The Hollywood Reporter
Bruce Vilanch Compares Will Smith Oscar Slap to 1954’s ‘A Star is Born
by Seth Abramovitch 
March 29, 2022

Bruce Vilanch Talks About The Slap-Happy Academy Awards

As the head writer for every Academy Awards ceremony between 2000 and 2014, no one knows more about how a joke can live or die on the Oscars stage than Bruce Vilanch. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the legendary quip-writer, 73, to get his take on Will Smith’s instantly infamous slapping of guest presenter Chris Rock at Sunday night’s ceremony. The altercation arose over a joke Rock made about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, and her shaved-head look, which the comic suggested would be suitable for “G.I. Jane 2” — seemingly unaware Pinkett-Smith has alopecia.

As jaw-dropping as it was, the moment — followed by Smith’s expletive-laden shouting at Rock to keep his wife’s “name out of your fucking mouth” — was not entirely without precedent, though Vilanch had to reach into the Oscars metaverse (the ceremony held in 1954’s A Star is Born) to find a comparable moment.

Hi Bruce. So where were you for this very memorable Oscars?

I am in New York so I wasn’t at the show. I had nothing to do with the show. I did write a couple of jokes for people, but I certainly was not around for the big slap fest. In fact, this has just come in: “Sean Penn has canceled his Oscar meltdown because he can’t compete with Will Smith’s.”

That’s a good one.

Thank you. Lead with that.

In terms of Chris Rock’s “G.I.Jane” joke itself, do you think it was out of line at all?

I don’t follow Jada Pinkett Smith’s personal life, so I don’t know about her alopecia. And I don’t know if Chris Rock knows about it, either. I just think he was doing a joke about her look without knowing what was going on with her look. I don’t think it was a scripted joke. Everything of course that’s scripted gets vetted, but I think probably he came up with it when he was standing on stage. That’s what comics do. I think that if anybody had seen it ahead of time, they would’ve pointed out to him that probably it was not the best idea.

Was it slap-worthy? Is it any joke?

I certainly know that when people get up on stage, comedians especially, they say things, and they’re in the moment, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. And then when it doesn’t work on the Oscars, they hear about it for the rest of their lives. 

But that does not excuse somebody getting up and assaulting somebody else. I mean, that’s crazy. Not since James Mason slapped Judy Garland in A Star is Born has the Oscars seen this kind of activity. And that was unintentional. He was just making a grand gesture and happened to conk her while he did it. This was like a calculated move. He got up, and he strode over there, and he did it. I think the moment it happened you realized this was not in the script.

When you said that anything that’s scripted is vetted, you mean it’s vetted by the producers, but you wouldn’t necessarily go to the target of the jokes and say, “We’re going to be doing X, Y, and Z about you.”

Not necessarily. Sometimes you do. It depends on the relationship that the person telling the joke has with the person the joke is about if they feel squeamish about it. I remember calling Elizabeth Taylor because we had an Al Pacino [joke at her expense]. Al had lost seven times. Billy [Crystal] was going to say he’s “heard another man’s name cried out in the night more times than anyone except Elizabeth Taylor.” And so we had to go to Elizabeth to clear the joke. She cleared. She thought it was hilarious. She can’t walk back from eight marriages.

And she was there that night, and it all went great?

Yeah. There were bits on the show last night that you knew people were in on. I mean, did she really pull all those guys out of the audience that gets their COVID tests? They must have known that was going to happen. I can’t believe that they didn’t know it was going to happen. Because when they tried to get Will Smith up there — he wasn’t going to budge. But maybe it was spontaneous. I don’t know. 

What do you make of the Academy’s response or lack of one during the broadcast?

I think they’ll have to dig their way through the idea that somebody was supposed to arrest Will Smith for assault. I don’t think anybody was sitting backstage looking through the Academy code of conduct. And I suspect if they were, they decided just to let it play out, and it’ll be dealt with after the broadcast. To call attention to it by then having him disappear from his seat would really overshadow everything that was going on, so I think that was the decision that they made.

And what do you think this is going to do to the Oscars? Is it going to chill them in terms of hosts and presenters making more pointed jokes?

