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PLATOS, Pt. 1: And now it can be told

There's something my writing partner once said: "To work in the Entertainment Industry," you have to have a short memory and a long fuse.

You might call this a story about just how long a fuse you need, and just how short your memory has to be.

Still, it sometimes helps to write everything down, just in case you need it for later.

Like now.

Heh heh heh.

Lemme tell you about a little-known television pilot called Plato's Retreat.

Plato's Retreat was the most famous, most popular swingers club of its day. It used to be in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan - now it's a Food Emporium.

Think of that next time you're shopping there.

Anyway.

So there was this guy who was working for his dad's PR firm. They get the publicity account for Plato's Retreat. This PR guy sees a lot of wild stuff. Twenty years later, he decides to write a play about it. His wife has money, they can produce this play themselves.

Still, no one will touch it.

I don't know if I can impress upon you how bad a play has to be in order to remain unproduced in New York City when you have the money already.

I've seen plays that open with Lucky the Leprechaun drinking scotch and cursing at children for twenty minutes. Someone thought that was good enough to produce.

(And I was a funny fucking leprechaun. But anyway.)

PR Guy, who's now selling chandeliers, (so let's call him Chandelier Boy) finally gets talked into letting a professional writer come in and fix up his script.

Every single writer who reads the script turns it down.

Until they get in touch with my manager.

We like Manager Joey. He's a human handshake. He knows all sorts of people. Among them is Director Joey, who's helping Mr. and Mrs. Chandelier Boy get this thing on its feet. Director Joey likes the concept, but hates the script. He tells Manager Joey that this play needs a lot of work.

Manager Joey, being a human handshake, knows that my writing partner, Clayton, is probably going to have more patience with a bad play than I am. So he shows the play to Clayton first. Clayton also agrees that the play is awful, but the concept has promise. Clayton agrees to meet with them for lunch, one fine day in May.

Clayton shows up at this restaurant where the Chandeliers, Director Joey, and Random Gay Man in Attendance were already waiting for him. (We noted this to be a pattern. Mrs. Chandelier loved having a Random Gay Man in Attendance.) Director Joey is, incidentally, also gay; which made it even more odd when the first thing out of Chandelier Boy's mouth was, "I just gotta know, Clayton... you a fag?"

"Er, no." Clayton said.

"Good," Chandelier Boy croaks. (okay, let's just call him CB from now on, okay?) "Fags can't write this shit."

Mrs. CB is is about fifty-five, but doesn't look a day over sixty-two. She introduces herself by telling Clayton about her recent breast implants.

So Clayton figures he has nothing to lose by offending these two.

"I read your play," Clayton says, "and it's terrible. Here's what I think we should do. We take this play, and we toss out every last word. Then we turn it into a TV series."

Next thing Clayton knows, he's having a lunch meeting with Isaac Hayes...

(to be continued)

PLATOS, Pt. 2: Small Wonder meets Alf

Okay, you may be wondering – why were Director Joey and Random Gay Man in attendance, putting up with an obnoxious homophobe?

As we found out later, Director Joey has endless patience. Also, gay men kinda gravitated towards Mrs. C… I think this is a similar dynamic to Mommy Dearest and drunk, pill-popping Judy Garland being gay culture icons.

Anyway.

Director Joey seemed to tolerate CB because he believed that there was a good idea somewhere in his "play." And really, CB’s homophobia is pretty unconscious. His “fags can’t write this” comment wasn't meant as a swipe on gay people, he just has no tact and honestly believes that a gay man could never understand the world of swinging...

…and here we saw the first evidence that maybe CB was a moron.

So.

Clayton ends up in this meeting with Isaac Hayes. Turns out they've been talking to Isaac about maybe doing some original music for the stage version. When Mrs. C told him that they were going to make Plato's Retreat a TV show instead of a play, he agreed to meet with them.

CB and Isaac actually got along pretty well, reminiscing about the Seventies. When it got around to talking about the TV show, Clayton took over the meeting. Several times, CB tried to give Isaac Hayes a copy of his "play." Clayton stopped him, telling Isaac that too many things will change between the play and the TV show, and we didn't want him getting the wrong impression about where the piece was going...

