of the women's— I mean if the women's movement per se
is over, but the women who espoused this philosophy are young. But now
all of a sudden, you've got a woman who's essentially postmenopausal,
mouthing all of these kinds of assertiveness ideas, and that in terms of
the chronology hadn't really happened yet.
-
GELBART
- That's right. Well, it was the difference in if Gloria Steinem said
something and you felt threatened, you were kind of resentful because
you couldn't fantasize about being her boyfriend, but if Bella Abzug
said something, you could give her those points because you weren't
going to hit on her anyway. I mean, I never really even thought about
that before we're talking about it, before this conversation, but I
think that was part of the reason that Dorothy could get away with
it.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I think that's true.
-
GELBART
- And maybe some guys would have thought, "Well, she's this way because
she's disappointed." You know what I mean? If somebody really threw her
a great fuck—excuse me—she'd come around, but I'm not going to
volunteer, you know.
-
COLLINGS
- Poor Les. [mutual laughter]
-
GELBART
- Poor Les, yes. Well, do you know the beginning of Tootsie?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- Well, I was not there at the beginning of Tootsie. The beginning of Tootsie went
like this. A writer named Don McGuire, M-c-G-u-i-r-e, a longtime writer,
director, even actor in Hollywood, he wrote a screenplay called Paging Donna Darling, and it was essentially the
same, but far more farcical, none of the social overtones, about an
actor, an out-of-work actor, who finds himself getting this job, but
hardly any social issues were really addressed. But it was optioned,
fortunately never made.Then it got kicked around to a writer named Robert Kaufman— It's
terrible, I can't remember the man's name, but it's in the history
books. It was slightly improved, but it still had a long way to go.Then Dustin got interested in it, and Dustin worked with his— He called
him his head writer. Now, that's such a strange thing to call somebody
who's a writer, because head of what? There was no staff. He just called
him his head writer, you know, a writer at the head of nothing. Murray
Shisgal. Murray Shisgal was a playwright who wrote a very famous piece
back in the sixties, I think, called Luv, L-u-v,
and the [Does A] Tiger Wear a
Necktie? or—
-
COLLINGS
- Is that where that spelling of love came from?
-
GELBART
- Yes. Well, no. He adapted it. I'm having trouble with adapting, adopted
it. But I haven't said "adaption" yet.But he and Murray were very, very close. And about that time the original
proposed production people were out of it and it had landed at Columbia
Pictures. Murray had made two passes at the screenplay, and it wasn't
good. They weren't good. Frank Price, who was running Columbia then,
which had just been bought by Coca-Cola, called me in and said, "Would
you rewrite this? I'll be very honest with you. If you'll write it,
we'll go forward. If you're not, we're going to dump it because of the
long history," blah, blah, blah.First of all, I knew, again, in the irresistible department, Dustin
Hoffman in a dress, gotta work. But I thought, not just as a guy who
wobbles in his heels. It's just got to be more. I remember the precise
moment when I hit upon that, what I think is the touchstone for the
picture. Dustin and I were driving on the Pacific Coast Highway, he was
living out in Broad Beach, and we were improvising this scene, with
Dustin playing Michael, of course, and I was playing George, his agent.
I forgot what led up to it, but he, Dustin, ad libbing, said something
quite sensitive in the role of Michael, and I said, "You know, Michael,
you're a much better man since you've been a woman," and the car sort of
swerved.He said, "Jesus, that's great. Remember that."I said, "Oh, I'll remember it."So then everything in the movie was tied to that notion, to the education
of Michael, not just to how he felt about other women, but how he felt
about himself as a woman and how he felt as a woman. I think what helped
it was we took the truth about how Dustin looked. We didn't say he
should be pretty. We didn't say won't other people notice he's not
really a woman if we play him as he would be if he were a woman, and
that lent an awful lot to it.
-
COLLINGS
- So what was the movie tied to before you hit on that very central—
-
GELBART
- Nothing. Just farce. But, you know, you think why is one writer righter
than another writer. Because I look at books, photography books, and I
say, "I've got a camera. Why doesn't my stuff look like this?"Dustin insisted upon a scene which would have been much more in
character, which was, in fact, in a version pre-me, and which was the
first thing I threw out, because it was the kind of scene you would have
had if you just said, "Hey, this guy's dressed as a woman. What are all
the things that can happen to a guy if nobody knows he's a woman?"So one of the scenes was— Although this had nothing to do with that, as I
think about it. But one of the scenes was Michael having sex with a
woman, I think Julie, the actress in the soap, and his penis gets caught
on her coil and they have to go the hospital.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, god.
-
GELBART
- Really.
-
COLLINGS
- It sounds so stupid.
-
GELBART
- With a blanket, with a blanket over them, and they have to be
separated.
-
COLLINGS
- That's so weird.
-
GELBART
- It is weird. Now, I'll tell you something even— Here's weird, part two.
Here's the sequel to weird. Long after Tootsie,
Michael made a— Michael. Dustin made a deal to be in a film to be
directed by Blake Edwards, and one of the scenes that Dustin wanted to
do in this movie was the famous penis-caught-on-the-coil scene.
-
COLLINGS
- That's so strange. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- Eventually, the relationship got bagged and they didn't make the movie,
and Dustin threatened Blake with a lawsuit if he retained the
penis-caught-on-the-coil scene. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- If he retained it?
-
GELBART
- If he did it.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay, because this was—
-
GELBART
- "I'm outta here, but so's my property. Don't you dare do that
scene."
-
COLLINGS
- "Okay." [laughs]
-
GELBART
- I think while other writers before me were concentrating on putting him
in a steam room with some naked women, doing this, doing that, I was
trying to find the tone, the key, the real reason to justify doing what
is essentially a 3,000-year-old piece of business. I mean it's in Forum, and that was from Plautus, who had stolen
it from the Greeks.Incidentally, for whatever it's worth, and I don't know that it will ever
happen, but did I tell you about Lysistrata?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- Well, that's another story, but I did do my own adaptation of Lysistrata without modernizing it, combining it
with another Aristophanes play, but essentially the same idea of the
women revolting. The only bow to modernism is I call it Sex and the City State, only to not put anybody
off who's— But I want to do it with an all-male cast as it was done
originally, and probably for a few hundred years thereafter. But maybe
that will happen. I hope it does. Obviously, I'm interested in
cross-dressing, as well as the fate of the world.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Well, I can't imagine that film in 1984 just being a lot of stuff
about—
-
GELBART
- Shtick?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Why not? That's what it would have been.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, it's just unthinkable, because it seems so timely as it is.
-
GELBART
- Well, it got shaped into that. It got shaped and fashioned and forced to
be about something and not just about fun in dresses.
-
COLLINGS
- It's so wonderful when, what is her name, Mrs. Beverly Kimberly, or I
can't remember what the— Kimberly.
-
GELBART
- Kimberly. I've forgot her name. Dorothy Michael as—
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I forgot what her name was.
-
GELBART
- Was it Nurse Kimberly? No, not nurse. Something like that when she makes
an—
-
COLLINGS
- She was in an administrative position in the hospital. But she makes
these wonderful pronouncements about—
-
GELBART
- Yes, and goes off script.
-
COLLINGS
- I love it when she's supposed to read the teleprompter and tell this
battered woman about being patient and therapy and all this, and she
says, "This is horseshit." It's just such a refreshing—
-
GELBART
- It was refreshing. A lot of that, though, is when I say it's Dustin, I
mean he can be so wrong about something like the coil, and yet there is
a brashness about him that's refreshing, and I'm saying that as someone
very "disin-Dustined." [laughs] I write about him in the book. I quote
myself—why not, it's my book—when I say, "Never work with an Oscar
winner shorter than the statue."I ran into him about, oh, gosh, I keep saying two years ago, but it was
about seven, six for sure, more than six, anyway. Why do old people
insist on nailing down a time that nobody else gives a damn about? We
were at a party. I mean this was a triple-A party, you know, and wall to
wall, so that truly as I came in, I was standing there facing him, small
space, and there he was. He said, "Hello, Larry."I said, "Hi, Dustin."He said, "That wasn't hard, was it?"I said, "That wasn't. That was."He said, "I can't tell you how relieved I was to read your book and find
out that the worst thing you could say about me was that I short." Now,
that's terrific. That's almost how do you hate him? Well, I found out
how you hate him, but I mean it was terrific.Then he said to me, because eventually I was really canned off the movie,
you know, chiefly because—
1.15. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE ONE
October 26, 2005
-
COLLINGS
- No, I got that part. You were canned off the movie.
