The Press
Bruce Vilanch In Toledo, Ohio?
By Staff Writer
April 5, 2025

The Toledo Lucas County Public Library will welcome comedy writer, producer, and actor Bruce Vilanch; best-selling Regency and Georgian romance novelist Eloisa James, and women’s fiction author Sarah Penner to its Authors! series this spring. They join Laura Lippman, Adam Nimoy, and Viola Shipman as part of the 2025 series.

Highlighting genres such as memoir, mystery, romance, and thrillers, these acclaimed authors will take the stage at Main Library’s McMaster Center. Each event will include a moderated discussion about the author’s creative process and the inspiration behind their work, followed by a brief Q&A session.

Tickets are available at eventbrite.com. Call 419-259-5200 for details. Each ticket purchase includes a signed copy of the author’s featured book, while supplies last.

The schedule includes:

Bruce Vilanch, April 10.
Viola Shipman, April 16.
Eloise James, May 1.
Sarah Penner, May 22.
Laura Lippman, June 26.

Authors! programs will be held from 7-8 p.m. at the Main Library, 325 Michigan St., Toledo. Visit toledolibrary.org for more details.

The post Bruce Vilanch In Toledo, Ohio? 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!.

Rancho Mirage Writer’s Circle
The Art of Comedy Writing—Steven Rowley and Bruce Vilanch with Dave Karger (moderator)
By Rancho Mirage Writer’s Circle
Feb 21, 2025

WE ALL NEED TO LAUGH! Join Emmy-winning comedy legend Bruce Vilanch and New York Times bestselling author Steven Rowley, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, to discuss the serious business of writing humor for the page and screen and the enduring need for comedy in turbulent times. It was a guaranteed good time.

The post The Art Of Comedy Writing With Bruce Vilanch first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Gold Derby
Short, snappy, and sincere: Experts reveal 5 keys to delivering the perfect acceptance speech
By Ray Richmond
January 3, 2025

The calendar tells us that a new year is dawning, and we know what that means: The two-month-long awards show avalanche is upon us, beginning with Sunday’s Golden Globes. And with awards come acceptance speeches. They go together like salt and pepper, ketchup and burgers, Beavis and Butt-head. Those speeches come in all shapes and sizes depending on the winner doing the accepting. They can be long, they can be short, they can be full of gratitude and meaning. They can be powerful or they can be interminable, or something in-between.

There is an undeniable finesse essential to delivering an effective and impactful acceptance speech. Yet, there is no specific playbook to learn the do’s and don’ts. That leads to speeches being wildly unpredictable. It can be 16-year-old Patty Duke uttering a simple “thank you” in 1963 while accepting her Oscar trophy as Best Supporting Actress for The Miracle Worker. It can be Greer Garson droning on for nearly six minutes after winning Best Actress in 1943 for Mrs. Miniver, inspiring the Film Academy to start placing reasonable limits (around 45 seconds) on speech length.

So we decided to offer a public service to potential winners who don’t want to be played off the stage and consulted four experts to give us their pro tips for delivering the perfect acceptance speech.

Our esteemed panelists:

— Bruce Vilanch, the comedy writer extraordinaire who served as head writer on the Academy Awards for 15 years at the beginning of the current century and is widely acknowledged to be the go-to dean of awards show scribes. Vilanch now hosts the podcast The Oscars: What Were They Thinking? and has a memoir coming out March 4 titled, It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote.

— David Permut, a veteran film producer and a 2017 Oscar nominee for the Best Picture contender Hacksaw Ridge. He is also producer of the forthcoming feature Twinless from writer-director James Sweeney that has its world premiere at Sundance on opening night later this month.

— Madison Brodsky, an entertainment reporter, host, and content creator who has reported on various red carpets over the past decade.

— Danny Deraney, a PR executive and personality whose clients include or have included Laura Benanti, Rosanna Arquette, and Illeana Douglas.

Here are their recommendations when it comes to the art of the acceptance speech:

Keep it short and sweet

Size definitely matters. While not everyone’s concept of “short” is the same, they all agree that reading off a list of thank-yous is never a good idea.

“Brevity is definitely better,” Permut explains. “I mean, I’m in the business, but the person who isn’t in the business watching at home can’t relate to all the names being pored over. We can relate to it when they thank their higher power and their mom and dad, and maybe their fellow nominees and the director. But they should stop short of singling out their agents and lawyers and managers and other parties who may be part of their team. People watching at home just don’t care.”

“Yes, keep it short and sweet,” Brodsky echoes, “because nobody wants to sit through a five-minute laundry list. The best speeches are 60 seconds or less and are very focused. They hit all the highlights. You can thank people who truly make a difference, but add a little meaningful story to it, something quick and sweet. Instead of thanking each member of the cast and crew individually, doing a group thank-you goes a long way.”

At the same time, you don’t want to appear to be rushing through your speech.

“After winning, you’ve got to pace yourself,” Deraney says. “Be cognizant of the moment. As my French teacher in high school told me, remember how long six seconds can be and follow the six-second rule no matter the oral task. You can get a lot of things in without thanking the family tree. Give thanks but remember it’s not storytime. Be appreciative, but also remember there’s a show going on.”

Vilanch believes that too many acceptance speeches leave the audience cringing because “people tend to get very-self-indulgent once they get up there and they’ve got the world’s attention. That’s when you’re going, ‘Get off! You’re done! You’re killing yourself!’ But you can’t get mad at sound editors who work in a room by themselves and are up there sincerely thanking people who mean something to them. It’s not always so cut-and-dried, because you don’t want to crush anyone’s huge moment.”

