If you’re looking for someone to serve as a tour guide situated at the crossroads of Old Hollywood and modern-day pop culture, you can do a lot worse than turning to Bruce Vilanch.
While Vilanch may be best known for his four-year stint spent on Hollywood Squares, the New Jersey native made his bones as a writer for the Academy Awards over the span of 25 years, netting two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy, Variety or Music Special. But long before Vilanch was penning gags for not just the Oscars, but the Tonys, Grammys and Emmys, he made his mark in the ‘70s working on a number of infamous variety specials.
It’s all spelled out in glorious detail in his new memoir: It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote. In these pages, readers get the behind-the-scenes blow-by-blow of not only televised crash-and-burns like The Star Wars Holiday Special, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, but cult film failures like Can’t Stop the Music and The Ice Pirates.
Vilanch will discuss his book on March 3 at Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington following a screening of his 1999 documentary Get Bruce.
The idea for the book was planted during the pandemic, when the world had a lot of downtime and started unearthing the aforementioned mistakes on YouTube.
“Everyone was sitting at home and all these podcasts sprang up,” Vilanch explained. “These people found me and were not born when these things were done. They discovered them all on the Internet and saw my name. They said, ‘How did this happen and who said yes to this?’ The Star Wars Holiday Special was the one most asked about. But then the Paul Lynde Halloween Special and Brady Bunch Hour were not far behind. They wanted to know how these actually came to be. I discovered I was telling these stories and after a bunch of these things, I thought I had a book here about how I wrote the worst television shows in history.”
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Other hilarious scenarios Vilanch shares include working on the failed 1978 musical Platinum and an equally still-born attempt at crafting a sitcom around Charo. But the juiciest recollection comes at the end of the book in the form of the infamous 1989 Oscar broadcast that found Rob Lowe cutting the rug with someone playing Snow White. And while Vilanch insists it wasn’t as bad in the house as it was unfolding, he does admit the collateral damage amped up considerably when a sex tape featuring Lowe with underage girls surfaced shortly afterwards.
“It all fell apart in the press the next day,” Vilanch recalled. “It was all the ancillary activities. The lawsuit, the letter from producer Allan [Carr]’s erstwhile friends—it died down and then a few weeks later, the Rob Lowe sex tapes surfaced. Whenever he was mentioned, it was, ‘Seen most recently on the Academy Awards…’ But he has owned it and is the poster child for bad behavior. He’s written about it in his memoir and has been on a million shows talking about. It’s clear that he’s at peace with it. But yeah, it was quite a bit of turmoil.”
Vilanch’s journey to Hollywood started with him being a child actor who never became a star (“I kept acting until I was too old to be a kid and I was auditioning opposite actors that were the real age”) and instead went to the Ohio State University. At this point, he was hired to be an arts and entertainment writer for the Chicago Tribune. It was here that he had the opportunity to cross paths with an up-and-coming vocalist named Bette Midler.
It was a meeting that forever changed Vilanch’s life to the point where the book’s dedication reads, “….the woman who changed my life before she changed yours, the Divine Miss M…Bette Midler. No one can follow her.” The memory rings clear today for the 77-year-old comedy writer/songwriter/actor as it did a half-century-plus ago.
“I went to see her at Mr. Kelly’s and I thought she was fantastic,” he said. “I interviewed her, said she was very funny and said she should talk more on stage. She asked if I had any lines and that was the beginning—I started writing for her then and there. That sort of became a hallmark of her act. From there, I started writing for other people. It was never a career I planned, but it wound up being a lot of fun anyway.”
Bruce Vilanch will be appearing on March 3 at Cinema Arts Centre, 423 Park Ave., Huntington. Vilanch will be hosting a screening of his 1999 documentary Get Bruce and promoting his new memoir, It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time. For more information, visit cinemaartscentre.org or call 631-423-7610.