-
GELBART
- I was canned. That's right. I was canned, and one of the reasons was
Mike Ovitz, who was then running CAA, devised this plan where Dustin and
Sidney Pollack and I would all go to Connecticut for a week and spend it
in a house that Robert Redford owned but wouldn't be in, and we could
work out all the remaining script structure, whatever. I said, "No, I
can't. I can't do that."They said, "Why?"I said, "One of my kids is having a birthday party. I can't go."He said, "Well, what am I supposed to—?"
-
COLLINGS
- Send a nice present.
-
GELBART
- [laughs] Exactly. That would have been good.He said, "You're kidding."I said, "No, I'm not kidding." So he really took it to heart, so much so
that among other reasons, that was the chief reason. So he said, "You
know, I've had a few kids since Tootsie."I said, "Yes, I know. Congratulations."He said, "I understand what you mean now. I would not leave my kid. I
wouldn't leave town for all the money in the world."I said, "Well, good. I'm glad you know what that feels like now."He said, "How are your kids?"I said, "Well, our daughter Cathy died last year." I tell you that,
otherwise I would be suspicious, but he burst into tears and he was
crying for a lot of things. I think he was crying because I think— I
know he liked me and I know he knows he hurt me, but he cried like a
baby. But then recovering quickly, he said, "Does this mean we can kind
of work again?"I said, "If it happens, sure. Why not?" Amazing guy.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. You've sort of put me off the stride of the questioning.
-
GELBART
- I'm sorry. Tootsie, Tootsie.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, okay.
-
GELBART
- Oh, I'm sorry. Did I get you, too?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, it's always hard to hear about stuff like that.
-
GELBART
- I know, I know. I'm sorry.
-
COLLINGS
- Let's see.
-
GELBART
- But if you've noticed, any Dustin movie, Dustin Hoffman movie, that it
always seems like a double feature. There's the one he's in and then
there's the one everybody else is in, because he kind of looks after
himself and it's often at the expense of everything else and everybody
around him, except in Tootsie. It worked out
rather well.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, I think one of the things that's interesting about it is that it
almost seems almost like a documentary in a way.
-
GELBART
- Really?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, in the sense that just exactly like you said, that he comes off as
kind of like playing himself and he's in his own movie, and it's almost
like a documentary on Dustin Hoffman in the acting world, in the
beginning part. Then there's Sidney Pollack and he doing the thing as
the agent.
-
GELBART
- Oh, yes, that's kind of verité, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Then that, for me, that makes a kind of a nice bracketing for the
artifice, the obvious heightened artifice of the soap opera scenes.
-
GELBART
- That's interesting. That's interesting, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- So it all works out kind of nicely, and then the scenes with Jessica
Lange and like her dad and stuff, that's in kind of a sort of another
realm that I'm just not quite sure exactly what they're doing.
-
GELBART
- They're there to have the kind of fun you can have when they don't know
that the woman they like is a man. They're there as—
-
COLLINGS
- As kind of straight.
-
GELBART
- So he can fall in love with her for the conventional reasons. They're
there so he can be in bed with her, but not really be in bed with her.
They're there so— They're there for really sort of—
-
COLLINGS
- Reality check.
-
GELBART
- Reality check, meat and potatoes. All the social issues go away about
men, women, our perceptions of each other, whatever, whatever,
whatever.
-
COLLINGS
- In one of the earlier drafts you have a very different agent scene.
You've got the agent sort of saying, "Well, my partner died today and I
don't want to drop dead." It's really different from the way it—
-
GELBART
- "Oh, you're going to kill me," or something, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- He just ends up sort of switching the subject and saying that
Michael—
-
GELBART
- I don't remember that but vaguely now. There were a lot of good things
that got lost. I remember in an earlier version that Michael had been
married before.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, right, and that's in this, too.
-
GELBART
- I remember, he's working in a restaurant and his first wife comes
in.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, and his wife's name is Cathy, and the daughter, the kids are
Sasha and Becky.
-
GELBART
- Right. And he sees what he missed, not having babies with this woman,
and the new husband's name is Michael.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay.
-
GELBART
- Well, if I live long enough, I'll finish the musical comedy version for
the stage of Tootsie and maybe I can get some of
that back in.
-
COLLINGS
- It's really a subject matter that has legs, because it's still such an
important issue today.
-
GELBART
- Yes, it is. It is.
-
COLLINGS
- It's something that really, when you watch it, it doesn't seem dated or
of the eighties or anything.
-
GELBART
- I know, because that situation doesn't go away.
-
COLLINGS
- The line about the cattle prods, do you remember that, where there's a
complaint that the doctors on a certain floor are groping the
nurses?
-
GELBART
- I remember that.
-
COLLINGS
- She says, "I'm going to—."
-
GELBART
- Oh, your bazoozies or something?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, she says, "I'm going to issue every nurse on this floor an electric
cattle prod." Then she makes a phone call and she's putting in a phone
call to a retail farm implement store.
-
GELBART
- Really?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- I don't even remember that. That's not mine.
-
COLLINGS
- That's not yours, okay. Because at that point it just starts to remind
me kind of like a Caesar's Hour or something
like that.
-
GELBART
- Well, yes, I don't think I had anything to do with it.
-
COLLINGS
- I know that we haven't talked about like everything that you've done,
but—
-
GELBART
- Life's too short.
-
COLLINGS
- But I know that you really like the Hawkeye character, but what are some
of the other characters that you've written that you really have a good
feeling for as characters?
-
GELBART
- I don't even know.
-
COLLINGS
- For you, it's really more sort of like situation?
-
GELBART
- Yes, the situation, they're all in situations, hopefully, but it's all
autobiographical in one sense or another. The idealistic and the most
negative aspects of a character are, I'm very ready to admit, are all
aspects of my own personality. I can be as murderous, lofty, petty,
etc., etc., etc., as any of them. I don't know that I— I guess Hawkeye.
Hawkeye was kind of a very easy kind of ventriloquist's dummy for me to
talk through.
-
COLLINGS
- What do you think you would have done if you hadn't been a writer or in
any aspect of entertainment?
-
GELBART
- Well, I wasn't serious enough about my music after a while to have
qualified as a musician. I guess I'd have some aspect of some commercial
endeavor, I'd have learned it, whether it was real estate or— I don't
know why I even say that.
-
COLLINGS
- But something that has to do with people, I would imagine.
-
GELBART
- Or not. I mean, I'm less with people now than ever. I mean you're about
the only one I see, Jane. [mutual laughter] Seriously, I am so wrapped
up in paper, printing paper, that is, that I'm with people less and
less, and the people I'm with tend more and more to be just— Not just,
but be members of the family.I can't sell, really. I can't count. I can probably subtract, just by
doing multiplication and getting the wrong sum. I don't know what I'd
have been. I have absolutely— It's a great question, but I don't have a
great answer.
-
COLLINGS
- What are the things that surprise you most about your life?
-
GELBART
- The fact that I'm still surprised by what I should expect. I think my
whole life surprised me. I used to go to sleep as a little boy with my
hand on my heart waiting for it to stop. I don't know what I thought it
would do after that.
-
COLLINGS
- Really? Why did you do that?
-
GELBART
- I just didn't think I was going to live.
-
COLLINGS
- Why?