…very tactful, that.

(Actually, I think my favorite part of this meeting, as it was relayed to me, was when Isaac Hayes asked Clayton how familiar he was with his work. Clayton said, “I’ll be honest with you – I know you more from your “Salty Chocolate Balls” days. To which Isaac said, “Right on.”)

So after that meeting, Clayton figures maybe these people have got something, even though they appear to be a bit insane. But hey, they could get Issac Hayes to have lunch with them. Clayton finally calls me up and fills me in. He hands me CB’s play the next day, warning me that it’s really, really horrible. Still, sometimes Clayton can be a pretty harsh critic, so I figure I'll give it a chance...

The play is horrible. Really, really horrible.

The closest approximation I can give you is... well, consider what I've told you about CB thus far. We're talking about a short, dumpy fiftysomething man with no volume control and a belief that he knows more about everything than everyone...

...now imagine being trapped in an elevator with him for two hours.

That's what reading his play was like.

I’m really gonna have to track down a copy of it so I can post some excerpts.

Clayton and I met that weekend and spent eight hours banging out the first germs of an idea for a TV pilot. We get it all typed up, spell-checked, formatted... I put together a resume of my creative career for CB, which he’d asked for.

Come to think of it, that was a mis-step, right there. We really should have asked CB for his resume as well. That way, we might have found out that his TV credits amounted to a sitcom pilot called “Gerry and the Robots” (think Small Wonder meets Alf) and a beauty pageant for middle-aged women who’ve had plastic surgery.

Neither of these projects ever saw airtime.

At any rate - with all the materials we’ve prepared, we’re set to meet CB at his apartment that Friday…

...and Clayton never shows up.

(to be continued)

PLATOS, Pt. 3: Did I mention your play sucks?

Clayton and I usually make a point of meeting up right before a meeting - especially one that looks like it might be difficult - in order to psyche each other up and have a common objective when we walk in.

Our meeting with CB is supposed to start at 7pm. I'm supposed to meet Clayton at a cafe close to CB's apartment at 6pm. I get there at 6. I wait until 6:15 - no Clayton. At 6:30, I call Clayton's cell phone. No answer. Finally, at 6:55, I head off to CB's apartment, hoping beyond hope that Clayton is already there. After all, I've never even met the guy. I've just heard these stories from Clayton about how CB is possibly bonkers, and possibly a racist, and how Mrs. CB is possibly even more bonkers and kinda looks like Mona from Who's The Boss, but with D cups and not as pretty.

So you know, I'm a little wary about setting foot in their apartment alone.

(Hey, let's call Mrs. CB "Mona" from now on. Okay? Okay.)

I walk in CB's apartment. No Clayton. First thing CB says to me:

"So you read the play? You like it? You wanna work on doing the stage version?"

"Um, no..." I said, wondering what this guy was trying to pull. Clayton had committed us to working on a TV adaptation. CB had already been told he had to find somebody else for any theatre version of this. "...I'm here to talk about doing a TV pilot."

CB showed me some newspaper clippings about Plato's Retreat while we were waiting for Clayton. They were quite entertaining. A New York Post article reported that a prostitutes' union was picketing Plato's Retreat, as the place was taking away their business.

I was beginning to see what Clayton meant about the potential of this piece.

Still, time is going by, and no Clayton. So I decide to start talking to CB about his play, and what has to change. I concentrate on the characters, not the plot - which was pretty easy to do, as CB's play had no plot.

Anyway, let's do a quick rundown of the main characters in his play:

FLO: A "harsh taskmaster," and the owner of Plato's Retreat. CB used this term a lot to describe Flo. The problem was that Flo, as she existed in his play, was obnoxious, rude, and a racist. But even worse, she wasn't funny.

"What you have to UNDERSTAND, OK?" CB would say, "is that she's a HARSH
TASKMASTER, but people like her anyway."

Yes, I thought. "but the audience won't.

JOSE: The gay Mexican towelboy, with ambitions in the field of hairdressing. It took a while to convince CB that "gay Mexican haridresser" does not a well fleshed-out character make. In fact, it would take five more meetings to convince him of that fact.