I don’t know how it will change, and then I don’t think it will change the Oscars. The show is what it is. The sad part is that it overshadows all the good stuff that was on that show, the range of diversity of the winners, and the fact that Deaf representation, gay representation, Black representation, all of that stuff, was [celebrated]. And there were more popular films involved, and the whole idea that the buzz was back on the show and the glamour was back and Timothee Chalamet with no shirt. All of that was there, and that’s now all overshadowed by The Punch and Judy Show.

But it sounds like you liked the show overall?

I thought there was some great stuff in it. It moved along. I don’t know that I would have dancers in the In Memoriam section. It was a nice idea, but it kind of upstages the faces that you’re looking at. I mean, you want to have that mean something, so I don’t know about that. It was hit and miss.

No pun intended?

Certainly, the opening was strange. I mean, it really was a kind of a Grammy opening to open with what looked like a Beyonce video. But they wanted to have a big star right up front, so they had the Williams sisters and Beyonce, and then they brought out the [hosts] who made some funny jokes at the beginning.

Yeah, some of those jokes were, I would say, a little meaner than the one that got the slap.

Which one was meaner?

I guess how Amy Schumer kept going after Being the Ricardos, saying how it wasn’t funny.

Oh, the Ricardos thing. Yeah, she did do that.

And Don’t Look Up: “I guess the Academy members don’t look up reviews.”

Yeah. Well, it was basically negative. That’s kind of her thing: sweet face and saying these things.

And then they made a joke also about Will Smith’s open marriage during the COVID bit, and they laughed that off.

Well, that’s their brand. I mean, what are they going to do?

The interview was edited for length and clarity. 

The post Bruce Vilanch Talks About The Slap-Happy Academy Awards first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Bruce Vilanch on being adopted, growing up gay, and unique living with Bette Midler, directing the Academy Awards, the Emmys, and joke writing (April 26, 2021)

The post Podcast: Vilanch Talks W Michael Stein On Being Adopted, Growing Up Gay, Living With Bette Midler, And More first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

LA Magazine
Oscars Dirt: Veteran Writer Bruce Vilanch Tells All (and More)
By Andrew Goldman
April 13, 2021

The 1989 Oscars, infamous for their 11-minute opening production number that saw Snow White dueting with Rob Lowe on “Proud Mary,” ended the career of the show’s producer, Allan Carr. That year’s ceremony, however, proved a more auspicious beginning for first-time telecast-writer Bruce Vilanch, who would go on to work on 24 more shows. “They gave me a T-shirt that said, ‘I wrote everything but Snow White,’” Vilanch, 72, says. The humorist started as a writer for the Chicago Tribune before Hollywood came calling. Over the years, he’s written not just for the Oscars but also the Tonys, Grammys, and Emmys, making him a kind of awards-show éminence grise, if someone as blond as Vilanch can technically be considered such a thing.

Here, he talks to Andrew Goldman about past Oscar ceremonies and offers a few COVID-era what-not-to-dos for the first-time producers of April 25’s Oscars.

Listen to the full conversation with Vilanch on Los Angeles‘ podcast The Originals.

A big part of the job of an Oscar writer is writing the bits that the stars say while presenting. Would you get a lot of pushback from stars?

You get notes, and everybody gets into the act. I mean, I literally got a call once from a guy who was Goldie Hawn’s yoga trainer, who said, “She left a script at the studio, and I took a look at it. You know, she’s not going to say this.” This actually happened.

Who was particularly hard to write for?

Keanu Reeves was hard to write for because there’s no stage personality there. Johnny Depp was the same thing. I mean, when actors inhabit characters, it’s on the page and that’s their job. But they’re not like Shirley MacLaine or Billy Crystal or Bette Midler, who strut out on stage every night and have the stage persona. I had a bitter failure with Keanu, who’s a really terrific guy. We thought we’d give him a Bill and Ted kind of thing to do. It was ridiculous. He tried to sell it. It just didn’t work. Forty years later and I’m still apologizing to him.

Oscar telecast history is filled with jokes that don’t land. In your role as a writer, were you ever able to prevent a disaster?

Well, one obvious one comes to mind. We had a joke [for host Billy Crystal] about the rumor about Richard Gere and a gerbil.

Oh my God. I can’t believe you considered doing a gerbiling joke at the Oscars.