-
GELBART
- I just seemed fragile and inconsequential and afraid of death and
completely ignorant about life. So I think the fact that I'm still alive
and that I've seen so much, but over seventy-seven years, between blinks
you do get to see a lot of life.I'm amazed that I traveled as much as I did. I'm amazed that I'm
surrounded by a family, my own family, that I've been married this long,
that I married at all, that I had so much help from so many people, that
I still do from my wife. I guess I'm surprised that I turned into
anything. I mean I wasn't really— I don't think I was— I was a
combination of well treated and maybe not so well treated as a little
boy. I don't think I thought much of myself. I don't think of myself
now. I think a lot of what I've done I think I can be proud of, but I
don't know how I did that. I guess "lucky" is such a strange word. I
don't know. I guess that's obvious, the "I don't know" part.
-
COLLINGS
- When you're working, when you are writing, is it like torture for you or
is it—
-
GELBART
- Oh, no, it's never torture.
-
COLLINGS
- Or is it sort of captivating and supremely enjoyable?
-
GELBART
- I'm engulfed by the work. It's never torture. There's something that
happens to you over the years, beyond the years themselves, and that is
that there's a confidence, not a cockiness, but an awareness. I mean,
when you're younger, when I was younger, I would think, "What if I can't
do this, or what if I can't figure out this problem or what if I don't
even know I have a problem?" You start— I start thinking, if I think
about it, and I don't, because I know the process that's taking place, I
don't have to verbalize it for myself, "if" is replaced by "when." When
I figure this out, when this drops into place, when this happens,
because I know it will. I guess the biggest— That's too morbid. Never
mind.
-
COLLINGS
- No, no, go ahead.
-
GELBART
- I was just thinking one of the biggest cheats, I think, is that I won't
be able to see myself after I die, you know, the look on my face. I'm
not morbid. I was more morbid when I was younger. But I think that all
the things you read about life preparing you for death are true. It just
seems as natural as— Or more natural than even being born, at least, and
of course I'm surprised by the speed. It's not as though— I mean it's as
though every morning is the first morning, that there weren't all these
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of mornings, probably thousands by
now. Mostly I know that I'm not thinking anything that no one has ever
thought before.
-
COLLINGS
- What are your hobbies?
-
GELBART
- Rewriting. [mutual laughter]
-
COLLINGS
- You seem like such a cerebral person. It's hard for me to imagine you
gardening or—
-
GELBART
- I do garden. I do garden. But mostly of the rewriting nature; that is to
say weeding and cleaning up. can't start with a seed and a cup of water.
I don't know how to do that.The grandkids were my hobby for a long time, but the truth is, the aging
process kind of slows you up physically, too. You just haven't got the
energy you had, the strength, and I miss that. I miss being more active.
But I mean, by the same token, they're growing up and they need less of
me than I conned them into thinking they did earlier on.
-
COLLINGS
- Have you sort of introduced your children and your grandchildren to
media, how to read media, and sort of tutored them in this subject?
-
GELBART
- I've really only— You say my children?
-
COLLINGS
- Children and grandchildren, yes, along the way.
-
GELBART
- I think I had a lot to say. I know I had a lot to say about my own
children when I was younger and they were younger, if only to say I
didn't like that because or I liked this because. My wife used to chide
me, she'd say, "You're spoiling everything for them."I'd say, "No, no, no. They don't have to like what I like, but I want
them to know why." Or dislike. I think for the most part they became
quite discerning. I think they've all grown up with a sense of play in
language. I mean playful language, and I don't mean becoming clowns or
standup comics, but I see that in them and I see that in some of the
grandchildren, too, this— This— Are we at that time again? I'm not very
good at reflection.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Would you like to end?
-
GELBART
- Sure.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay.[End of October 26, 2005 interview]
1.16. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE
January 11, 2006
-
COLLINGS
- Last time we touched on your work And Starring Pancho
Villa as Himself, Barbarians at the
Gate, Mastergate, Floodgate, Weapons of
Distraction, and then there's—
-
GELBART
- There's a new gate, Abrogate.
-
COLLINGS
- —Abrogate.
-
GELBART
- I just finished it.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, because you were alluding to that at some point. So this time we
were just going to flesh those out as much as you would like, if you
feel that—
-
GELBART
- You give me some fleshy questions.
-
COLLINGS
- All right. Why don't we start with And Starring
Pancho Villa as Himself.
-
GELBART
- Okay. And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, I
was asked by HBO to write a screenplay based on some research that they
had been doing that was devoted to this insane confluence of early
movies—
-
COLLINGS
- It's so fascinating.
-
GELBART
- —and early Mexican Revolution, you know, and it was irresistible. I
mean, it's about war and it's about movies, and I kind of fancy both as
subjects. So armed with that, we did that film. It so never fails to
amaze me that I can speak of it so glibly and so swift. I guess there's
not much difference between glib and swift, but I mean it was a project
which consumed two and a half years of my life, and a lot of it was
talked about right here in this position with dozens of other
people.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- But tell me what else?
-
COLLINGS
- I just wanted to say in your voiceover commentary on the DVD, for
example—
-
GELBART
- I've not heard it yet.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really? You discuss there's a certain scene where the Father is the
father, the priest in this town is the real father and Pancho Villa
intervenes.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- He's going to mete out justice, and you put into the voiceover, this is
a true story, and it just raises the question, how did you sort through
what must have been reams and reams of factual material and start
shaping what could and couldn't go into the screenplay?
-
GELBART
- Well, "sort through" is the operative phrase. You look at what you've
been provided with in terms of research history, facts, fiction, and you
know there's some mechanism which says, "I can use this. I don't need
this," and often the material you're drawn to is the more human side of
any story as even in Barbarians at the Gate.
Statistics don't much matter, history doesn't much matter, geography.
Person, personages not so much, personalities yes, character traits.For instance, they left out of the film something I really wanted very
much in the film because it was based on historical fact; and that is,
the idea that— Not the idea, the fact that President [Victoriano] Huerta
was a big pot smoker, and I thought that was just a nice throwaway
thing. I just had him dragging on a joint, and for some reason that got
lost. But that's a detail that would jump out at you from the research,
and anything that gave you a clue. Of course, you're looking at it for
notions of sequence and construction, but anything that helps you
understand the characters you're going to write, of course, is grist for
the mill.
-
COLLINGS
- Frank Thayer was a real person?
-
GELBART
- He was a real person.
-
COLLINGS
- He comes across to me, having just been barely, barely introduced to the
material, as kind of like a combination of from looking at the Raoul
Walsh book and John Reed book, kind of like almost like an amalgamation
of them. Is that at all accurate?
-
GELBART
- Maybe. Maybe. Well, Jack Reed is in the script and fairly well speaks
for himself. Walsh's book has proved to be largely fictional in terms of
the role he played.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really? How interesting.
-
GELBART
- He takes credit for a lot of things that happened even before he was on
the scene, the agreements, the contracts between Mutual Films and Pancho
Villa.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay, because I was looking at his book and he's sort of presenting
himself as the Frank Thayer character. That's why I was wondering.
-
GELBART
- Yeah. Never happened. Never happened. A bit of post-grandiose attachment
to the subject. His chief role was to play Pancho as a young man in the
film, and that he did do, and of course, he did go on to become a very
celebrated motion picture director. But, no, Frank is probably
influenced by the fact that there were at least two western— Not
westerns, North Americans, gringos, that Pancho Villa had a relationship
with or relationships with. But Frank is almost a pure fabrication in
terms of what he thought, what he said. There was very little— And he
wasn't even, in fact— I can't remember the character's name now. Harry
[Aitken], the man who ran Mutual Films.
-
COLLINGS
- His uncle?
-
GELBART
- His uncle. He was not his nephew, it was not his uncle. I just did that,
I think, just to probably go along with the convention of nepotism in
the movie business.
