Father Knows Less

by Lee Kalcheim

  They felt good. I did not get what I wanted, so I didn’t feel good. What was the point? Why couldn’t I say what I really wanted? I remember walking down the aisle about to marry my first wife. I was twenty seven. I thought, I’m too young to die. What am I doing? “I looked around at the crowd. I can’t renege. All the people who sent us gifts, who came to the wedding. What would they think? What would they think? Would they have thought ill of me if I had shouted, “I want my mommy!”?

  I remember once working on a TV pilot script with a producer I’d just met. We were riding in a cab, back from lunch, and he leaned over and said to me, “Y’know, I can tell we’re gonna be friends. Really good friends.” At that moment I thought, Who says that kind of thing? I knew right then and there that this relationship was doomed. I was going to get screwed. Friendships are built over many years and many shared experiences. He knew from one lunch? I mean, if I had just turned to him and said, “You’re kidding!” maybe he would have greater respect for me and the work I did for him. Probably not. He didn’t understand the nature of friendship. He certainly wouldn’t have understood why I thought he was kidding. I do know I would’ve felt a helluva lot better.

  Because the fact is, years after my first wife and I were divorced, I had lunch with her and she was very rational about the mistake that we had made. We were probably both aware of the rationalizations we were making to justify the marriage. She wanted to be married. I didn’t know what the hell I wanted. And we did it. It ultimately caused no harm to either of us. We both remarried happily. But I didn’t learn anything from not telling her the truth. I learned it from my little son, when he told me the truth. The truth hurts sometimes, but if you think beyond the pain, you learn something about yourself that is much more valuable than any flattering lie. I learned that the insult, “No, I want my mommy” was not an insult if I put myself in his place. Who wouldn’t want to snuggle with his mommy? I do.

  SCENE: WARNER BROTHERS, THE SET OF FRIENDS

  (Gabriel is standing with his father, Lee, and the director, Michael Lembeck, as Jennifer Aniston walks over to Gabriel and kneels down in front of him.)

  JEN

  Hi. I’m Jen. Who are you?

  GABE

  Gabriel.

  JEN

  What a lovely name. Would … would you like to see the set?

  GABE

  (Looking back to his dad to see if it’s okay. Lee nods)

  Sure. Thanks.

  (Jennifer takes Gabriel’s hand and walks off with him, hand in hand, as Lee and Michael watch)

  MICHAEL

  Nice couple.

  LEE

  Yes. She could do worse.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOORAY FOR YOU KNOW WHAT

  Why was I on the set of Friends at Warner Brothers? Because the little scene I wrote about Julia and the boys took me there. I had sent it off to my successful director friend Barnet Kellman, who was directing Murphy Brown in L.A. Barnet had directed one of my plays. He was a fine director. Smart and tough and patient. He’d finally left directing theatre and gone to L.A to try to make a decent living. I knew a few people out there. Gave him some names. He got some work. They found out he was good. He did some pilots. And hit it big with Murphy Brown. He told me he had resisted going to L.A., as most theatre people do at first. But once there, he found that “They don’t treat you any more like shit than they do in the theatre and they pay a helluva lot more.”

  Barnet liked the stuff I wrote about the kids. My older dad musings. He gave me some notes. I worked on it. And next thing I know I’m in L.A., and we’re reading the scenes (I’d expanded the scene into the whole first act of a series pilot) in a friend’s living room with a pretty good cast, including Judd Hirsch and Jennifer Aniston.

  It read pretty well. We decided to take it to the studio where he worked, Warners, and present them with a reading. We called Judd, but he wouldn’t consider reading the scenes for studio executives. Call him when you had an offer. So I said to Barnet, “You know, I can read this part myself. I’m not great actor, but I can deliver it. And if I can make it work, they’ll think, Imagine how good this would be with someone really good! We decided to take a shot. We assembled a group of actors and me in a conference room at Warners. Les Moonves and his staff listened. They laughed. They did not rustle papers or take phone calls or doze. They seemed amused. A day or so later we were sitting in offices at NBC, where we were told, “We like this project. If you can find a star for it, we’ll make a pilot.”