SEYMOUR: The character based on CB. SEYMOUR was the mat room supervisor. The "mat room," in Plato's Retreat, was a dark room with gym mats all over the floor. You were not allowed in the mat room with any clothes on. Mad orgy stylee. Seymour worked outside the matroom, handing out towels and dispensing "wisdom."

In between sequences in the play where nothing much happened, Seymour would walk upstage and complain to the audience about his life. In fact, all he did was complain. And even though he'd talk to the audience all the time, we were left at the end of the play knowing almost nothing about
him.

"But he's likable," CB would say.

How?

GEORGE & GLORIA: Two Plato's Retreat regulars. A married couple. George was fat. Gloria was not. That's all the character development CB had done.

IVAN & IRIS: Another married couple. S&M fetishists, who, oddly, were quite boring.

Later, we became convinced that CB gave a lot of couples the same first letters in their names so he could remember who was married to who.

VINNIE & CAROL: Vinnie was very popular at Platos. Why? Because he could disco!

Vinnie spent most of the play verbally abusing Carol and talking about how he was going to beat the shit out of her when he got home. Carol spent most of the play not saying much.

Vinnie was supposed to be a protagonist.

SINCLAIR & COBINA: WASPs from the suburbs. Aaaand, that's about it.

So in this first conversation with CB, I try to gently explain to him how television is different from theater, and how a lot of things have to change--both structurally and thematically--in order to create a piece that isn't over in two hours, that lasts for hours upon hours of material. For example, the character of Flo...

..and CB got up to make a sandwich.

This sort of thing became a pattern with him. Tell him his ideas need work, he'd start eating.

We probably put twenty pounds on him by the end of the summer.

So what happened to Clayton?

Well at the time, Clayton was working as a Shop Coordinator on SEX AND THE CITY by day and tending bar by night. We were meeting CB on a Friday night. Clayton, had just been through three days in a row of the day job/night job. He'd gotten maybe six hours of sleep in 72 hours.

Clayton got off work on Friday about two hours before he had to meet me. Having an hour to kill, Clayton figured he could catch a nap. He snuck up
to Sarah Jessica Parker's bedroom set and conked out on the bed....

....and woke up at 3AM, locked inside the studio.

Meanwhile, I'm in CB's apartment, calling Clayton's cellphone every ten minutes, insisting that this kind of thing never happens and I'm geniunely worried about him, and by the way CB, I know you just met me and all but your play sucks and here's why...

So I wouldn't have been surprised if CB hated me after that meeting and didn't want to work with us anymore.

No, it actually wasn't until the next meeting that CB started to hate me...

(to be continued)

PLATOS, Pt. 4: Good Cop/Bad Cop

I didn't know when I came in here, and I haven't suddenly gotten any brighter.

There were many pitfalls, pratfalls and obstacles in our journey towards making Plato’s Retreat a reality. First obstacle: convincing CB that yes, we did need to write a script.

See, CB had gotten in touch with Murray Schisgal. Murray heads up Dustin Hoffman's production company. He's also one of the co-writers of Tootsie. CB told Murray about this project. Murray didn't want to read an entire script, but he agreed to read the pitch package.

CB thought that since Murray wouldn't read the script right away, we didn’t need to write one. And it took a three-hour meeting on a Friday night to convince CB otherwise. After that, we decided it was time for some Good Cop/Bad Cop.

Now, Clayton and I are both pretty easygoing guys who have learned through experience that, as far as the Entertainment Industry is concerned, it’s better to have people like you than it is to be right. After all, if someone likes you, it’s easier to bring them over to your way of thinking. That’s how we handled things on the Sitcom gig. And that’s how Clayton handled things while working as a Writer’s Assistant on the Sitcom. He was unfailingly nice, friendly and hardworking, even with people who treated him like dingo droppings.

But now here was someone who required a little tough love. Someone who also required our talents as writers. A Creative Smackdown, if you will, was in order.

Clayton saw a wonderful opportunity to let loose his dark side, so he called Bad Cop. We’d need a Bad Cop for the next meeting. It was the one where we wanted to overhaul CB's characters. What made this particularly difficult is that A) CB's not a writer, and B) CB's ego wouldn't allow him to see that anything was wrong with his characters.

