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Audio: Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast – #220 Bruce Vilanch
By Earwolf and Gilbert Gottfried.
August 13, 2018

Gilbert and Frank welcome an old friend, legendary comedy writer Bruce Vilanch, who looks back at the “golden age” of TV variety shows and specials, including “Donny & Marie,” “The Brady Bunch Hour,” “The Star Wars Holiday Special” and “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.” (all co-written by Bruce himself). Also, Margaret Hamilton makes her move, Robert Reed channels Carmen Miranda, Jack Benny does “The Match Bit” and Gilbert takes over “Hollywood Squares.” PLUS: Jack Palance! Bob Hope’s filing cabinet! “Wayne Newton at SeaWorld”! Bruce hangs with Tallulah Bankhead! And the Oscar joke that never made the air!

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

LOS ANGELES — Put comedy writer Bruce Vilanch on the spot by asking if he has a political gag suitable for the Oscars, and he makes a game try.

“There’s probably a joke in Trump buying three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri,” Vilanch said, “because that’s all he does is publicize himself. So it seems to me you have a nice, clean shot on the ninth hole.”

He doesn’t have to sweat polishing the riff on best-picture nominee “Three Billboards.” While he’s crafted one-liners for hosts and presenters for 23 Oscar shows, he’ll be watching comfortably at home and with Koosh balls at the ready.

“So you can throw them at the screen when people you don’t like win,” Vilanch said. The ceremony airs at 8 p.m. EST Sunday, March 4, on ABC.

He isn’t playing at being a critic: In his salad days, he wrote film reviews and celebrity profiles for the Chicago Tribune. He and rising star Bette Midler clicked during an interview, and he helped shape her comic stage persona on his way to becoming an in-demand writer for TV shows and big-ticket events including the Tony and Grammy awards and Comic Relief, and for stars ranging from Billy Crystal and Robin Williams to Donny and Marie Osmond.

Admirers sang his praises in the 1999 documentary “Get Bruce!” about his life and work.

“Part of the way that people view me is because of how Bruce has written for me,” Whoopi Goldberg says in the film. “And I’m very grateful for that, because it makes me actually look much smarter than I am.”

Viewers got acquainted with the distinctively mop-topped, bespectacled man himself in a late 1980s revival of “Hollywood Squares,” in which he and Goldberg traded quips from adjacent squares.

After writing for a quarter of all Oscar ceremonies — this year is the 90th — and winning two Emmys along the way, Vilanch is uniquely positioned to size up the grande dame of Hollywood awards shows, and how it and repeat host Jimmy Kimmel can serve TV viewers and the anxious stars who fill the theater.

One hint: The jaw-dropping best-picture envelope mix-up of last year is pretty much a gift to Kimmel.

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TIMES CHANGE. THE OSCARS DON’T.

Vilanch says the movie academy has kept the ceremony template intact from the very beginning, “which is to give every award on the air. So you have to figure out a way to entertain the audience while the sound effects editor is thanking his Hebrew school teacher.”

Social media is routinely incorporated now in awards show — think of Ellen DeGeneres’ star-filled selfie at the 2014 Oscars that went viral on Twitter — but Vilanch says the Academy Awards are in a league of their own.

“The thing about the Oscars is it’s the biggest one. … I would love to see them do more to own the past and the history of the movies,” he said, but acknowledges that the passing years stand in the way.

“As you get farther and farther from the Golden Age, fewer and fewer people of the audience, outside of the theater, are getting who you’re referring to. … There will be a component of the audience saying, ‘Audrey Hepburn? Was she the one in the boat with the guy? Oh, she was Tiffany,'” he said, adding, unhappily, “It’s real.”

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NO EGOS WERE DAMAGED IN THE MAKING OF THIS SHOW

A host who plays it “too inside or too snarky” is courting trouble, according to Vilanch. That includes even being mildly insulting to actors and filmmakers who are on hand to be celebrated, as 1995 host David Letterman found when he turned Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey’s given names into silly sing-song.

“Neither of those women were there that night to have their names made fun of. They’ve come a little farther than that,” Vilanch said. “They’re sitting there and it’s like, ‘Really, TV boy? This is what you’re going to do, you’re going to make fun of my name?'”

Audiences in general have become very sensitive to humor they deem cruel or unseemly, Vilanch said. A joke about a heavy-set actor, for instance, likely won’t fly even if it’s delivered by a similarly rotund comedian, he said.

How to avoid putting a foot wrong in writing for a ceremony seen by millions, even in an era of declining ratings?

“You have to trust your judgment, and sit down at your computer wearing a parachute kit. Just in case,” he said. A line might go too far, but if it’s “a beauty, it might be worth it.”

