Since getting his big break crafting jokes for Bette Midler in the early 1970s, Emmy-winning comedy writer and personality Bruce Vilanch has found success writing for the small screen and stage. But by his own admission, the scribe behind 25 Academy Award ceremonies and more than his fair share of Miss Universe and USA pageants has also penned some real flops.
In his new book, “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote,” Vilanch walks readers through some of the most ill-conceived projects he’s been attached to over the years — from 1978’s “The Star Wars Holiday Special” to the now infamous 1989 Oscars ceremony that opened with Rob Lowe and Snow White pirouetting to “Proud Mary.”
“‘It was a terrible idea, and I shouldn’t have gotten involved’ didn’t even occur to us at the time,” Vilanch told IndieWire on a Zoom call, using the screen name “travis kelce’s other” in a nod to online comparisons between him and the NFL mom, which he’s helped fuel.
“Most of these things happened before the internet, and the internet is what tells you that you shouldn’t have done it, because they constantly pummel you with, ‘Well, what do you want to hear from that guy for? Look what he wrote,’” he said. “And they all came back to haunt me.”
Vilanch, who came up in the era of comedy legends like Carol Burnett and Dean Martin, often alludes in conversation and in the book to the thrashings he’s taken from “keyboard warriors.” But the frequent guest on pop culture podcasts actually seems to enjoy younger viewers discovering and deriding his less-successful variety shows, TV specials, and stage productions. And he uses “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time” to join in the fun, musing about the power-drunk producers, degenerate writers, and illicit substances that helped birth bizarre projects starring the likes of Florence Henderson, Paul Lynde, Bea Arthur, Charo and — before she shot the whole thing down — Carol Channing.
In the case of “The Brady Bunch Hour” — which alternated weeks on CBS with “The Hardy Boys” and “Nancy Drew” from 1976 to 1977 — the problems began when storied network producer Fred Silverman had a lightbulb moment involving America’s favorite blended TV family.
For five seasons beginning in 1969, “The Brady Bunch” enjoyed a successful run on ABC, convincing Silverman that the ensemble of actors, led by Henderson and Robert Reed, would make perfect variety show hosts. His solution was to embed a variety show within a sitcom about the Bradys and Alice (Ann B. Davis) moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in TV. But as everyone found out once they arrived on set, working in musical performances and drop-ins from guest stars like Tina Turner and Vincent Price into the Bradys’ once-rather-mundane existence was, in fact, a very bad idea.
“’The Brady Bunch’ existed as the Brady Bunch. They didn’t have ‘an act,’ so to have them suddenly get a variety show was kind of weird,” Vilanch said, citing Silverman’s penchant for offbeat and sometimes disastrous variety shows at the time, including “Pink Lady and Jeff.” “There was a better way to do it, but this was what we were handed. And I didn’t even know that until we actually got to the thing.”
According to Vilanch’s book, neither the motley crew of writers assembled to bring the producer’s vision to life nor the stars of the show had any idea what “The Brady Bunch Hour” would entail until at least a month after arriving on location. At that point, the writers gathered to familiarize themselves (for the first time) with the original show and began concocting various excuses for having big-name stars floating in and out of the Bradys’ new life in Malibu. And eventually, someone broke the news to the unsuspecting cast — some of whom took it worse than others.
“They all thought they were going into some sort of revival of the old show with some musical elements added. They didn’t think they were expected to become Osmonds overnight, that there would be songs to learn, dance routines to master, characters to play in sketches. And the characters wouldn’t simply be characters. They would be their Brady character playing a character,” Vilanch writes, adding that this was “a drastic change from entering from the backyard and asking Alice what was for dinner.”
“Robert Reed, the captain of the SS Brady, was especially hard hit by this revelation, as he was a seriously serious actor,” he continues. “If you ever watch the show, you will see a man going through a deep psychological struggle trying to make sense of Mike Brady, architect and family man, attempting a soft-shoe with a straw hat and cane.”
Chewbacca, a Wookiee Christmas, and a Creature Nicknamed “C*ntface”
In “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time,” Vilanch never passes up a chance to share (mostly) harmless gossip about a famous former coworker, tell an outrageous story, or revel in on-set shenanigans.
Along with describing the show’s disastrous start, Vilanch peppers “The Brady Bunch Hour” chapter with anecdotes about a closeted Reed coming to life in Carmen Miranda drag, Henderson flashing the writers’ room after getting pranked, and new cast member Rip Taylor waging a pointless battle to win over Davis, who’d recently found Jesus. While in the previous chapter on 1976’s “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special,” he recounts how ABC’s push to appeal to younger audiences resulted in the biting “Bewitched” comedian driving a semi-truck through a stage wall in sequins and KISS regaling the audience with rock ballads, alongside Margaret Hamilton playing the Wicked Witch of the West.
But some of his juiciest revelations come from the book’s opening pages, which describe how a key misunderstanding about the nature of variety TV led to the Wookiee-centered collaboration between George Lucas, a group of enthusiastic CBS producers, and a room full of writers on a variety of substances.
“I don’t think George knew what he was getting into when he sold them that,” Vilanch said of Lucas pitching the network “The Star Wars Holiday Special” before turning back to more legitimate endeavors, like filming “The Empire Strikes Back.”
“He withdrew once he saw what was happening, but it was too late,” the comedian added, underscoring the point he makes in the book that neither the “Star Wars” creator nor his team knew exactly what a variety special entailed. “It was on, so all he could do was begin disowning it before it was born.”
