Bruce Vilanch has written ‘some of the biggest disasters’ on TV. He’s embracing his legacy
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On the Shelf
It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time
By Bruce Vilanch
Chicago Review Press: 256 pages, $29
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Remember that Snow White-Rob Lowe debacle at the 1989 Oscars? How about the galactically bizarre 1978 “Star Wars Holiday Special”? Or the 1980 Village People disco bomb “Can’t Stop the Music”?
Bruce Vilanch had a hand in all of the above, and lived to kiss and tell — and now write about it. His new book, “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time,” details his involvement in some of the most gloriously awful moments in the history of entertainment. Never the shy or retiring type, Vilanch is happy to embrace his legacy (which is easier to do when you’ve also won two Emmys and written for 25 Oscar telecasts).
“These were some of the biggest disasters, but everybody has disasters,” he told The Times in a recent 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 across as a big, caustically friendly and wonderfully gay Muppet. He’s successful enough to have been the subject of an excellent documentary about the craft of comedy (1999’s “Get Bruce,” featuring Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Nathan Lane, among others), and he’s seasoned enough to know where plenty of bodies are buried.
And yes, he helped write some serious stinkers.
Some of this can be attributed to the era when he made his showbiz bones. The ’70s was the decade of the prime-time TV special, usually built around a middling star and featuring talent from the airing network. (Synergy. It’s been around for a minute.) The specials were a blatant attempt to offer something for everyone, in a precable epoch defined by broadcasting, as opposed to today’s narrowcasting.
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It was also, not coincidentally, a time when drugs were rather prevalent.
“Many of these things were made in a cloud of smoke,” Vilanch said. “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.”
Such were the circumstances that gave us “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” George Lucas’ space adventure — there was only the one at 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 results, which aired Nov. 17, 1978, were not spectacular, but they were spectacularly strange. I could sense this even as a “Star Wars”-besotted 8-year-old. The story, such as it is, involves Chewbacca’s mission to return to his home planet of Kashyyyk to celebrate Life Day. The major cast members were on hand. So were CBS mainstays including Art Carney, Bea Arthur and Harvey Korman, all of whom stopped in to do wacky bits.
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“We were doing the thing on a hand-painted set pulled together from other things,” Vilanch said. “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 internet, where all shallow graves are eventually 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 happen? Who said yes? And have they paid their debt to society?’”
Vilanch writes of the “keyboard warriors” who track him down when they discover he was among the parties responsible for such trainwrecks. They also want to know about the 1989 Oscars, which kicked off with the spectacle of Snow White, played by the relatively anonymous Eileen Bowman, interacting with stars in the audience wearing a collective look of “What on Earth is happening right now?” This led into a duet with Lowe on a Hollywood-themed version of “Proud Mary.”
The response was less than enthusiastic. But Vilanch was essentially an innocent bystander, even as a writer on the show. The bit was the brainchild of producer Allan Carr, who also hired (and fired) Vilanch on “Can’t Stop the Music” (and, it should be noted, also produced the massive 1978 blockbuster “Grease”). The Oscars debacle effectively ended Carr’s career. He died in 1999.
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“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 said. “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 still has a soft spot for his late friend, and is currently working on a theater piece about him.
That telecast didn’t slow Vilanch’s roll. He reigned for many years as the wisecracking center square on “Hollywood Squares,” a space once occupied by Paul Lynde, for whom Vilanch wrote another special featured in the book, 1976’s “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.” A game of Six Degrees of Bruce Vilanch would include Bette Midler, Billy Crystal, Steven Tyler, Roseanne Barr and a long list of others. The guy knows, and has written for, a lot 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 said. “So you do meet a lot of people and I love that.”
He helped serve up a lot of turkeys. And now he gets to gobble.
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