On the Shelf
It Appeared Like a Dangerous Thought on the Time
By Bruce VilanchChicago Overview Press: 256 pages, $29If you purchase books linked on our web site, The Occasions might earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges help impartial bookstores.
Do not forget that Snow White-Rob Lowe debacle on the 1989 Oscars? How in regards to the galactically weird 1978 “Star Wars Holiday Special”? Or the 1980 Village Folks disco bomb “Can’t Stop the Music”?
Bruce Vilanch had a hand in all the above, and lived to kiss and inform — and now write about it. His new ebook, “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time,” particulars his involvement in a few of the most gloriously terrible moments within the historical past of leisure. By no means the shy or retiring kind, Vilanch is comfortable to embrace his legacy (which is less complicated to do if you’ve additionally gained two Emmys and written for 25 Oscar telecasts).
“These were some of the biggest disasters, but everybody has disasters,” he informed The Occasions in a current interview. “It wasn’t like they said, ‘Oh, this is s—. Let’s get Vilanch.’ It’s just the luck of the draw. It’s just the way things turned out.”
Vilanch, now a snarky and youthful 76, comes throughout as a giant, caustically pleasant and splendidly homosexual Muppet. He’s profitable sufficient to have been the topic of a wonderful documentary in regards to the craft of comedy (1999’s “Get Bruce,” that includes Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Nathan Lane, amongst others), and he’s seasoned sufficient to know the place loads of our bodies are buried.
And sure, he helped write some critical stinkers.
A few of this may be attributed to the period when he made his showbiz bones. The ’70s was the last decade of the prime-time TV particular, normally constructed round a middling star and that includes expertise from the airing community. (Synergy. It’s been round for a minute.) The specials have been a blatant try to supply one thing for everybody, in a precable epoch outlined by broadcasting, versus at the moment’s narrowcasting.
It was additionally, not coincidentally, a time when medication have been slightly prevalent.
“Many of these things were made in a cloud of smoke,” Vilanch mentioned. “It was also just a crazy period when it was a three- or four-channel universe, so you could get away with a whole lot of stuff because a lot of people were coming home and watching television at a certain hour. People actually sat down in the living room. They only do that now for a few events, either a football game or Nikki Glaser roasting a football player.”
Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Anthony Daniels as C3PO in CBS’ “Star Wars Holiday Special” (1978).
(CBS through Getty Photos)
Such have been the circumstances that gave us “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” George Lucas’ house journey — there was solely the one on the time — was red-hot. As Vilanch writes, “Either someone at CBS, or someone at ILM, or someone in the IRA, or someone on the IRT — depends on which version you’ve heard — suggested producing some sort of ‘Star Wars’ spectacle for TV to keep the franchise bubbling on the burner of public awareness until the second installment was released.”
The outcomes, which aired Nov. 17, 1978, weren’t spectacular, however they have been spectacularly unusual. I might sense this at the same time as a “Star Wars”-besotted 8-year-old. The story, corresponding to it’s, entails Chewbacca’s mission to return to his dwelling planet of Kashyyyk to have a good time Life Day. The most important forged members have been readily available. So have been CBS mainstays together with Artwork Carney, Bea Arthur and Harvey Korman, all of whom stopped in to do wacky bits.
“We were doing the thing on a hand-painted set pulled together from other things,” Vilanch mentioned. “We didn’t go to London for six months to shoot this thing. It was crazy. We had hand-me-down aliens that we had to get at the outlet store. Anybody who was interested in ‘Star Wars’ would look at it and go, ‘What is this?’
“And then it disappeared. We thought we could put it in a shallow grave and nobody would really find it.”
Enter: the web, the place all shallow graves are ultimately dug up. As Vilanch recalled, “When I started doing podcasts during COVID, people way younger than I am would say, ‘“The Star Wars Holiday Special,” how did that occur? Who mentioned sure? And have they paid their debt to society?’”
Vilanch writes of the “keyboard warriors” who monitor him down once they uncover he was among the many events accountable for such trainwrecks. Additionally they need to know in regards to the 1989 Oscars, which kicked off with the spectacle of Snow White, performed by the comparatively nameless Eileen Bowman, interacting with stars within the viewers carrying a collective look of “What on Earth is happening right now?” This led right into a duet with Lowe on a Hollywood-themed model of “Proud Mary.”
The response was lower than enthusiastic. However Vilanch was basically an harmless bystander, at the same time as a author on the present. The bit was the brainchild of producer Allan Carr, who additionally employed (and fired) Vilanch on “Can’t Stop the Music” (and, it must be famous, additionally produced the huge 1978 blockbuster “Grease”). The Oscars debacle successfully ended Carr’s profession. He died in 1999.
“They had delivered the show to Allan as a savior because the ratings had been going down, and there was some fresh blood at the Academy,” Vilanch mentioned. “His mandate was, ‘Make it different, make it young, make it unusual.’ So they were trying not to second-guess him. And that proved to be fatal.” Vilanch nonetheless has a comfortable spot for his late good friend, and is presently engaged on a theater piece about him.
That telecast didn’t gradual Vilanch’s roll. He reigned for a few years because the wisecracking middle sq. on “Hollywood Squares,” an area as soon as occupied by Paul Lynde, for whom Vilanch wrote one other particular featured within the ebook, 1976’s “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.” A recreation of Six Levels of Bruce Vilanch would come with Bette Midler, Billy Crystal, Steven Tyler, Roseanne Barr and a protracted record of others. The man is aware of, and has written for, lots of people.
“When you do the Oscars you meet the stars who are just guesting on the show, and they’re all marching through your office with their publicists and their spouses and their holistic pet psychiatrists and all the other people in their entourage,” he mentioned. “So you do meet a lot of people and I love that.”
He helped serve up a variety of turkeys. And now he will get to gobble.