  We were overjoyed. Wait a minute! If we can find a star for it? Barnet and I looked at each other. “Isn’t this their job?” “Aren’t they the network?” “Aren’t they supposed to get the star?” We decided, “Let’s not quibble.” This is all better than a “No.” This is a qualified “Yes.” If they don’t like it enough to find the star themselves, but they like it enough to challenge us to find one, we shall rise to the challenge!

  We consumed lists of actors. Then lists of actors that the network wanted to do business with. I’d never heard of most of them. Because I was exhausted from raising kids, I hadn’t watched TV for the last three and half years. I noticed that two people were not on the list. Judd Hirsch and Bobby Sherman.

  I went back to New York. To the family. I figured, well, like most things, this wasn’t going to happen. Barnet went from our optimistic, “It’s a qualified yes” to “You know if they really want to do something they don’t tell you to get the star. It’s a basically a ‘runaround no.’ But we’ll go through the drill. We’ll look.” Barnet’s agency handled Gene Wilder, so they sent the scenes off to Gene. Couldn’t hurt. He’d just had a show on air the previous year that had tanked. They weren’t serious. They wouldn’t want to do another show with him. He wouldn’t want to try again so soon. Pro forma runaround.

  I was meeting a woman in New York who was a seer. Yes, a seer. She read palms and tarot cards and told your fortune. Why you may ask? To find out about my future? No. She had a television series idea! Of course. Who doesn’t? As I was later to find out in L.A., our pool cleaner, our gardener, the checkout girl at Ralph’s Supermarket, all had series ideas. Why was I meeting with this nutcase? Because, frankly, I needed the work. Maybe somehow, some way, she did have an interesting idea for the series. We met in the bar of a hotel lobby that had been flooded in a recent rainstorm. It smelled like the basement of our house in Massachusetts after the spring rains. The room had the same doomed feeling as the project. “What is your series idea about?” I asked her. She leaned to me intensely, taking my hand in her purple-nailed hand. “Me.” “You?” “It’s about a woman who can tell the future.” Okay, I’ve got to stop here. You get a sense very quickly when you hear an idea that you know (a) you don’t want to write and (b) if you do write, it will not … will never, ever sell. But then, you figure, you know … maybe, just maybe, she has a twist on this that is so unbelievable, so charming, so funny, so … new that it could be a series. I’m here. I’m having a beer in a mildew stinking bar, what else have I got to do? So, she told me what she does. She tells the future. And I start ruminating. Coming up with ways we could make that character the center of a series. I’m selling her on her own idea. And she loves it. Why not? Am I desperate or what? I check my watch. Oy, it’s late. I lean to her:

  “Uh … before I go … could I ask you to tell me something about my future?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will my television show get on the air?”

  She took my hand. Opened it. Looked intently. Moaned. Sighed. Then nodded.

  “Yes,” she said, “I see much success.”

  I decided to quit while I was ahead. I could have asked her to be more specific. She saw success in what? My garden would be successful this summer? My old Volvo would get us through another winter? What? Didn’t ask. Took the news as good and said I was late for dinner. I was beat. I’d spent an hour and a half coming up with ideas for a TV series for a woman whose own idea I thought had absolutely no
merit until I started coming up with my ideas for her. Wait a minute, you take a bad idea, but because you have nothing better to do, you convince yourself it’s a good idea. Remember when Coca Cola came out with “New Coke”? Did anybody raise his hand and say, “Why are we doing this?” Ditto: Going into Vietnam, Iraq, etc., etc.

  I called home to tell Julia I was on my way.

  “Call Barnet. He’s called four times!”

  I called Barnet.

  “Gene loves it! I’m flying to New York on the redeye. We’re going to his house tomorrow. A limo will pick you up at noon!”

  Son of a bitch. The seer was right. I fell down laughing.

  The next day I was riding up to Gene’s house with Barnet in a limo. I thought, Okay, if nothing else happens, this is a giggle. And I remembered another thought, a kind of shibboleth about the business: If anything’s going to happen, it happens quickly. This was happening quickly. Of course it took Richard Attenborough twenty years to get Gandhi made. I wasn’t making Gandhi. I was only making Dadoo. That’s what we were calling the series. The name the boys had called me since they first learned to speak.