Well, there was a movie that year called An American Tail about Fievel the mouse. And the joke was “Richard Gere was going to present this award with Fievel, but Fievel backed out.’ Richard was on the show presenting something very serious like a documentary, so he’s sitting out there, and we’re backstage looking at the monitors. And when you’re sitting at the Oscars and you see a guy coming up the aisle with a camera, you know something’s going to happen involving you that you don’t know about. So Richard sees the camera and he’s terrified. And so Billy just looks at him and says, “We can’t. He’ll have a heart attack. Look at him, he’s pale already.” So we cut the joke. I wish I could say that I said to cut it, but Billy said it.

The Oscars have been experimenting with having no host at all because it seems that despite how high-profile a gig it is, it’s hard to find someone willing to host.

It’s impossible.

Why?

Because if you’re big enough to host the Academy Awards, you can only get in your own way. Things that you would do on some other show and not get noticed . . . everybody notices it when you do on the Academy Awards. David Letterman did not need to host the show, and he was living with it for years afterward.

Is there somebody elusive that producers are always going after to host who’s never said yes?

Tom Hanks. I think he once said they’ll never nominate me again if I host the thing. I don’t think that’s true, but I just don’t think he wants to do it. One year Billy was very sick—had like severe migraines—and we were worried about whether he would make it. Tom was the standby. He would have come and done it, but Billy rallied and was great.

Do you remember people politicking to host?

Jay Leno wanted it very badly, but I think ABC was not interested in promoting him. Which is weird because Johnny Carson did it [five times between 1979 and 1984].

If someone hosts only once, is it fair to assume that person wasn’t deemed successful at it?

Maybe. Or it might be that they didn’t like it. These people are so rich and famous already that they don’t need go through all the agita. They don’t need the money. And if you’re going to do it the way a performer does it, you’re going to spend a lot of time on it—time that you could spend making a Marvel comics movie.

You worked on the infamous Anne Hathaway-James Franco show. What went wrong?

The idea was that they were young and that was all that mattered. But they had no real chemistry. When they got together to do the promos for the show, they were edited to look as if they had chemistry, but they had no chemistry.

When you say no chemistry, do you mean that they didn’t particularly care for one another?

I would hate to say that about either of them because I know them both and they’re nice people. But Anne’s a precision instrument. She’s very disciplined and knew what she was going to do each time. And James is freewheeling, so he was not really in his comfort zone. Plus, James had brought in a bunch of Judd Apatow writers who had never been involved with the show before, throwing him stuff.

Even with the best hosts, there’s a point at which the broadcast feels like it will never end. Is there any way to fix that?

Yeah, you have to eliminate categories. But the Academy’s not going to do that. Every year, I say, “When the ratings get low enough, they’ll start eliminating.” There are 24 categories, and only four of them have actors. Part of the reason that people get tired is because they’ve seen awards shows like the Golden Globes where everybody is recognizable. And the Oscar show is full of nerds. Some of them are saying some wonderful, significant things, but people aren’t listening because they don’t give a shit about them.

So what can this year’s Oscar producers—Steven Soderbergh, Stacey Sher, and Jesse Collins—learn from other COVID-19 era awards shows?

Well, the Emmys did it great. The Golden Globes tried to duplicate some of that, but they had some of their own ideas that didn’t work. Their comedy sketches swung wide, with Kristen Wiig and then Maya Rudolph and Keenan Thompson doing that thing. They were both funny premises, but they just didn’t land, especially when they had an audience of 50 first responders. It was a nice idea, but nobody wants to see an audience without celebrities in it. Plus, the show was laden with so much—they were carrying the guilt of the white race the whole show. Don’t do the show that you would normally do; do something completely different. Steven Soderbergh producing is a brilliant idea because he’s a filmmaker, and he’ll do something different with it. Because he knows that he can’t do the same old, same old. Because we’re in an extraordinary year.

The post Bruce Vilanch Spills The Tea On Oscar Dirt first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Out & About Nashville
Profile: Actor and Comedian Bruce Vilanch
By William Shutes
December 13, 2019

If Barbra Streisand will always own the title Funny Girl from her star-making turn in the musical of the same name, Bruce Vilanch is and has been Hollywood’s Funny Guy for decades.  Known behind the scenes for a razor wit and in front of the camera as the ham sidekick to Whoopi Goldberg’s center square in the late-90s reboot of the game show, Hollywood Squares, Vilanch is making a star turn in the 2019 TPAC presentation of the Lythgoe Family Panto, Aladdin and His Winter Wish.  Vilanch spoke with me last month as he prepared to head to Nashville for this Christmas spectacular.