-
COLLINGS
- Sort of make it why this kind of not outstanding person would have
been—
-
GELBART
- Got the nod, right. But he did go down there. He was the link between
New York. Griffith, of course, wouldn't expose himself to that danger,
wasn't even interested, and the guy who ran the company was just a
company man, so there was a Frank Thayer. The real, the closest
character, in addition, I think, to Pancho, to the real-life model
was—
-
COLLINGS
- Sam Drebbin.
-
GELBART
- Sam Drebbin. In fact, I got a letter from the late Peter Stone,
dramatist, whose grandfather employed Sam Drebbin in the family business
in Texas.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, after the Pancho Villa?
-
GELBART
- I think before. I think before.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's interesting. So that whole emerging relationship between
Pancho Villa and Frank Thayer was something that you wrote in to just
carry the—
-
GELBART
- It was very Hollywood. Yes, I'm not crazy about how it turned out
because the last thing I wanted it to be was a buddy picture, but I
think eventually too much of that seeped in.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, do you happen to know if Frank Thayer really did do a screening of
the film in Mexico?
-
GELBART
- He did not. He did not. That's Beverly Hills license. [mutual
laughter]
-
COLLINGS
- One review that I read said that Villa himself did not have like an
articulated political philosophy.
-
GELBART
- I don't think he did. I think he just had a social conscience and a
sense of social fairness. No, he was not a politician.
-
COLLINGS
- So is that how you painted him?
-
GELBART
- I think so. I think it's reflected that much like it's not so much that
history repeats itself, I think we've said this, it's on a loop, you
know. He was there for the people, and at no particular financial gain
or ambition. I mean, as depicted in the film and was certainly true of
life, he felt he wasn't educated enough to run the country.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. That scene where he—
-
GELBART
- He shoots the woman?
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, yes, okay.
-
GELBART
- No, no, go ahead. What were you going to—
-
COLLINGS
- I was just going to say the scene where he tells Frank, "There will
never be a President Villa," and Frank Thayer says, "Perhaps it can be a
dream sequence," was really funny.
-
GELBART
- Yes, thank you. I liked that, myself.
-
COLLINGS
- Was Pancho Villa as offended by the photoplay as the script suggests?
Was there anything in the material that you looked at?
-
GELBART
- No, we don't know. We don't know. We don't know.
-
COLLINGS
- I think that that scene where— I did read something that that whole
business about him shooting the woman was fact.
-
GELBART
- It was, and he killed a lot of women. He killed a lot— He raped probably
more women than he—[recorder turned off]
-
GELBART
- Yes, he meted out some very rough justice, and it was equal opportunity
execution around.
-
COLLINGS
- I think that the way that that was set up as an example of how these
images are edited, too, was really, really nicely done.
-
GELBART
- Yes, I liked it, too. I don't often say this, but I have the feeling
that the film, in terms of criticism, was kind of shortchanged. I
thought it was a better effort. Maybe we didn't succeed.
-
COLLINGS
- I think it's great.
-
GELBART
- I do, too.
-
COLLINGS
- No, I really do. I think it's one of the most fascinating things I've
seen in a long time.
-
GELBART
- Yes, but it kind of— More and more, I don't know. Television is like
this, this stream that just goes by and you're like a leaf that's caught
in the tide and you're gone. What's next and what's next? Nobody ever
says, "Why did people do this?" It's not a complaint, but largely the
press is interested in what's coming up, not what's been done and not
even what's done.I thought [Antonio] Banderas did a wonderful job, who was very
handicapped because the Mexicans still hate the Spanish, and he is very
Spanish.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I was really— Because I don't know Spanish, I was wondering how his
accent was coming off.
-
GELBART
- His accent was fine. He got coached, because he probably speaks a better
Spanish or a more Spanish Spanish. But I think the best way to describe
how his sincerity and how his own personality and his own work ethic and
his own sense of fairness, he's very socially conscious and very well
read and he's a fabulous guy. But anyway, they kind of gave him the cold
shoulder for the first week.
-
COLLINGS
- The crew and the extras?
-
GELBART
- Everybody, the crew, the Mexican population of the show, which was like
100 percent. But by the second week, they were calling him "Generale."
They loved him. They loved him. He just wins you, and he doesn't win you
by flirting; he wins you with real accomplishment.
-
COLLINGS
- Did he do his own horseback riding?
-
GELBART
- Oh yes, he wanted to buy that horse. For all I know, he did.
-
COLLINGS
- You mention that the original film combined the contrived scenes with
the documentary scenes.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Is that from like reviews of the film that—
-
GELBART
- We know that's a fact. We know that's a fact. I don't know about reviews
of the film. I probably—
-
COLLINGS
- Or documentation about the making of the film.
-
GELBART
- The documentation says— Yes. They wanted to do it in two parts. They
wanted to do the photoplay, as they called it, and they wanted to do the
actual action, the battle action in— Isn't this terrible, I've forgotten
the name of the town, the big town.
-
COLLINGS
- Torreon.
-
GELBART
- Torreon. Then somehow in the process they decided to merge them and so—
I mean we can see how precedental that was, too.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, indeed. Oh, it would be so fascinating to see that film.
-
GELBART
- I know. It does not exist. It does not exist.
-
COLLINGS
- It's gone.
-
GELBART
- We thought maybe, maybe with the film making its appearance, somebody
would say, "Hey, look what I found in the barn."The first battle of— What's the first battle? I forgot. It's— I could
never pronounce it properly. The first time they go down there.
-
COLLINGS
- It's probably in John Reed's table of contents here [Insurgent Mexico].
-
GELBART
- The first time they go down to Ojinaga. It's not important. I think
that's what it's called. But anyway, that film was given— They wanted to
give that film— They did give that film to the [U.S.] Library of
Congress. Did I tell you this?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- But the Library of Congress said then, "We're a library. We only store
and archive," if there's a difference. I'm sorry, I'm proofreading
myself as I talk. "Printed material." So they took the picture and
changed it into a series of stills. They printed each still.
-
COLLINGS
- Each frame?
-
GELBART
- Each frame, sorry, each frame, exactly, each frame as a series of still
pictures.
-
COLLINGS
- So that can be reconstructed.
-
GELBART
- But that can be reconstructed, but that's just a lot of shooting and
smoke and crap. It's not a big thing. It would have been fantastic to
have Wolsh as the young Pancho and Pancho as Pancho and to see how they
did it.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, god, it would have been, yes. How interesting that the film has
Pancho Villa defending his hacienda.
-
GELBART
- At the end?
-
COLLINGS
- No, as the reason that he started this revolutionary movement, because
isn't this the—
-
GELBART
- That's the Hollywood version.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, exactly, yes.
-
GELBART
- He said, "The only land my father owned was his grave," or, "That's all
he was buried with."
-
COLLINGS
- Right, right. So the idea that it would be completely unpalatable to
have him just be this poor peasant who's—
-
GELBART
- Of course, of course.
-
COLLINGS
- It really speaks to where we live and what it's all about.
-
GELBART
- But every society seems to. I mean, I used to think that was
particularly American and particularly Hollywood, but now I read Michael
Apted, the British director, is furious because he was a co-producer of
Rome, the HBO series, which was done in
financial conjunction with the BBC, and he's complaining because the BBC
took the first three episodes, boiled them down to two and loaded it up
with mainly sex scenes. He says in an interview, "I thought Hollywood
only did that," [inaudible].
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, well. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- Oh well. So much for—
-
COLLINGS
- As goes Hollywood, so goes the BBC, I suppose.Do you remember anything in particular that Kevin Brownlowe recommended
for the film, as a film historian?
-
GELBART
- Kevin Brownlowe worked mainly through— Jesus, my memory is—
-
COLLINGS
- Josh Maurer.
-
GELBART
- Bruce Beresford (the director). Bruce Beresford knew Kevin Brownlowe and
he got some suggestions from him, and in a couple of cases I challenged
Brownlowe's account of events, but I can't remember what those were.Josh Maurer I would rather not discuss, because that turned into a
completely negative, terrible experience.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay. Let's see. So we talked about the widow. This is a silly
little question, but there's one scene in Frank Thayer's office and
there's a poster on the wall for The Life of General
Villa. Do you happen to— Is that a real period poster?