  Gene was as Gene looks like he’d be—warm and charming and very responsive to the material. Interesting, because he’d never had children. But as we all know from his screen persona, particularly in Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, he entranced children by communicating a silly, fetching, off-beat, childlike quality of his own. We talked about the scenes. What we wanted to do. What he wanted to see. And we noticed he had a tennis court. So we talked about tennis.

  And things did indeed happen quickly. Warners committed to making a pilot. Jennifer Grey was cast as Gene’s wife, and auditions were held to cast the roles of Sam and Gabe. You don’t know weirdness until you go to a casting call and see dozens of young boys auditioning to play the part of your boys. Gene came in to meet all the kids, and Julia stopped by with Sam and Gabe to say hello to Barnet when we took a lunch break. Gene came over to greet them and pointed out that Gabriel, with his auburn hair and big eyes looked just like him as a young boy. “He could be my son.” Then Sam, with his booming foghorn voice, asked, “When are we going to eat?” Gene turned, “A great voice.” Then turned to Barnet, “A great voice!” Julia felt a chill. Nope. Her kids were not going to be actors. At least not now. And she was not going to be a stage mother. She pulled them both to their feet and, giving a big hug to Barnet and sweet smile to Gene, said, “Boys are starved. Good luck today!” And whisked them off and out of show business.

  We ended up with two terrific kids from Los Angeles that we saw on tape. We had our cast. And what seemed like a week later, but was probably a month, Julia and I and the boys were ensconced at the Oakwood Apartments in “The Valley” in L.A., shooting the pilot. Poolside at the Oakwood apartments was bizarre. During pilot season actors descend on L.A. to audition. We must not have been the only pilot with kids in the cast. There were at least a dozen other kids around the pool, sitting with their moms, who were holding scripts as they intensely went over their lines

  “No, Allison, it’s I hate this dress. Not, I hate this dress.”

  Sam and Gabe sat in the shallow end of the pool with Julia while she read them Winnie the Pooh. I glanced over at them and thought, right choice and then went back to work “punching up” my pilot script.

  I’d been away from manic TV writing for years, and suddenly I was being told that each scene had to end on a boffo line. When I wrote for All In The Family, Norman Lear’s chief concern was always content, not laughs. I remember him once walking into the room while I was doing a rewrite with the story editors, and he said, “Hold it gentlemen. Before we do any rewrites, I think we ought to discuss what this episode is about.” He is one of a kind. Now, TV had become all about the jokes. There couldn’t be a moment of air. Funny. Funny. Funny. I had always prided myself on the fact that, if you took all the characters names off the script, you could still tell who said each line, because they were so true to that character—no on else could possibly say them. Now I was sitting around the Oakwood’s Pool on the weekend and going through the script line by line and saying, “Is this funny enough? Can he say something funnier?” It was my first clue of what was to come. I had conceived of a show that would focus on the tiny details of bringing up kids. The nuance of raising children. Well, a bumper sticker most fitting for L.A. would read, “Fuck Nuance!”

  I trusted Barnet, and if he felt it needed punch, I’d damn well give it punch. I can do punch. But I remembered fondly the weeks of rehearsal on the play we did together, Friends. It was a comedy, albeit about a man who was suicidal. And not once did the idea of making a line funnier ever come up. Of course, we had two hours to play out the lives the characters in this play. We would see them in highly dramatic situations as well as comic ones. We had time to draw our audience in. Get to know our characters. Let them laugh at the idiosyncrasies of these two guys. One of my favorite moments in the play had been when Ron Silver, playing Mel, a down-on-his-luck cartoonist living in a cabin in Vermont, is telling his guest, his oldest buddy and now the Assistant U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. (Craig Nelson) about his problems with women.

