L-R: writers Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Mel Tolkin pitch pages
to hard-to-impress Sid Caesar in the original writers’ room.
“Real People, Not Actors”
Gutting the Writers’ Room
“I called the Writers’ Room the sanctum sanctorum. If you look those words up you’ll see they come from the biblical phrase ‘holy of holies,’ which is an indication of how important I thought the place was. The show began in that room, where young, creative people were pitching ideas, catching them in the air, and putting them down on the written page. If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage.”
-- Sid Caesar
by Jamie Jobb
first of three parts
Scripted television shows emerge from a “writers’ room" which implies several writers comfortably cocooned within their own convivial womb of studio make-believe. Everyone cradled there, scribbling characters and stories then flinging fresh punchlines at them to see what sticks -- that’s what happens in these rooms for writing.
Nothing wrong with words ground round in a group setting, like making sausage … or law. Just keep your mess behind closed doors, please. This close-scripted teamwork takes a lot of writing and rewriting, cooperation and competition, cross-talk and gagging. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Great tv shows flow from writers’ rooms. Some quick examples: “Big Bang Theory,” “Modern Family,” “Seinfeld,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (itself about tv writers). Folks have been rewarded handsomely for their commitment to that room and the frictional fictions which mature there.
Brainchild of American comic genius Sid Caesar for his live NBC-TV broadcasts in the 1950s, Caesar’s prototypical writers’ room harbored immense talent: Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Max Liebman, Larry Gelbart -- all of whom found fame on stage, screen and tv.
Ironically, their brilliant careers were overshadowed at the time by a now-less-famous bullpen of other scribes who pitched in Sid’s “sanctum sanctorum”: Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Tony Webster, Joe Stein, Selma Diamond, Aaron Ruben, Mike Stewart, Shelley Keller, Phil Sharp, Charles Andrews, Neil’s brother Danny Simon, Sid’s brother Dave Caesar.
Before Sid’s shows, tv productions did not allow The Talent and the writers to comingle in pre-production. Caesar’s innovation opened doors for future television writers to pitch their pages in similar such rooms for many other tv-star show-of-shows which followed. Caesar wrote: “The writers’ room was more than just a place; it was a state of mind and a standard to aspire to.”
Pitted together there in the same room, Caesar’s writers realized the significance of their good fortune. Reiner’s “Dick Van Dyke Show” on tv, Brooks’ “My Favorite Year” on film, and Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” on Broadway all paid loving homage to Sid’s original writers’ room.
Sixty years later, Sundance TV now actually offers a program called “The Writers’ Room” where teams of writers yak in profuse detail about their cable tv shows on a studio set designed to look much like such an inner sanctum.
For outsiders, “The Writers’ Room” is tough tv to comprehend, particularly for those of us with little knowledge and less interest in the shows which employ all these collegial scribes dropping all their inside jokes. What the quark are they laughing about anyway?
It’s difficult to see Sundance TV’s point of committing so much air time to this sort of closed-circuit commentary on “hard scripts”. Perhaps everyone who watches Sundance is a wannabe writer/director or paparazzo/autograph hound? Brew me that La Dolce Vita Grande Latte and let’s look at your dang script right now!
But who is this reviewer -- himself a Tennis Channel subscriber and devotee of Jean-Luc Godard -- to criticize anybody’s closed circuitry? Furthermore: who the heck foresaw poker as dynamic sporting television!?!
“Soft scripts” reduce the role of the Writers Guild of America because “reality” television “writers” simply suggest storylines for these “scripts”.
All the rest -- dialogue, scene structure, story detail -- is handled on set by people with strange job titles: “story consultants,” “story producers,” “supervising story producers,” “field producers,” “story consultants” and/or “deliverables coordinators”!
Instead of scenes and dialogue, all these field producers do is “write” the show’s format, cast real people to type, and edit the story in post production. As one disgruntled writer phrased it, soft scripts simply require “real people, not actors”.
As if actors are unable to speak for themselves! Reality tv characters speak not only for themselves but also for their self-inflicted plotlines, if such can be called “plot.”
Their titles tell all we need to know about these low-budget “reality” shows: “Hardcore Pawn,” “Ax Men,” “Cake Boss,” “Sister Wives,” “Mystery Diners,” “Ghost Hunters,” “Ice Road Truckers,” “Breaking Amish,” “Bug Juice,” “Urban Tarzan,” "The Prancing Elites," “Celebrity Wife Swap” to name the most luridly ridiculous offerings.