-
GELBART
- I think it is, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- It's wonderful. Okay. You had also mentioned in an earlier interview
that you don't tend to follow along with the shooting of your film
scripts. You were saying that was one of the things that you liked about
theater. But in this case, you were right there.
-
GELBART
- I made two trips down there. I could not— I really didn't want to. It's
very hard for the writer on the set, you know? For a lot of reasons, and
you probably know them all. So I made two trips, and certainly the first
trip coincided with the table reading and beginning and making
adjustments, script adjustments and just the beginning of the shooting.
Then I went down for the Battle of Torreon.Of course, you're in constant touch with people by phone, by fax, by
e-mail, with pages, with lines, with thoughts, and you were seeing
things being assembled here while they're doing it all down there.
-
COLLINGS
- Wasn't one of the scenes shot on your property here, you said, in the
voiceover?
-
GELBART
- It was?
-
COLLINGS
- That's what you said, and that you had all these guys hanging from
lampposts. It was sort of the aftermath of the—
-
GELBART
- Oh, it was a joke.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, okay. I was wondering because I thought, "Well, gee."
-
GELBART
- No, I said this was shot at—
-
COLLINGS
- I've been over there and it doesn't look that big, but you know what
they can do with film.
-
GELBART
- No, no. I'm sorry. It was a joke that obviously people take
seriously.
-
COLLINGS
- All right. Well, I guess I fell for it.But did Antonio Banderas ad lib a lot?
-
GELBART
- No. He might have in Spanish. In fact, he did in Spanish now and
then.
-
COLLINGS
- Because at one point when he's being introduced to Irene Hunt, he says,
"Oh my, and now my mother is blonde."
-
GELBART
- Oh, you know what? That is an ad lib.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, and you've mentioned that in the voiceover and I just wondered if
there was—
-
GELBART
- You're quite right, that is an ad lib, and it's there and fine. I think
the key word is or the key phrase is "a lot." He didn't do it a lot, but
he did it in a couple places where it was actually very helpful. I can't
remember another, but there probably is another one or two.
-
COLLINGS
- It's just I really, really like the film because it's—
-
GELBART
- Oh, me, too. I mean I'm thrilled that you liked it.
-
COLLINGS
- I mean the way that it digs into this historical event and shows the
kind of the narrative that was built up around that and attempts to
recreate that, and in so doing, sheds light on what the media is doing
today with news reporting. It's really very, I thought, very
skillful.
-
GELBART
- Thank you. That pleases me, I mean because I respect your opinion and
because you're so honest and, in this case, so right. [mutual
laughter]
-
COLLINGS
- So very right.
-
GELBART
- Yes, and I pride myself on my honesty. Yet some critics said that we
were guilty of the same thing, of the same kind of practice, of
glamorizing war, of being selective, of casting a Spaniard for a
Mexican, of having our way in a way. But that's a game you can play
forever, and I can say, "Yes, and you as the press are duplicating the
way you work," blah, blah, blah. But thank you. I'm proud of it.
-
COLLINGS
- I don't think it would have been made if it had been as they are
suggesting.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- So you have to look at what can really happen.
-
GELBART
- What can really happen, and what can really happen— Of all the— Of all.
Of the three things I did at HBO, this one seemed far more vulnerable to
other people's subjectivity. I mean, we had a Mexican expert on the set.
I was there when she told somebody from the L.A.
Times how inaccurate it all was, what a lie it was. I had her
banned from any future shooting, because I had the documentation. But
she, she disagrees with some of the other historians, so you get into
that.The one thing about Pancho is he was either a rapist or a Romeo or George
Washington or Adolf Hitler, depending on who you talked to. But Jesus,
that made me crazy. And Pancho Villa's granddaughter, and he's got more
granddaughters than a Mormon, than Brigham Young, she was saying, "No,
that never happened." She was protecting. Well, let's leave her out of
this.
-
COLLINGS
- I thought actually that— I'm not sure how this happened, but that
Antonio Banderas does a really wonderful job of not— I mean, he's
somebody who can come across as very romantic.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- He doesn't do that in this film.
-
GELBART
- No, he took pains to. He all but dirtied his teeth. No, he was
wonderful.
-
COLLINGS
- He's almost sort of like holding back from the camera so that he—
-
GELBART
- He'd get so he doesn't court you.
-
COLLINGS
- Exactly. All of that charisma is liked boxed up somewhere. I kept
looking for it, oh, Antonio Banderas, but it never came out.
-
GELBART
- Good. Thank you. You're a good audience member.
-
COLLINGS
- Is there anything else that you'd like to—
-
GELBART
- About Pancho?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. It's a great film.So you did touch a little bit on Barbarians at the
Gate last time, and I thought we might expand on it a little
bit. You said last time, just in passing, you said that when you read
the book a couple of those characters were just irresistible.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- What was irresistible?
-
GELBART
- Well, because you kind of— As you read about people, you actually begin
to hear them and you actually do see them on the screen and you actually
do envision them in scenes, and certainly that was obvious and people
could understand it in the case of Pancho Villa. But in a [F.] Ross
Johnson, I could see this flamboyant huckster, smooth operator,
transparent to some and not so to others. But it was just the meat of a
wonderful character, and I knew from the book that there would be a set
of relationships between Johnson and his wife, Johnson and the firm he
worked for and the firm he was competing with, and you just can hear the
steak sizzling as you read the stuff on them.I think there is a— I don't know the exact measurements and I don't know
if you could tell it going through a weighing station, but there are
those larger than life, very hefty characters that you want to bite
into, in the literary sense. They just stand apart and away and above
most lives, sometimes in a negative sense, obviously, especially if
you're a Mexican peasant who gets shot right through your temple or
you're a company that you're screwing for your own personal advancement.
But that's what makes them so attractive.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, there are a lot of scenes with Ross Johnson and his wife, which
greatly humanize him. I mean he explains a lot of his motivations.
-
GELBART
- That's right. You know those World War II movies where there was always
a guy from Brooklyn, and he'd say, "You mean the Nazis are so—?" It's
Mr. Exposition. Well, she was Mrs. Exposition.
-
COLLINGS
- She's not from an upper-class background.
-
GELBART
- No, she's not. No, she's not, and with the most amazing name,
Leilani.
-
COLLINGS
- I wondered about that.
-
GELBART
- Yes. She was Leilani Jones? No, Leilani something imponderable (Leilani
Sarelle). But Leilani was married to, I found out later, or she did
later marry, Miguel Ferrer, who's the spitting and sounding image of his
father, José Ferrer, and they've since divorced, but that's not much to
talk about anyway. But I didn't know much about his real-life wife.
-
COLLINGS
- Ross Johnson's real-life wife?
-
GELBART
- Ross Johnson's real-life wife.
-
COLLINGS
- But did she come from a— What kind of background, socioeconomic?
-
GELBART
- I can't remember.
-
COLLINGS
- But you wrote her as being kind of out of the world of these high-flying
people.
-
GELBART
- Yes, and she might have been.
-
COLLINGS
- But that's something you put in?
-
GELBART
- Maybe. I'm not sure. I know the most useful tip I got from anybody about
how to deal with the technical aspects of the script, as say the
financial thing, because I really— And I've said this to somebody the
other night when we were talking about it, it was such an unlikely world
for me to write about because my inclination is to give you tens for a
five. I just don't know any math at all. But I said, "What is a
leveraged buyout?"And he said, "Well, think of it as taking out a mortgage on your own
house." And that was the key to me, because everybody understands that.
Even I understood that. So that helped.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, the [Henry] Kravis character, I mean he does come across in some
ways like the Darth Vader of the money business world. But he also in
the screenplay, anyway, has his own sort of redeeming passion where he
wants to get in the game because he's the father of the leveraged
buyout.