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SEXUAL MISCONDUCT, THE THIRD RAIL?

For an industry in the midst of confronting alleged misconduct by major figures, how can Kimmel pay heed to the crisis yet keep it from overshadowing Hollywood’s biggest night?

Golden Globes host Seth Meyers handled the issue deftly with quips about Harvey Weinstein and others facing accusations, Vilanch said. But a broad-brush approach may be smarter at the Oscars.

Calling out individuals who are under a cloud and are past Oscar winners is an intersection that could prove embarrassing to the movie academy, Vilanch said.

“The more general, the better. Now that I’ve said that, who knows what Jimmy Kimmel will do,” he said. He lauded the ABC late-night host for “brilliantly” handling last year’s best-picture disaster and suggests Kimmel “can spend time on that, which kind of deflects everything else. … It’s almost like a gift.”

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PERSONAL BEST

Asked to pick a favorite among the nearly two-dozen Oscar shows he’s worked on, Vilanch settles on one that included the stuff of highlight reels.

It was 1992, the year that Billy Crystal hosted and Jack Palance, announced as best supporting actor for “City Slickers,” did one-armed push-ups on stage to prove he still had it at age 73. Vilanch, his fellow writers and Crystal churned out a series of jokes about the moment to be delivered by Crystal at regular intervals.

“It was so insistent that Billy’s manager came backstage about an hour in and said, ‘How many more of these are you going to do? I’m running a pool in the audience,'” Vilanch recalled. “We won an Emmy for writing that show.”

It also became an Oscar template.

“From then on, every other host was watching the show in the wings, and as things were happening we were writing new jokes,” he said.

The post Oscar funnyman to show: play up envelope mess, not harassers first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Comedy writer Bruce Vilanch is normally not a praying man. But backstage at the Academy Awards, for which he has long served as head writer, he often gets religion.

“You pray that somebody will make a fool of themselves in the early minutes of the evening,” Vilanch says of the unpredictable live telecast, “then you take it and run with it.”

The classic example came during the 1992 Oscars, when Jack Palance celebrated his Best Supporting Actor win by doing a few one-armed push-ups. That sparked a night of priceless quips from host Billy Crystal, many written on the fly by Vilanch (“Jack Palance just bungee-jumped off the Hollywood Sign”).

With his Elton John eyewear, kooky T-shirts and trademark blond tresses on display, Vilanch might recount that story in delicious detail when he appears Saturday, Aug. 31 at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos. The event is billed as “An Evening with Bruce Vilanch.”

Avilanch_bruce_vilanch_normal_sizeAs this JCC performance shows, Vilanch is not just a behind-the-scenes funny man. He starred in a Broadway revival of “Hairspray” and currently stars in an off-Broadway hit, “Rubble.” He’s acted in films and for many years he was a familiar X and O on “Hollywood Squares.”

But his role as a writer for awards shows such as the Oscars and Emmys has given him his widest notoriety. Somehow, in a town famous for eating its young, Vilanch has lasted 23 years at the Oscars, serving up jokes for hosts great (Billy Crystal) and not so great (James Franco).

The New Jersey native credits the great Jewish comedians of old for his sharp wit. “I was exposed to so many of them as a kid,” Vilanch recalls. “I was a rabid fan of Henny Youngman and Alan King.”

He also salutes his mother, who was a master quipster like her son.

Vilanch tells the story of how his mom used to keep the living room furniture covered in plastic most of the time. Eventually she decided to reupholster the well-preserved pieces, and when Vilanch asked her why, she replied, “I’m telling people it’s because Sonny Bono died.”

The Vilanch family belonged to a local Conservative synagogue. Little Bruce attended Hebrew School three times a week, was a member of United Synagogue Youth, and was bar mitzvahed.

After college he gave journalism a try, but when Bette Midler met him in 1970 and offered him a job writing jokes for her, the comedy die was cast, and a lifelong personal and professional relationship began.

A move to Los Angeles led to staff writer positions on variety shows, and hired-gun joke-writing jobs with stars such as Lily Tomlin and Joan Rivers.

He made his premiere as an Oscar writer in 1989, eventually becoming head writer in 2000. Once asked if he wanted to keep working on the show after so long, he replied, “It’s the greatest show on Earth. It’s like asking somebody ‘Hey, would you like to play in the Super Bowl?’ ”

Long before it was cool or commonplace, Vilanch, who is gay, was a major activist for LGBT rights. He says the social progress made on that front in the last two years has been “absolutely staggering.”

But now he has turned his attention to Russia, which recently instituted harsh anti-gay laws and has seen an uptick in anti-gay violence.