Will:  So first of all, you’ve pretty much been the go-to guy for decades when a celebrity needs Grade-A material to get the audience roaring with laughter. You’ve won Emmy Awards for your quick wit.  I watched a video while I was doing my preparation when you talk about the Academy Awards with Billy Crystal, and basically rewriting the script as the show went on so that you could just keep it fresh and keep it topical.  Did funny come to you naturally or is it something that evolved and that you grew into?

Vilanch:  It’s an interesting proposition.  I mean, I guess it came to me naturally.  I was sort of surrounded, also, by people who were funny and had my mother’s family in particular who were really funny.  But I think that when you’re fat, ungainly, unathletic, and a kid you have to work up some defenses.  And I discovered I could use humor as a way to, as Whoopi (Goldberg) says, it gives you a chance to run.  It disarmed them, and so I used that a lot when I was a kid.  And I don’t know where that came from. You know I spent a lot of time making faces in the mirror and all that and my mother was very theatrical so I had that to look up to.

And so I suppose it’s just one of those things we don’t know that we have it’s like some people have math.  I still don’t have math.  I think it’s one of those indefinable chemical things that happened in the brain that we think we know but we really don’t.

Will:  It’s interesting when you talk to, you know, so many different drag queens and comedians who really do identify that you know, it was being an other. That really sort of put them on to that pathway.

Vilanch:  Sometimes that is translated to “Did you have an unhappy childhood?”  So you had a life of the mind that wasn’t unhappy, but I did have a life of the mind because I wasn’t interested in conventional stuff, A lot of people who fold into conventional form don’t have to think about any of that. And, and we do. 

I was on The View once Joy Behar said, “Well, I had a very happy childhood and I turned out alright.”  I’m not gonna fight that.  When you feel you’re not a conventional person, you have to find other ways.  And I think they are found for you naturally if you pay attention to them, for sure.

Will:  Christmas pantomime is really sort of a peculiarly English form of entertainment and Nashville’s developed a love for it.  Last year, they did a presentation of a Peter Pan panto that was very well received.  In Aladdin and His Winter Wish, you’re playing the Widow Twanky who, in the past, has been played by other huge names like Sir Ian McKellen and John Inman from Are You Being Served?  Have you ever had any experience with panto before?

Vilanch:  We did Aladdin and His Winter Wish at the Pasadena Playhouse three or four years ago.  We had a blast.  It was a great success and we had a lot of fun.  The Lythgoes on doing this all over the country now I mean, they’re in Salt Lake City and they’re down in Laguna.  So this is in the new great tradition, but I mean the big names have done them on stage in London because it is it’s it’s one of those English Christmas things.  It’s a chance for very serious actors to carry on and camp it up.  So it’s like taking a vacation from seeing was “real” theater that is very heavy minded and serious and just letting everybody kind of take a romp.  We take these fairy tales, stuff them with pop songs, and everybody just gets to ham it up like crazy.  It’s really family entertainment,

Will:  You’re truly one of the biggest showbiz mavens that we have.  You’ve written for everybody from Bette Midler to The Brady Bunch.  You’ve been a Hollywood Square And you’ve even stepped into Edna Turnblad’s shoes in Hairspray.  Across your very storied career, do you have one or two achievements of which you find yourself most proud?

Vilanch:  Well, I did 25 Oscar shows and so I guess I’m proud of that.  We won two Emmys in that crop, which is a fabulous roller coaster ride to be on.  And Hairspray, of course, is high up there and being on Hollywood Squares for six years, to the left of Whoopi, if that’s possible. And after 20 years in Hollywood suddenly becoming a famous person has actually been the strangest thing of all.

I point to those like career highs, but I’m proud that I’ve used whatever talent and fame that I’ve got to promote things I’m interested in for the betterment of mankind.  To get civil rights for gay people, promote Jewish causes, and the things that I’m interested in within the communities I’m a part of to try and make the world better for them.

Will:  The Hollywood Reporter – I love this – has referred to you as La La land’s unofficial gay mascot.  Has the nature of being out and proud of being out in Hollywood changed much in the last decade or is it still a lot of the same old story of stars having to hide just inside the closet to keep their careers?