-
GELBART
- Yes, because he is the game. He invented the
game.
-
COLLINGS
- And nobody gets it, and this is sort of an interesting psychological
look at him.
-
GELBART
- I thought so. I mean, I love the actor who played him, Jonathan— What's
wrong with me today?
-
COLLINGS
- Pryce.
-
GELBART
- Jonathan Pryce, except he's about three feet taller than Henry Kravis,
who was quite short.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, interesting.
-
GELBART
- Yes, and every time I enjoyed him, I said, in spite of that.Kravis— You know, I hit on it very minutely, but if I had to do it all
over again, I would have emphasized the real evil in these people
insofar as they were death merchants, they were selling a product which
they knew to be poisonous, but it didn't really matter. The bottom line
was not mortality; it was the bottom line.
-
COLLINGS
- Because F. Ross Johnson talks more about Oreos.
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes, and it wasn't by design, but it just— I think after that, I
watched some of the congressional hearings where the tobacco people
spoke, and later it was revealed that they were all committing libel and
perjury because they all knew what the real dangers were in smoking. I'm
sorry I didn't allow myself this golden opportunity to say how really
toxic they are.
-
COLLINGS
- In fact, James Garner makes F. Ross Johnson quite likable.
-
GELBART
- That's the problem with— We talked about that, didn't we?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- Well, they talk about certain actors as having a contract with the
audience.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, and he's definitely.
-
GELBART
- He definitely was. [Jack] Nicholson is another one. It's "our Jack."
He's a charmer. And when Ross Johnson says, "All I ever cared about were
the people who work in our plant," I mean, people took that seriously
because Garner was saying it. But Ross Johnson was full of shit, which
is why his boss says when he goes up there, "Well, I just figured what F
stands for."So that was a minor carp, but a major minor carp, that Jim is so
likable.
-
COLLINGS
- How was he playing it? I mean did you ever talk with him about the
part?
-
GELBART
- Yes, oh, sure. Yes. But there's just— He's got too much— There's not a
paper trail, there's a film trail of stuff where's he's just played this
lovable scoundrel and people are not going to not love him.
-
COLLINGS
- No, I know. He comes across as really a sweetheart. [mutual
laughter]
-
GELBART
- I know. It's a drawback.
-
COLLINGS
- Also he's like very much that sort of classic, that lovable American
scoundrel, as you say, sort of the lovable outlaw who they don't
actually do anything harmful, but they are living outside of the
constraints of the—
-
GELBART
- Yes, the maverick.
-
COLLINGS
- The maverick, yes. Also the idea is that it's that kind of person who
can really take the risks and build a business and build an economy, and
so it's seen as sort of a tragedy that the company is taken out of his
hands.
-
GELBART
- Yes, exactly, whereas it was a good thing that he was out of there.
-
COLLINGS
- It's a funny scene when they're flying back in first class talking about
the sacrifices that they'll have to make from now on.
-
GELBART
- Yes. I think that somewhere in the research there was a reference to the
fact that he had to fly back commercial.
-
COLLINGS
- So in the very last scene, he's in his bathrobe standing on his patio,
and is he— I couldn't read that scene.
-
GELBART
- You couldn't read the legend?
-
COLLINGS
- No. No, I couldn't tell whether he was like sort of thinking about his
next big venture and—
-
GELBART
- Well, it's whatever you think. It's whatever you want. For a guy who is
surrounded by so many people, there he is alone.
-
COLLINGS
- In his bathrobe.
-
GELBART
- In his bathrobe, out of his Madison Avenue gear and not at a golf
tournament, and for this, he has to— But after taxes, his settlement was
what, twenty-six million or something?
-
COLLINGS
- That's right. What it said on that.
-
GELBART
- That's where I got it. So that's all just a postscript.
-
COLLINGS
- Sort of what happened after.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- All right. You also sent me the CDs of a recording of Mastergate.
-
GELBART
- Oh, right.
-
COLLINGS
- I have to tell you, it was just wonderful to hear it performed in front
of a live audience, because they were just so responsive.
-
GELBART
- They were ready. [laughs]
-
COLLINGS
- The actors did such a good— Ed Asner was one of the performers in that,
and did really just such a wonderful job of bringing out the style of
speech of—
-
GELBART
- Yes, they did a better job than the actors did on Showtime, because, one, they could read it and they weren't
hobbled by—
-
COLLINGS
- Trying to memorize everything.
-
GELBART
- All of that. It's murder to memorize. They were good, weren't they?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, they really were. And I really was delighted to be able to see it
because I have always been fascinated by these televised proceedings. I
think if I were to see them actually live in the congressional chambers,
they wouldn't be that interesting to me.
-
GELBART
- I know, it's like a football game.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. But there just seems to be a whole ritualized aspect to these
proceedings, the cadences of the voices, and it's almost like a
Kabuki.
-
GELBART
- You're right. You're right.
-
COLLINGS
- Where things just must be followed. Well, of course, there are
regulations governing how these things are run.
-
GELBART
- But they, too, are slaves to what they now recognize as the convention,
and they're all spiffed up for the cameras.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. Yes. I remember a period when red ties were—
-
GELBART
- They were wearing a flag, literally, weren't they? I mean, the blue
suit, the white shirt, the red tie.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Now they've the got pins.
-
COLLINGS
- Now they've got the actual—
-
GELBART
- So they can wear patterns in their ties.
-
COLLINGS
- We talked about how fascinated you were by the Army-McCarthy
hearings.
-
GELBART
- For starters. That was the first.
-
COLLINGS
- I said last time, "What were you thinking about then?" And you said,
"Well, it would depend on what I was working on." You must have been
working on Caesar's Hour.
-
GELBART
- Might have been.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you do anything with Caesar's Hour with
the—
-
GELBART
- No. Caesar's Hour was almost entirely
nonpolitical.
-
COLLINGS
- That's what I figured, yes.
-
GELBART
- No. So I think there was a part of me that was longing to do something
political. Just what we were talking about a second ago, the ritual
aspect of it, the theatrical aspect of it, is so attractive that I
couldn't resist. Do you want to know more about it?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- What the—
1.17. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE TWO
January 11, 2006
-
GELBART
- I think we performed it in 19— I know when we did it. It was performed
in 1998, I think. It began life at the beginning of the year, though,
sometime in maybe late '97. Robert Brustein, who was the artistic
director of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
called and said would I write a political piece, and he suggested a
piece by Aristophanes called Peace, P-e-a-c-e,
obviously. It's very hard to read those classics, you know, depending on
the translation, and you really need to almost be—
-
COLLINGS
- Like in a seminar or something.
-
GELBART
- Exactly. You can't interpret for yourself, and you can't be looking up
in the glossary what that meant then and this meant then. So I didn't
get it. I mean I understood it. I understood it was a—
-
COLLINGS
- But it didn't grab you.
-
GELBART
- No, and I didn't know. I wasn't interested. But I think the Iran-Contra
thing was either going on or had just finished, and I said, "How about
if I just do a faux committee hearing," and he thought that was a good
idea. Two things drove me; one, the opportunity to do this and have it
actually done, and it's easier to do things— It was easier for me to do
things with that company than to think of a Broadway thing with
financing, with theaters, will all kinds of other madness. The other
thing was around that time or just prior to that, I read the accounts
of— Twentieth Century Fox had been sold by whoever owned it five minutes
before two men, Marvin Davis, who was an oilman, Denver oilman, who just
died, and his partner Marc Rich.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh yes.