  MEL

  Y’see the problem is … I go to a restaurant. I see a woman at another table. I like her looks. I look at her. I fantasize about her in bed. With kids. In a vital, intense discussion over breakfast. Dancing. Running on the beach. Being deliriously in love. Then the girl in the restaurant bites her nails or something. And I say, “Oh, oh, nervous. Skittish. Pent-up anger. Lots of fights. Irrational.” And I break up with her right there. I fall in love with women, marry them, and break up with them all without ever meeting. I’m hopeless. Completely hopeless.

  Not a joke in the speech. Just pure character revelation. But it got laughs. As Barnet would say, a TV episode is a 22-minute two-act play. Everything is condensed. No time for nuance.

  We jumped headlong into shooting the pilot. Other comedy writers were brought in to help punch up the punch ups. I’m not sure any of the newly inserted jokes made the show any better, but I had a helluva good time sitting around the writers room with three other funny guys throwing out punch lines. I saw the idea of a subtle show about parenting slipping away. But I remembered the adage of an old ex-agent of mine who used to yell at me as I walked down the hall, “Funny is money!”

  After a week of rehearsal and mad rewrites upon rewrites, we were ready to shoot the pilot. Julia and the boys were sitting in the front row of the stadium seats inside the Warner soundstage. An out-of-work comedian was warming up the audience. There were many delays, and having run out of warm-up material and noticing that there was more than the usual amount of kids in the audience he said, “Okaaaay, how about a little quiz for all the kids up there? Okaaaay how many of you like music?” Hands shot up. “Okaaay let’s see how many musical instruments you can name? Let’s start with stringed instruments.” Some little girl yelled out “Violin” “Right!” Another “Banjo.” “Right!” A mother yelled “Cello”. Right. A little boy yelled, “Piano” “Right!” Sam, in his four year old foghorn voice belted out, “Wrong!” The comedian looked up to see Sam leaning over the front row. “Wrong? What’s wrong with that? A piano is a stringed instrument.” “No, it isn’t,” said Samuel. “It’s a percussion instrument. It has strings but the strings are struck by the piano’s hammers. It’s percussion!” “Okaaaay,” said the comedian, “Let’s hear it for the smart kid in the front row. What’s your name?”

  “Samuel.”

  “Why are you here tonight Samuel?”

  “My father wrote this.”

  “Really? Is he a writer?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okaaaay. Does he also play piano?”

  “No, my mommy does.”

  “What do you play?”

  “Nothing yet. But I’d like to play the violin.”

  “A stringed instrument, right?”

  “Ha!”

  Hearing Samuel banter with t
he warm up guy, I knew the whole idea for the series was right. I wanted it to be a show about special kids. Kids whose preoccupations were not only sports and toys and fast food and trips to Disneyland, but the myriad of surprising things in life.

  The pilot went reasonably well. The audience laughed. Gene was charming. The network execs wrung their hands. When I asked Gabriel, the critic, what he thought, he said, “OK, except the set doesn’t look like our house. It’s too neat.”

  After the show was shot, edited, and retitled Something Wilder, “real folks” were brought to a little studio for a screening. They were seated in special chairs with “reaction knobs” in the arm rests. They were shown the pilot and asked to press knobs when they “liked” or “disliked” what was going on on the screen. My TV future was in their hands. Literally in their hands.

  I didn’t want to wait around in L.A. for the results of the screenings or for the network to make its decision. It would be at least another three, four weeks. I didn’t want to sit around anywhere. I had some money now. We flew to Europe. To Brussels and then to London. Where they spoke the King’s English. Unpunched.

  SCENE: A RESTAURANT IN PARIS THAT SPECIALIZES IN “MOULE ET FRITE”

  (Four year olds, Samuel and Gabriel, and their parents are seated and have been handed menus.)

  LEE

  Why don’t we just have their specialty—Moule?

  GABE

  What’s a Moule?

  LEE

  It’s a mussel.

  GABE

  A muscle of what?

  LEE

  Not that kind of muscle. It’s a fish. It lives inside a shell.

  SAM

  What’s a frite?

  JULIA

  A French fried potato.

  SAM

  The French don’t call a French fry, a French fry?

  GABE

  That’s silly.

  JULIA

  Well, frite means fried in French. And since we’re in France, there’s no need to identify it as French.