We started with Seymour, the lead character in CB's play. We started off with his job - mat room supervisor. Seymour sat outside and passed out towels. We started to explain to CB how it's maybe not a very good idea to have our main character complain all the time while stuck in one place, it kinda makes him static and unlikable...

...and CB got up and pulled a half-chicken out of his fridge.

"What you have to UNDERSTAND, okay,” CB said, pacing the room while shoving cold chicken into his mouth, “is that Seymour is STUCK, okay? That's important to his CHARACTER, okay?"

"Why?" I asked.

"Because he's tired of sex. He's a voyeur."

"Why?"

"Because he likes to watch fucking."

"Why?"

Allen began to turn red.

I genuinely apologized to CB (after all, I was supposed to be Good Cop) and asked him to sit down. "Thing is, none of what you're saying really gets us to the heart of the character. The things you mentioned - he's stuck, he's tired of sex, he likes to watch - these things are just a result of his deeper motivations. That's what we have to get at."

CB looked at me as if I'd just recited the Gettysburg address in Urdu.

So we moved on. We talked to CB about generalities. First, I asked him to stop using the term "sitcom." We had agreed to make Plato’s Retreat an hour-long program... CB was just going to confuse people if he got attached to that word.

But therein lay our first problem. CB wanted this to be a comedy. We told him it'd be a melodrama.

CB looked at us like we'd recited a crepe recipe in Ugandan.

We told him the show should have a sweeping narrative, a large cast and intricate storylines. He agreed. We told him those were the core elements of melodrama.

CB started to get blustery.

"Okay, what you have to UNDERSTAND, okay? There's this play by Eugene O'Neill called Waiting For Lefty, okay? In it there's a character called the YANK. And he's unlikable. And he has no direction. And that's a DRAMA, okay!"

CB sat back, rather pleased with himself.

I looked over at Clayton, just to see if he wanted to do it. After all, he was supposed to be Bad Cop. Yet he nodded, giving me the go-ahead.

"Um... Clifford Odets wrote Waiting For Lefty. You're thinking of The Hairy Ape. That's a farce, not a drama."

CB's hated me ever since.

As we were wrapping up, CB wanted to talk about who we could staff as writers for the show, assuming it got picked up. We threw out a few names from the Sitcom, explained how we could get to them… and then I was regaled, for the first time, with CB’s philosophy on homosexual writers.

“Any of these guys you’re talking about, they fags? ‘Cause fags can’t write this shit.”

At this point, CB may have been sensing that we were about to smack him.

“What I’m trying to say, okay,” CB said, quickly backpedaling, “is that the gays, they don’t know what swinging was, they don’t have the experience to know what to write about. So I don’t think we should hire any gays.”

Finally, Clayton kicked in as Bad Cop. “A good writer is a good writer,” Clayton said. “I couldn’t care less who they’re fucking.”

CB accepted the comment and invited us to watch TV with him. It being Friday night, we opted to leave CB’s apartment and get shnookered instead.

It was becoming clear (at least to me) that I’d make a better Bad Cop than Clayton. For one, I wasn’t as good at masking my true feelings about people. Good Cops have to cozy up to the scum so their guard goes down. I’m no good at that, as the scum knows I know they’re scum.

Not to mention the fact that, at the same time all this is going on, I’m in therapy letting out all this repressed anger and aggression… and here we have some older guy who thinks he can impart wisdom to a couple of young writers, and suddenly I’m channeling a bewildered, angry twelve year old who’s just been told that his first girlfriend is a Protestant whore…

…okay, we’re getting into territory best left unposted.

...oh, one more thing: There's another teeny reason CB hated me. His wife had a crush on me.

I don't believe I've mentioned that.

(to be continued)

PLATOS, Pt. 5: Drain Bamage?

Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: Igor, would you mind telling me whose brain I did put in?
Igor: And you won't be angry?
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: I will NOT be angry.
Igor: Abby someone.
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: Abby someone. Abby who?
Igor: Abby Normal.
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: Abby Normal?
Igor: I'm almost sure that was the name.

Okay, we’re back.

Lately, some people have come to me with concerns that maybe I’m leaving a bad impression of myself as an industry writer. That maybe, upon reading this, one might think I talk like this about everybody I work with…

…okay, my mom’s concerned.