“Reality” programs have become so ubiquitous that they’ve become franchised: “Real Housewives of _____,” “Million Dollar Listing _____,” “Survivor _____,” “Real World _____,” and “_____ Moms”. These programs change location and casts, but basically remain the same show wherever the heck they go.
We know producers are running out of ideas when spectacles like “Naked Dating _____” start replicating themselves -- not only does that franchised program eliminate the writing, it eliminates the wardrobe altogether, leaving only tattoos and blurred private parts to hide behind the small talk! Are we titillated yet?
“Actor”/characters on most of these shows follow one simple plotline: 1) offend each other, a lot and 2) apologize for it, a lot. Call this: “So Sorry TV” … stripped-down stories which eliminate any need for actual actors on sets or writers in rooms, thus greatly reducing the show’s payroll with only “real people, not actors” speaking their minds’ own lines.
Although no one knew it at the time, “An American Family” launched “reality tv” when it was filmed in Santa Barbara in 1971 and aired in winter 1973 on public television of all places! Back then, it was a curiosity on PBS otherwise known for its wildlife documentaries. This time they focused the wildlife cameras on people -- or rather “Californians”, a species foreign to most of the rest of the USA at that time.
The documentary film crew lived “in the wild” with a family long enough to capture an actual divorce scene through an open doorway! It was very dramatic then and did not seem staged.
By the way, the show truly was "filmed" on 16mm as no great portable video existing then. Although this show has been mislabeled “video verite”, it’s a very good example of “cinema verite” -- right down to the choice of film stock (Kodak Tri-X). The series was a dozen one-hour episodes for its lone season featuring the five children and two parents of this seemingly typical suburban family, the Louds.
None of the Louds came across as members of any kind of Looney Tunes Duck Dynasty. They seemed to be real folks -- perhaps because they were exposed on film, something the “shine” of video can not reproduce. As the show progressed, it seemed to dawn on some of the Louds that they were not taking enough advantage of their situation.
Halfway through the series, the Loud kids tried to capitalize on their free air time like early rock-and-roll adapters Ricky Nelson, The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch. But by then it was too late; there weren’t enough remaining episodes to sustain the Loud Band’s media presence on a weekly show which was not intended to be renewed.
“An American Family” is most renowned as the program where Lance Loud “came out of the closet”, the first person to do so on American broadcast tv. It was clearly a calculated move on his part. Now gay characters overpopulate television sitcoms in numbers far beyond their actual presence in the population! Lance Loud -- the first “reality tv” star -- led the way.
At the time Lance seemed quite courageous, despite his self-consciously queer on-screen silliness. He moved to the East Village during the show and has been an icon within the LGBT universe ever since. (See sidebar “Tracking Down An American Family”.)
While Bravo seems to be cable tv’s charcuterie most committed to grinding fresh cold cuts of “reality tv”, other channels give Bravo quite a run for its money: A&E, CMT, MTV, VH1, TLC, truTV, WB, USA, Lifetime, Disney, Spike, History, Food, Animal, Fox. That overproduction of soft-scripted shows now slips a huge condom over the writers’ room -- the concept not the Sundance program. Sid Caesar would not be happy.
The ongoing conflict between written and vernacular tv sludges across an ever-vast-and-vaster-wasteland of commercial cable television. Things are so sticky that Bravo last season upset its own applecart with "Girlfriends Guide to Divorce" a very good hard-scripted show shot “on-the-fly” like a reality program.
It’s more than oddly ironic that Bravo -- king of the soft-scripted series -- would set such a high standard for more “real” sitcoms with its very first offering which contains none of those face-the-camera "confessional"
moments that are a hallmark of reality tv.
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“Your Show of Shows”
Sid Caesar Links
Basic Sid Caesar Links:
View video of Sid and his costars. Plus order DVD box sets:
Link to Sid Caesar offerings on Netflix:
You Tube playlists featuring Sid Caesar and his pals:
More about The Writers’ Room tv show:
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Tracking Down
“An American Family”
Although the complete twelve episodes are unavailable on video, quite a few clips from “An American Family” can be found on line. Start with these articles if you’re interested in pursuing this pioneering work of tv documentary:
A PBS feature on Lance Loud:
You Tube playlists of clips from the show and its aftermath:
My pal and avid reader/editor Marilyn Berg Cooper passed along this gem of a link after the recent passing of Carl Reiner -- involving a very funny and convoluted search for the origins of a Show-of-Shows joke:
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