-
GELBART
- Okay, you know Marc Rich?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Okay. Now, Marc Rich— The Justice Department wanted to talk to Marc
Rich. This was way, way, way, way before he ever got his parole, or his
pardon, his presidential pardon from Clinton, as we know. But they
wanted to talk to him about some of his more nefarious or more obvious
crimes, and they asked him to come to Washington, and he said, "No, I'm
not coming to Washington." He was hiding somewhere in some little canton
in Switzerland. They were fining him something like a hundred thousand
dollars a day for not appearing. Among other things, they threatened to
take over his half of 20th Century Fox, and I thought that would be the
perfect setup. A government bureau running a Hollywood studio, what a
marriage, and it was just one of those thoughts, and I didn't do
anything with it.But when Brustein said, "Yeah, write something like that," I thought,
"Gee, maybe I can marry this opportunity with that situation." So I said
to my wife, "I'm going to do a kind of a Watergate thing. What's a good
gate? What could I call it, gate? What gate?"So she said, "Mastergate," which I thought was
just— Did I tell you this story before?
-
COLLINGS
- About the particular naming, yes.
-
GELBART
- Okay, all right. So then, of course, I named the motion picture studio
Master Pictures, and then I had the perfect reason for doing that.
Please stop me if I've told you any of this, because I know I've talked
a lot.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, no, no.
-
GELBART
- Anyway, we did a play there. It went exceedingly well. Did I tell you
about Frank Rich coming up?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, you did. That it was in—
-
GELBART
- He loved it, said it must go to Washington first.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, oh, that would have been great.
-
GELBART
- Yes. I tried to get the Kennedy Center to do it. They said it was too
political.
-
COLLINGS
- It would have been so perfect.
-
GELBART
- They said it was too political. Can you imagine? So we opened it in New
York, and Frank gave it a lesser review, which really broke my heart and
a little bit of my wallet.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really?
-
GELBART
- Oh yes. I financed that production. It was a major kick in the wallet.
Anyway, then the show ran, and then we did it on Showtime. I wasn't terribly pleased with the production. I
don't think anybody was.
-
COLLINGS
- I thought it worked— Hearing it on the CD, I thought it worked really
well as radio.
-
GELBART
- It does work well as radio.
-
COLLINGS
- It kind of reminded me of Duffy's.
-
GELBART
- Well, yes. I'm right back where I started, screwing up the language.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, exactly. Yes. I mean, I love the rhythms of these, "resides in a
consecutive series of unnumbered houses," you know.
-
GELBART
- Right, yes. Thank you.
-
COLLINGS
- "That is my conviction, based on several of his own." I mean it's very
poetic.
-
GELBART
- Well, that's— I like having done Abrogate,
because that was written for radio for the BBC, so being British, they
being British, of course, I finished the play being an American, quicker
than they could execute a contract, so I'm waiting for them to do that,
and then I think we'll do it over there. That is even more— It's more
biting than Floodgate, actually.
-
COLLINGS
- So do you think of that as kind of a trilogy, Mastergate, Floodgate, Abrogate?
-
GELBART
- Yes, yes, that would be a trilogy enough for me. Three is enough of a
crowd.
-
COLLINGS
- So does Abrogate specifically deal with this
[George W. Bush] administration you were suggesting?
-
GELBART
-
Abrogate, I say on the front page, I say the
place is Washington, the time, inevitably, and it's meant— It is at a
time when the present minority has become the majority again and they
are investigating all that this present administration did to break,
bend, and destroy, deconstruct, as they say, the Constitution.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, one can only hope.You say in an interview at the end of that CD that you gave me that
something had come up, a possibility of a sequel to The Candidate?
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- Did anything ever pan out with that?
-
GELBART
- Oh yes, that's another two years of my life.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that did happen?
-
GELBART
- Did we never, ever talk about The Candidate?
-
COLLINGS
- No. A sequel to The Candidate?
-
GELBART
- Robert Redford, about three years ago or more, called me and said would
I be interested in writing a sequel to The
Candidate using the same character of Bill McKay, the hero or
anti-hero of the first.
-
COLLINGS
- I mean, it's kind of similar in theme to the Pancho Villa in a way.
-
GELBART
- In a way. In a way. So I said yes. I mean it's such an iconic picture,
and I worked with him for over two years, and it came to naught. I mean,
he's still going to do something, he says. He's kind of famous for
taking a long time.
-
COLLINGS
- To think about things?
-
GELBART
- To think about things. I guess it took him two years to think about
maybe he should have hired another writer.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, well. [laughs]
-
GELBART
- But you know, I said to him or somebody close to him, I said, "You know,
there was a time when two and a half years was petty cash in my life.
That's not the case anymore." So I—
-
COLLINGS
- You spent two and a half years on it, and he's just sitting on it? Oh,
that hurts.
-
GELBART
- He's not just sitting on it. Warner Bros. agreed to make it because they
agreed to a deal with him for a multiple picture arrangement, but I knew
that they were not going to spend a lot of money, and even a one-man
movie is a lot of money now on a political picture. The climate is what
we know it to be. I did not make it the kind of movie that a Robert
Redford fan would expect. It was not ideological, because his sentiments
are very well known, although obviously negotiable, since he's in
Washington shaking [George W.] Bush's bloody hand, you know, when he
received his Kennedy Center Honors, but more about what it is to be the
president in any time, the number of people you have to please, the fact
that you're still campaigning even though you're in, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah. I don't want to go— You know what really is? I have a
toothache, and it's—
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, oh.
-
GELBART
- No, no, no. It's so distracting me because it's giving me a headache.
But let's continue. I can talk through even my own talk.
-
COLLINGS
- Okay. Well, I think we talked quite a bit about Weapons of Mass Distraction last time.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- That was the one that you talked about most.
-
GELBART
- Right. So we can leave it alone or go back, whatever you want to
know.
-
COLLINGS
- If there was anything that you would like, you've thought of later.
-
GELBART
- I don't know what I said, and—
-
COLLINGS
- All right. You gave me a screenplay called The View
From Last Thursday.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- I was really struck by how different it is from just everything else
that I've seen, because it really seems like something that's— It's a
piece in miniature, whereas your other things have these broad— These
large political themes or—
-
GELBART
- It's also more emotional and it's also more about relationships.
Frankly, I've sort of had myself up to here in words, words, words, and
there's some other thoughts, and I'm certainly not going to sit down and
write a romantic story, but I think there's a lot in there I just want
to write about and think about and not just be still doing Duffy's Tavern in a sense sixty years on.
-
COLLINGS
- I mean there's that one character is—
-
GELBART
- Mick?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, Nick, right.
-
GELBART
- Mick.
-
COLLINGS
- Mick, Mick.
-
GELBART
- Is it Mick? Did it say Mick?
-
COLLINGS
- I think it is Mick. It's right here.
-
GELBART
- Yes, Mick [inaudible].
-
COLLINGS
- He just seems to be— He's not connected to the world of high finance,
and he's not an accomplished surgeon.
-
GELBART
- Was it a letdown for you?
-
COLLINGS
- No, no, it just was like totally different. I would never have even
expected a— It's like a sort of a miniature sketch, and it just brings
out nuances of his own character that just was surprising. I just
wondered what accounts for this turn.
-
GELBART
- I think my own age as a writer, but as a human being, first, just the
notion of dying really, or dying before you die, being replaced, being
evicted, making way.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's interesting, the theme of the eviction and the
gentrification.
-
GELBART
- Exactly. As he says when he quotes [James] Joyce, he says, "Robinson
Crusoe had to bury Friday," so this is Thursday, you know.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Well, it does have a kind of a larger political theme in that he
was a World War II veteran, although he kind of struggles with that
because he didn't actually see any combat.
-
GELBART
- That's right. He wanted to, but he—
-
COLLINGS
- He's sort of hidden that from people, and yet then he turns around and
he's got this neighbor on the street who's Japanese and this Japanese
fellow is so a part of the new economy and born well after World War II,
and yet here Mick is seeing him through the lens of this—
-
GELBART
- Through the personal, through the subjective point of view, of course.