Keep it spontaneous and unrehearsed

Vilanch recalls that the greatest example on his watch of an impromptu acceptance happened at the Oscars in 1992, when Jack Palance won Best Supporting Actor for City Slickers — and famously began doing one-armed push-ups onstage. “It helps to have someone who’s a little off to begin with,” Vilanch observes. “But yeah, the spontaneous moments are worth everything. The worst part is when they pull out a piece of paper or their phone, look down at the podium and start reading.”

One reason why the Tony Awards are “the most fun of them all” to watch, Vilanch finds, is “because these are people who do eight shows a week on a stage and know what to do when they get onstage in front of people to deliver a speech. A lot of people in the movie business have no clue because they’re not used to working with a camera. If they hit their mark, it’s a good day.”

“Prepare, but be careful not to over-rehearse,” Brodsky warns. “You should have a game plan going in so you know where your speech is going, but you still want it to feel natural and not like you memorized the entire thing. And then, end on a high note, like a really amazing funny quote or a meaningful statement, or a call to action.”

Deraney makes sure to prep his nominated clients before their awards moment “so they have a good handle on what to say. I like them to focus on how grateful they are, how wonderful it is, how much they love their fellow nominees. But it obviously has to sound real.”

Keep it gracious and genuine

For Permut’s money, it’s important always to practice humility when accepting an award bestowed by one’s peers. But the emotional angle is equally important and should never be shortchanged. “When you give a speech that’s just filled with emotions, people seeing and hearing it can feel it,” he emphasizes. “It hits people in the heart. It’s the same as when you see a great movie. It hearts you in the heart, in the soul. And it doesn’t hurt to make people laugh when making your acceptance, either. It’s all about coming across as genuine. People know when you’re being real and when you’re not.”

Sometimes, getting caught up in the moment can come back to haunt an award winner for being perhaps too real. Take, for example, the overcome Sally Field following her Oscar win for Best Actress (her second) in 1985 for Places in the Heart. What she said onstage has often been misquoted, but was actually this: “The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me.”

“I think she regretted it for years,” Vilanch stresses, “but then Sally monetized it. She did a Visa commercial [poking fun at it] where she made a ton of money. She finally owned it and essentially said, ‘I can’t run away from this,’ because that’s what happens when you do a thing like that on the Oscars. It’s like fumbling in the Super Bowl. It stays with you forever.”

Brodsky uses the example of James Cameron‘s speech after winning the Best Director Oscar for Titanic in 1998 as how not to accept your award gracefully. The filmmaker famously held up his trophy and declared, “I’m the king of the world!” Even if it was a line of dialogue in the film, “it came across as the opposite of humble,” she says. “Good speeches start with gratitude, and to my mind that was a missed opportunity for Cameron to show how thankful he was for the project.”

Make it memorable

“Leave the audience with something to remember,” Brodsky notes, “because the last line is kind of your mic-drop moment. So make it count.”

It should be noted here that while there have been plenty of memorable acceptance speeches over the years at the Oscars, they have nothing on the Golden Globes — where the alcohol flows and lips are loosened. In 1996, for example, Brad Pitt won the film supporting actor honor for 12 Monkeys and was moved to thank the makers of the anti-diarrhea medication Kaopectate. “They’ve done a great service for their fellow man,” he noted.

Two years later, when a teary Ving Rhames won for the HBO film Don King: Only in America, he called Jack Lemmon (nominated in the same category for 12 Angry Men) up to the stage and handed him the trophy. “I feel that being an artist is about giving, and I’d like to give this to you, Mr. Lemmon. It’s yours,” Rhames said. Upon being met with a raucous standing ovation after hitting the stage, a completely discombobulated Lemmon described it as “one of the nicest, sweetest moments I’ve ever known in my life.”

And who can forget Jodie Foster’s unofficial coming-out-but-not-really speech at the Globes in 2013 while receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement honor. “I had a sudden urge to say something that I have never really been able to air in public,” Foster said, “a declaration that I’m a little nervous about.. But I’m just going to put it out there, loud and proud. … I am single. No I’m kidding but I’m not really kidding but I’m kind of kidding. … I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the Stone Age, in those uh, very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family, and co-workers and then gradually proudly to everyone she actually met.” And it went on from there.

Vilanch recalls that the best line he ever heard in an acceptance speech was Charles Durning‘s in winning the 1990 Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Play for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “He said, ‘Some of you may be right. I may not deserve this honor, but I don’t deserve arthritis, either, but I have that’,” Vilanch relates. “At the time, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. It was his get-off line. That’s what makes these awards shows great. It’s the unpredictability and the chance to hear something like that. It’s so much more interesting and memorable than thanking their agent or makeup and hair person.”

Brodsky cites Halle Berry’s win for Best Actress for Monster’s Ball — the first Black performer to win at the Oscars in that category. “She acknowledged how much bigger the moment was than just her. That made for an unforgettable speech.”

She added, “I also loved Olivia Colman’s speech after winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Favourite in 2019. It was just pure joy. She was clearly so surprised, and her speech was just so funny and real and relatable. What made it unforgettable for me  was when she gave a shout-out to little girls practicing their speeches ‘on the telly.’ That was just so very charming and inspiring to me.”

The post Vilanch, Others Reveal The Art Of The Acceptance Speech first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

We Got Bruce
Bruce Vilanch Chats Incredible Career
By Mister D
May 18, 2024

Legendary writer and comedian Bruce Vilanch joins DBL to go through some of his most memorable (and occasionally infamous) TV specials, including ‘The Paul Lynde Halloween Special’ and ‘The Star Wars Holiday Special.’ He also talks about how awards shows can get their groove back in modern time, and the impact of LGBTQ+ comedy in the Netflix documentary ‘Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution.’

The post Bruce Vilanch Chats Incredible Career first appeared on We Got Bruce!.