Says Vilanch, “All of a sudden comes [Russian president] Vladimir Putin, fresh from a midnight reading of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he decides to make gay people the new scapegoat in Russia.”

It’s a rare solemn moment for Vilanch, who prefers to make light of most situations.

And though he’s far from the first person to note the long, powerful link between Jews and comedy, Vilanch has his own theory as to why it’s been such a fruitful association.

“Any people who are oppressed find humor as a way to deal with it,” he says. “African Americans have, gay people have. It’s a common thread, and the Jews are really good at it.”

“An Evening with Bruce Vilanch” takes place 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 31, at the Addison-Penzak JCC, 14855 Oka Road, Los Gatos. $15-$20. http://www.svjcc.org or (408) 358-3636.

The post “An Evening with Bruce Vilanch” Saturday, Aug. 31, Los Gatos first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Heâ€s long been the go-to man for anyone in show business in need of a funny line. Heâ€s probably even made you laugh, though you may not know it. The often clever sometimes crass words of Bruce Vilanch have been uttered by everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to James Franco.
Yes, Franco, whose recent stint as co-host of the Academy Awards didnâ€t exactly leave anyone rolling in the aisles.
“It was difficult to try to make him a sparkling host when itâ€s not his natural inclination,” Vilanch, 62, admitted in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles, which has been his home since 1975.
But Vilanch and the actor, better known for more serious undertakings, have apparently forgiven each other for everything — including a Twitter spat spawned after some bad press.
“Iâ€ve gotten rave reviews and hideous reviews for the Oscar shows,” Vilanch said, and often for the same one — heâ€s written more than 20 in all.
In 1991, the year Jack Palance won as best supporting actor, Vilanch was in his element. When the then 73-year-old Palance dropped to the floor in celebration to knock off some one-armed push-ups, Vilanch and his fellow writers found themselves in the wings rewriting the show, tossing the old jokes and putting in some new Jack Palance jokes. Pure comedy gold and one of Vilanchâ€s several Emmy Awards were the result of the endeavor.
Adopted when he was four days old, Vilanch was raised in New Jersey. “My family still lives there except in the winter when theyâ€re in Boca,” he said.
“There are always reasons to be back in New York. Astoria has become the chorus boy capital of the world. The N train is now called the ‘Gypsy Rush,â€â€ he joked.
He recalled that as a child he visited the Worldâ€s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park, the site of his upcoming show. “I went for the Belgian waffles … A breakfast snack all day long,” the amply proportioned Vilanch said. On May 7, the comedian will bring his life story to the Queens Theatre in the Park stage for one night only.
Though he loves New York, the West Coast denizen has no plans to leave sunny Southern California, “I love the weather,” he said. If anyone doesnâ€t like the lifestyle out there, he tells them, “Please leave — more parking space for Bruce.”
In his show, which he dubs “a sit-down comedy,” he will regale audiences with inside stories “about the crazy people who are in show business.”
His opening act, the Bev Leslies, are a soulful band who cover a wide range of music. He met them thanks to his ongoing association with Bette Midler.
“Iâ€ve worked with her for 40 years,” he said. “And sheâ€s only 32.”
Early in his career, Vilanch focused primarily on writing, a discipline he described as “very private. You have to set a schedule for yourself. When Iâ€m writing what I like, I get into the zone. When I sit down and focus, it comes naturally. Is it because panic is the mother of invention?”
Since appearing on the revised edition of televisionâ€s popular game show “Hollywood Squares” in the 1990s, heâ€s added more frequent gigs to his schedule.“You get instant gratification when youâ€re performing,” he said.
He described his Broadway debut in 2005 as Edna Turnblad, one of the stars of the musical “Hairspray,” as a career highlight, along with “watching Bette Midler ascend” and writing the Oscars.
Vilanch recalled watching the Oscars as a child in a bathrobe, knowing he was destined for a career in show business. “From the time I was a little kid, I was totally struck,” he said. Luckily, he had a supportive mother who encouraged everything he did. “She has great timing. I imitate her a lot,” he said.
“I once got her a part as a dead body on ‘Law and Order,†but she declined because it cost too much to join the union.”
Vilanch is known for sporting tight fitting T-shirts bearing slogans replete with double entendres, a practice that began because “when you have a body like this, you have to show it off.” In truth, he did it originally as an act of rebelliousness against his fastidious mother, but soon found the style suited his career.
What question, if any, does he wish he would be asked? Ever topical, the openly gay Vilanch quipped, “‘Are rumors about you and Prince William true?†But why would they ask that?”

Bruce Vilanch
When: May 7, 8 p.m.
Where: Queens Theatre in the Park, Flushing Meadows Park
Tickets: $37; $35 for seniors; $22 for students.
Visit queenstheatre.org

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