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Hollywood Insider Bruce Vilanch on what Cher, Bette Midler, The Golden Girls & more are really like!
By Celebrity Drop
April 6, 2025

Bruce Vilanch is stepping forward to acknowledge his role in producing some of the most infamous television moments of the twentieth century.

He reflects on projects like The Star Wars Holiday Special, Rob Lowe’s dance with Snow White at the Oscars, and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.

Bruce also shares his family ties to the legendary Bette Midler, discusses the humorous gag he wrote for Cher that she incorporates into her performances, and questions the true nature of Donny and Marie’s wholesome image.

Additionally, discover the reasons behind the tension between Bea Arthur and Betty White, along with an unexpected tale involving Bob Hope.

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Kelley Shepherd – Producer Craig Bennett – Presenter It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time https://amzn.to/4jjBFRI

Call Her Miss Ross: The Unauthorized Biography of Diana Ross https://amzn.to/42ssIiu

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TIMECODE 00:00 Start 02;10 He’s not Travis Kelce’s mother 02:54 Journalism 04:12 Child model 05:31 Bette Midler 10:51 Bob Hope 13:08 Donny & Marie Osmond 15:29 Sonny & Cher 18:14 The Brady Bunch Variety Hour 27:08 Star Wars Holiday Special 29:20 The Golden Girls 31:36 The Oscars 38:20 Elizabeth Taylor 40:02 Diana Ross 42:50 Sophia Loren 45:26 New book ‘It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time’ Subscribe for more videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/@celebritydro…

The post Video: Bruce Vilanch Discusses Bette Midler, Cher, & The Golden Girls first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Los Angeles Times
Bruce Vilanch has written ‘some of the biggest disasters’ on TV. He’s embracing his legacy
By Chris Vognar
March 5, 2025

Bruce Vilanch’s 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.

If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

The post Bruce Vilanch has written ‘some of the biggest disasters’ on TV. He’s embracing his legacy first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

We Got Bruce
Bruce Vilanch- HOLLYWOOD SQUARES, THE OSCARS
By Mister D
May 22, 2024

The man, the myth, the legend himself, Bruce Vilanch made a triumphant return to our humble show. He is a legendary storyteller, and you don’t want to miss him revealing the greatest joke that never made it on the air at the Oscars, what it was like writing the first ever appearance of KISS on television, and how the Star Wars Holiday Special came together. The award for the funniest podcast guest goes to…Bruce Vilanch on THE NIGHT TIME SHOW!

The post Night Time With Vilanch On Oscars, Star Wars Special first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

‘A Disturbance in the Force’ Ranked the #6 Documentary of 2023 by Rotten Tomatoes
By James Burns
January 10, 2024

A Disturbance in the Force, the feature documentary about the making of the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, has been ranked the #6 documentary of 2023 by Rotten Tomatoes.

In 1978, George Lucas was talked into cashing in on the STAR WARS craze by producing a holiday variety TV special.  What could possibly go wrong?

ANSWER: Everything…

From the filmmakers behind NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, FANBOYS, and RAIDERS!: THE STORY OF THE GREATEST FAN FILM EVER MADE comes A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE, the documentary about the infamous STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL.

Travel back to a galaxy far, far away – the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.  This documentary dives into the mystery of how it happened and why 45 years later it has become, much to the chagrin of George Lucas, the ultimate cult classic among Star Wars fans.

Featuring interviews with Seth Green, Kevin Smith, Patton Oswalt, Paul Scheer, Weird Al Yankovic, Donny Osmond, Bruce Vilanch, Gus Lopez, Steve Sansweet, and many more.

See the top 10 in full here. We send our congratulations to everyone involved in A Disturbance in the Force. If you’ve not yet seen it, you should, and you can buy the documentary now on Digital, DVD, and Blu-Ray from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Listen to producer Kyle Newman discuss A Disturbance in the Force on episode 116 of RADIO 1138 here.

The post Rotten Tomatoes Ranked ‘A Disturbance In The Force’ The #6 Documentary Of 2023 first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

The Random Kristian Show
The Random Kristian Show w/ Bruce Vilanch Funny Guy Extraordinaire
By The Random Kristian Show
January 11, 2024

Emmy award winning comedy writer/actor/songwriter Bruce Vilanch takes time from his crazy schedule to hang out on the almost 45 year anniversary of his more infamous productions, The Star Wars Christmas Special!! 

That’s right Bruce wrote that and many others that we discuss as well as being on the Hollywood Squares, acting on Broadway, working with greats like Bette Midler, and his involvement in so many aspects of hollywood!!

The post The Random Kristian Show w/ Bruce Vilanch Funny Guy Extraordinaire first appeared on We Got Bruce!.