Vilanch:  Well, I don’t think that happens outside of the acting discipline.  The rest of the world is out.  The executives… I think even below the line in the guilds, which have traditionally been bastions of longshoremen kind of On the Waterfront sort of thinking, I think those have opened up, too.  And they’ve opened up to women, which is even bigger than just gay people because there are more women than there are gay people.

But the last thing to fall is the acting thing and that’s basically because we’re selling illusion and the question that everybody asks when they cast somebody is, “Can he kiss the girl?  Will the audience buy him if he kisses the girl?”  And so there’s this raging debate about straight actors should only play straight parts and gay actors should only play gay parts and all of this middle of all these are transgender people saying, “Well, what about us?”

So it’s gotten very confused, but I think that will be the last thing to go.  And I think that won’t happen until you have a number of big deal athletes in major league sports who are out and proud.  And our stars… that’s going to be tough to do.  That will always be tough to do because, you know, this is the last bastion of macho.  And macho has to change.  Macho has to change to admit that there are other kinds of personalities besides macho ones.

Will:  That’s something that Nashville faces.  You have stars that had great careers and then came out, and suddenly they became pariahs.  Of course, you’ve got rumors that swirl about some stars and if they ever are able to come out.

Vilanch:  I did a benefit with Ty Herndon a few weeks ago.  We were talking about that.  At this benefit, he came out and sang his big hit “What Mattered Most.”  And then he said, “Now I’m going to sing it the way I wrote it: with the proper pronouns.  He went and sang it over again.  Of course, it was a knockout for that crowd.  He was illustrating his struggle. 

It’s all part of the whole macho culture, the old good old boy syndrome.  But what’s interesting now is that the Me Too movement has come along and it has just shown such a bright light on that whole idea of what is acceptable, what is “good old boy behavior,” what is macho, when you cross the line, and white privilege and male privilege and all of that stuff.  It’s all now under a microscope, a legal microscope, among others.  So this is this is the beginning of change, I think.

Will:  I ask this final question of a lot of people who’ve had really interesting, exemplary careers with plenty to reflect back on. What would you want to tell your younger self if you could?

Vilanch:  I think I would, I would probably say, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.  You got it, run with it.”  Self-doubt is always there, whether you like it or not, but to make it the theme of your life is crippling.  And I found that to be the case. Not that often, obviously, but occasionally.

If I had to tell myself, I’d probably also say less pizza.  That would really be what that would be the first thing I would say is less pizza.

The run of “Aladdin and His Winter Wish” continues at TPAC’s Johnson Theatre until December 22nd.  Tickets are available at TPAC.org and at the box office.

Click HERE for more by Will Shutes.

Bruce Vilanch

Aladdin And His Winter Wish

DATE: December 12-22, 2019
LOCATION: James K. Polk Theater
STARTING AT: $40

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

Valet parking is not available during weekday matinee performances.

“Magic for the holidays, a fun family ride!”, raves the Los Angeles Times. The age-old fairytale of Aladdin is given a modern twist with pop music, from “Treasure” by Bruno Mars to Ray Charles’ “You Don’t Know Me”, magic, and comedy.

Helped by the magical Genie, Aladdin meets and falls in love with the Princess and later has to save her from the clutches of the evil magician Abanazar. With his hopeless brother Wishee Washee alongside him, will Aladdin defeat the evil magician and make all of his dreams come true?
From the producers of last year’s hit Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, Aladdin and His Winter Wish is the perfect family show all ages will wish to see this holiday season!

Featured Celebrity Cast:
Kira Kosarin as the Princess (Nickelodeon’s The Thundermans)
Bruce Vilanch as Widow Twanky (Hollywood Squares)
Damon J. Gillespie as Aladdin 
(Broadway’s Newsies, NBC’s Rise)
Richard Karn as the Sultan(Home Improvement)
Josh Adamson as Abanaazar (ABC Family’s First Landing)
Jonathan Meza as Wishee Washee(Nickelodeon’s The Jumpitz)
Mykal Kilgore as Genie (NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live)

The post Comedian Bruce Vilanch Currently Stars in "Aladdin And His Winter Wish" In Nashville's TPAC Center, December 12-22, 2019 first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

The post A Case For Throwing Out The Oscar’s Script first appeared on We Got Bruce!.