Although Lucas may have saved some face with his early exit, it certainly didn’t help the look of the special, which revolved around Chewbacca rushing home to celebrate Wookiee Christmas, or Life Day. While the producers managed to get a hesitant Carrie Fisher and the rest of the central cast on board, much of the world-building was left up to the writers and crew, who had to source their own aliens from secondhand shops. And this, with Vilanch’s help, led to outrageous moments like a strikingly vaginal creature, whom the writers nicknamed C*ntface, appearing alongside Bea Arthur doing a floor show for patrons of the Mos Eisley cantina.
“We were out at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, and it was September, and the sun was pounding down. Air-conditioning could do just so much when combined with bright lights, heavy costumes and prosthetics …. We were losing aliens by the hours,” Vilanch writes of filming the scene in which the “vagina doppelgänger” and future star of “The Golden Girls” found themselves side by side as numbers dwindled.
“Each time one of them went down, I would quietly move C*ntface closer to Bea,” he writes. “Finally, it was just the two of them in the frame, C*ntface and Bea. We were that underpopulated.”
Of course, Vilanch doesn’t blame the entire thing on Lucas’ absence, his own antics, or the producers who devised solutions like guest stars translating for the otherwise unintelligible Wookiees and having Jefferson Airplane dropped in as a hologram. The people most to blame for the infamous reputation of “The Star Wars Holiday Special,” he implies, are the legions of fans who rediscovered and circulated the program online years later.
“As I said in the book, you have to remember Star Wars had not yet become the Scientology of the nerds. That happened after people could get the movies on tape. And then, the internet happened, and they could discover this thing,” Vilanch said.
“At the time, it was just another weirdo special cooked up by people doing drugs in Hollywood. That was the perception. We weren’t really committing a crime against the cultural nation,” he added, noting that, in the years and Star Wars off-shoots since, Lucas “won’t let go” of finding vehicles for his Wookiee holiday.
Space Bandits, Disco, and a Severed Head
People who pick up Vilanch’s slim text and expect him to show remorse for helping usher questionable content into the world will be disappointed. The veteran TV and stage writer is much more interested in bouncing between the weird circumstances surrounding a spattering of his less-acclaimed work, including the 1976 variety-show-turned-special “Charo” and a never-developed Channing-led sitcom named “Henne.” Though occasionally, he uses the book to explain why some of the ideas, like the 1978 musical “Platinum” and 1984’s “The Ice Pirates,” were either not so bad or could have been better than they turned out.
“‘Platinum’ was ahead of its time. It was not executed well, but it was a terrific idea — for something,” Vilanch said of the near-success of his Broadway debut featuring an aging film star attempting a comeback disco album, insisting it could be resurrected if everyone who remembers the ‘40s wasn’t “in assisted living somewhere.”
“‘Ice Pirates’ was neither fish nor fowl. It had a question of tone, but people don’t generally say, ‘God, that was awful.’ They say, ‘Well, that was fun, but I can’t believe that it got made,” he said of the film about space bandits targeting frozen water, in which he played a severed head opposite Anjelica Huston. “And as I said in the book, it was a half-assed hit. It actually opened pretty well — when movies were allowed to do that.”
While “Platinum” and “The Ice Pirates” are framed as forgivable — if only audiences would agree — there is one historic onstage gaffe that even Vilanch can’t pardon: the opening number of the 1989 Academy Awards ceremony.
A Stroke… of Genius
In the final pages of “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time,” Vilanch walks readers through “Grease” producer Alan Carr’s solo mission to recreate the long-running San Francisco revue “Beach Blanket Babylon” for confused audiences everywhere. As he tells it, he and ceremony co-writer Hildy Parks repeatedly tried to talk Carr out of the elaborate 1989 Oscars number that involved Snow White hobnobbing onstage with Merve Griffin, old Hollywood legends, and Rob Lowe. But like many of the other big personalities in Vilanch’s book, Carr was not one to question a scheme once it took hold — as the chapter on the 1980 film “Can’t Stop the Music,” a fictional origin story of the Village People, also demonstrates.
“Alan didn’t entertain a lot of questions when he was high on something, and I’m not talking drugs. If he was, like Mel Brooks’ creation Roger De Bris in ‘The Producers,’ in the throes of a stroke … of genius, he was phoning it in from a different plane of reality,” writes Vilanch, who was eventually taken off the script for asking to be paid for repeated rewrites, but not before Carr convinced him to do one draft from a “fat farm” in North Carolina
Like the “Beach Blanket Babylon” tribute, which prompted a swift lawsuit from Disney, Carr blindly pursued “Can’t Stop the Music,” which he conjured up during a night out dancing to Village People with Vilanch, Jacqueline Bisset, and Bronté Woodward, who was recruited to co-write the film. The script went through various iterations after Bisset, Olivia Newton-John, and a string of other leading ladies passed on the film. But neither the long road to filming nor the exit of the group’s lead singer, Victor Willis, during preproduction deterred the producer. By a sheer force of will, the film, starring Valerie Perrine as a fashion model who discovers the Village People and Steve Guttenberg as a music producer who helps them rise to fame, released a month before “Xanadu” and instantly bombed in theaters — as the story goes.
“[A bad idea] starts at the root. When they say ‘rotten to the core,’ they’re not kidding,” Vilanch said.
“I mean, something starts out and you just kind of know. When you say to yourself, ‘Gee, the Village People as movie stars with Olivia Newton-John, this is either going to be the greatest thing ever or the worst thing ever,’ the idea that it will turn out great is very slim compared to the idea that it will not,” he said.” “You just stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that, and you boldly go.”
Bruce Vilanch’s “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote” is now available from Chicago Review Press.
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