In terms of— I'm probably inordinately proud of the script, but it's
about so many things. It is about the new America that really only would
rather have highrises and condos than accommodate people with affordable
housing, quick, perhaps unearned fame, as opposed to a lifetime of hard
work and nothing near the rewards that the other existence creates for
somebody, and just holding on, just holding on and trying to fight for
what you believe in, and holding on in one way, in one very positive
way, and holding on in a very negative way, holding on to all of that
hatred and anger and frustration and rage and being given the
opportunity to have a good death, to forgive, and to forgive through a
spontaneous act, not seeing the light, being born again, planning to do
the right thing, but just instinctively.
-
COLLINGS
- Having an instinctive human reaction.
-
GELBART
- Yes, towards someone he thought of as an enemy. There's not one thing— I
think one of the nice things I'm beginning to discern through the miasma
caused by this toothache is that my family didn't read the newspapers at
all. My father read the racing forms or he'd read the race results. My
mother read only in Hebrew or Yiddish, and she would read advice to the
lovelorn in the Daily Forward, a Jewish
periodical, journal, the newspaper.I can't say that— I mean I think I care about the world only because I'm
more aware that I'm in the world and I'm privileged in a way. I earn a
living doing something I love. It's brought me a lot of material and
non-material, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I care about what's going— I'm
interested in what's going on, and when I find something that's going on
or did go on and I can put it into a script, whether a word or an idea
or a scene or a character, that, in turn, recreates an interest in the
world because of some of the subjects covered in the more recent work. I
picked up the newspaper and it said seventy-five years later people
still don't forget the Japanese. So I say, "Oh, I've talked about that.
I'm talking about that." Or just any number of things.In Abrogate, I have as one of the witnesses the
son of an immigrant, illegal immigrant, who is fighting, who fought in
Iraq, and I turn on the television at three in the morning as part of a
ritual that I didn't ask for, and there's a lance corporal—my guy's a
lance corporal—giving testimony to a committee about his service in
Iraq. It's a kind of a— I think of a push-me, pull-you, a kind of
continuous connection with what's going on, then giving my version of
what's going on, and then seeing if it's still going on. I'm missing
that third piece.
-
COLLINGS
- You're kind of describing a synchronicity between—
-
GELBART
- Between me and them, and et al.
-
COLLINGS
- Right.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- That you're constantly deriving colors for your palette from the—
-
GELBART
- I think so. But there's a kind of— It's amazing, I'm listening to my
head not working. I mean, I hear it. I hear it cranking and squeaking
and slipping gears.
-
COLLINGS
- This is—
-
GELBART
- No, no, no, don't let me off the hook. I mean there's something
happening here. Anyway, we've got it on tape, ladies and gentlemen, and
then he keeled over and fell on the floor. Let me not make those the
last words.No. There's a— Oh, the notion of how much more precious anything becomes
if its threatened or in shorter supply; i.e. I never felt more affection
for America than I do now that it's under attack by this administration.
I never felt more patriotic in a way—
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, I know what you mean.
-
GELBART
- —for the good things we stand for and the good things we know we are. I
think that's directly attributable to this less and less panic-stricken
notion of mortality, but with the notion that, you know, my time is far
more limited now, and so everything becomes that much more important to
me.What was— André Gide. Was it André Gide? No, it was not André Gide,
because I don't read André Gide. No, it was— Who was the— Abel Gance,
the director of Napoleon. He said— Did I ever
say this to you?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- Because it's my credo, he said, or maybe it's slipping. He said, "I take
life tragically but never seriously." I love that. Anyway, enough. I
can't say enough about me. This is all about me. How do I get off of me
here?
-
COLLINGS
- We can either be done, or I have a kind of a like a big-picture
question.
-
GELBART
- Go ahead. A big-picture question.
-
COLLINGS
- I don't even know if you're going to bite on this one. But there's a
really interesting book— Oh, I don't even have the book with me.
-
GELBART
- That's interesting.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. It's called Nervous Laughter: Television
Situation—
-
GELBART
-
Nervous?
-
COLLINGS
-
Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and
Liberal Democratic Ideology.
-
GELBART
- What, do they have M*A*S*H in there, or not?
-
COLLINGS
- No. That's interesting.
-
GELBART
- Okay.
-
COLLINGS
- But it's just somebody— It's like somebody's dissertation that was
published into a book, but anyway.
-
GELBART
- And they say?
-
COLLINGS
- The point is, is that he's talking about how television shows of this
period, sitcoms—
-
GELBART
- This period now?
-
COLLINGS
- No. Sitcoms of the, well, fifties through eighties, I guess, were sort
of— I guess you could call it kind of the Norman Lear effect, where
we're taking subject material that might have possibly been more liberal
than a great number of people in America were used to and kind of like
introducing it and teaching it and making it more palatable.
-
GELBART
- Did he find that objectionable?
-
COLLINGS
- No, no. He thought that was good. One Day at a
Time, he doesn't talk about this, but something else that I read
points to One Day at a Time as being one of
these teaching kind of shows where they're always talking about—
-
GELBART
- Was that Michael [J.] Fox?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
GELBART
- No, that was Bonnie Franklin?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
GELBART
- Right.
-
COLLINGS
- Where they're like always discussing all of these kinds of liberal
issues and kind of teaching them to people. I just wondered, because you
did have M*A*S*H and you did Tootsie, which was exploring these gender issues, and so much
of your other work, did you ever have a sense of yourself—
-
GELBART
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- —as belonging to an artists' community that was interested in exploring
these things?
-
GELBART
- I was aware that I was part of a group. I was aware that— Forgive me. I
mean we have talked, not for ages, but for so long I may be repeating
myself. But I was aware that we were filling a vacuum, that there was no
drama on television, certainly none that we knew about in the early days
when it first began, when Paddy Chayefsky was writing and Reggie Rose
and J.P. Miller and Horton Foote. Those things had all disappeared. They
were replaced by the cowboy shows, the western, the medical shows, the
cop shows, so there was no— There was melodrama, but there was no drama.
And if there's no drama, where do you discuss all of the— From any point
of view, from the liberal, from the conservative, from any point of
view, we discuss life and death, love and marriage, children and
government, blah, blah, blah. So I was aware that I was part of a group
that was supplying another kind of water cooler material for Monday
morning America. I was, and proud of it. We weren't immodest about what
we were doing. We knew it.
-
COLLINGS
- So you feel that there was a working climate where you'd specifically
try to address a certain kind of issue, like, okay, like in M*A*S*H, one of the soldiers marries a Korean
and now you're going to address racism.
-
GELBART
- Yes.
-
COLLINGS
- And the people you're working with are in concert with this idea of
teaching this material in a sense?
-
GELBART
- Never, never teaching. Just this is good conflict, this is good, this is
grist for the mill, for the third time today. This is the stuff of
drama, and where there's drama, there's comedy. This is pre-corporate— I
mean, television networks and radio networks were certainly corporate
affairs, but this was broadcasting owned by broadcasters.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, pre-conglomerate.
-
GELBART
- Pre-conglomerate, pre-General Electric, pre-Westinghouse, pre-Disney, to
the extent that it became Disney, and with a very, very different
federal climate. We were not afraid. What we were most afraid was, and
we dealt with it quite effectively, you know, through self-censorship
and actual censorship or outside censorship, and we welcomed the
opportunity to talk about real things.The day of just doing jokes for jokes' sakes had long passed. That sort
of got people into the tent in the early days with the Ed Wynn Show and Alan Young and even Your Show of Shows, which brilliant though it
was, didn't really attempt it. It was pure art. It was pure
entertainment. While Norman [Lear] did create it, he imported it. He was
smart enough to bring it over, but I think we've been here, haven't
we?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, that All in the Family was from—
-
GELBART
- That's right, it was from [British] public television, which was the
only source of television for a while. But he saw the potential.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. Okay. Shall we leave it there, or with any closing thoughts?
-
GELBART
- I hope I don't have any closing thoughts, because that means I'm
closing. [mutual laughter] We can leave it there, and please feel free
anywhere in the process—we're old mates by now—to call me and say, "What
did you mean by that or can you—?" Blah, blah, blah. Please take—[End of January 11, 2006 interview]