But just in case it’s not just my mom – let me just say that this story is a unique situation involving a project that is deader n’ dead. Also, the professionals I’ve worked with in this industry have really been wonderful, talented people. (Wonderful, talented people in therapy, but then again, so am I.) Most of the staff working on the Big Sitcom gave me an inferiority complex about my own skills at The Funny. And aside from CB, everyone I met during this project were people I’m glad to have run into. So in that sense, for the people I ended up meeting either through CB (or in some cases, in an effort to protect myself from CB), I am grateful to him.

Still, I understand what my mom was getting at here. The tone of the last four parts has been… well, maybe a bit nasty.

But see, I get a little testy when it takes someone three weeks to read my notes and you only know this because he's still asking questions three weeks later that would have been answered in my notes…

...okay, sorry. Sorry. I get carried away sometimes.

The fact is, at this point in the process I was just a little hurt by CB - his general rudeness and lack of professionalism I was willing to overlook because, hey - he could get Isaac Hayes to the table. I couldn't do that.

But once it was clear he wasn't bothering to read material he was asking me for... I mean, at that point I got the feeling he just had no respect for me. And here I'm wondering what I had done...

I know, I know: "Gee, maybe it was correcting him on play references. Maybe it was backing him into a corner on character development. Maybe it was that you'd always come to meetings dressed up nice and he'd be in a grubby t-shirt and shorts and his wife would say how cute you were, agree with you, and dismiss everything he said..."

Hindsight is 20/20, isn't it?

Yes, by this point Mona had taken quite a shine to me. Now, I thought she was just being nice to the young guy who was, well... who looked like he was about to lose his shit on her husband. Although Clayton was insisting I was gonna have to "take one for the team" eventually...

Wait a minute, where was I? Oh, right.

At this point in the process, I didn't really dislike the guy. And I didn't completely disrespect him either. However, I was getting concerned about having to write a script with him, due to his rather miniscule attention span and constant need for attention. Really, it was Clayton who first drew battle lines.

I think it was a Tuesday night. CB had wanted to meet. I couldn't, I let him know, and forgot about it. Later that night, I got a call from Clayton on his cell.

"I took one for the team tonight," Clayton said.

"You fucked Mona?" I responded waggishly. (Hey, I was proud of that. I was pretty high at the time.)

"No, that's your job," Clayton shot back (Damn his skills at witty repartee), "I met CB by myself."

"Really," I said. "How'd that go?"

"He's a fucking moron," Clayton spat.

"Oh come on, you're being a little--"

"No. He's a fucking moron."

"I know he sometimes gets--"

"Listen. To. Me. CB. Is. A. Fucking. Moron."

"...okay, then. Maybe he shouldn't be writing the pilot with us."

"You think?!?"

I began to realize that “moron” would explain a few things. After all, he seemed to miss the point of why I was meeting him that first time... he didn't know the difference between a drama and a sitcom... he’d think it appropriate to have a writing meeting with no shirt on… he couldn't remember who was President of the United States during years when he was alive and old enough to vote...

(Oh yeah, there was one meeting when he was going on about the impact of Reaganomics on the Seventies and I pointed out to him that Reagan became President in 1980 – a fact which, hearing from me, he wanted to confirm by running upstairs to his room to check on the internet. Clayton finally convinced him I was right.

And yet, even after that, I still wanted to hold onto the fact that he was just a little absent minded.

I can sometimes be very stupid.)

I recall when I related many of these stories to Mom, she said, very sweetly and with much concern, "Well, maybe he has brain damage."

Mom's a very nice lady. She always wants to think the best of people.

Hi, Mom!

Of course, I related many of these stories to my friends (usually immediately after one of the meetings, busily getting myself drunk) and their response was, “Why are you still working with this guy?”

There’s an explanation for that. I should tell you that one later.

But anyway… we were at a juncture where we clearly needed to push CB out of the creative process. But how to do it? He wrote the source material. Somehow, we had to prove to CB himself that he couldn't write.

...and that's when I came up with a cunning plan.

I’ll get to that later, too.

So wait… which story should I tell next? Suggestions?