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!.

Roger Ebert
Can’t Stop the Vilanch: Legendary Comedy Writer Spills on the Creation of His Career’s Guiltiest Pleasures
By Donald Liebenson
March 19, 2025

On Fri. Jan. 20, 1961, CBS aired the first and only episode of a new game show, “You’re in the Picture.” A week later, the ill-fated show’s host, Jackie Gleason, in an extraordinary post-mortem, explained to viewers “how it was possible for a group of trained people to put on so big a flop.” Show business, he said, “is a very strange and intangible endeavor.”

Few know this better than Bruce Vilanch. His estimable credits across an almost 50-year career include some of the most confounding and cringe-worthy specials in TV history. To name a few: “The Star Wars Holiday Special”; the so-called “Snow White” Oscar telecast; “The Brady Bunch Hour”; the basic cable perennial “The Ice Pirates” and the Village People disco musical “Can’t Stop the Music.”

Hollywood convention dictates that any one of these would be a career killer, but you can’t stop the Vilanch. Despite the “Snow White” debacle, he went on to co-write 25 Oscar telecasts, along with other prestige awards shows such as the Emmys, the Tonys and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. He has contributed material to such iconic entertainers as Cher and Bette Midler. He was the subject of a documentary, “Get Bruce.”

But thanks to the Internet, his career curiosities refuse to die. In answer to the eternal questions, “How did that get made?” Vilanch has written a wonderful book, It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, in which he chronicles the genesis and execution of these misbegotten projects.

Vilanch, a former Chicago Tribune reporter and second-string film critic, spoke with RogerEbert.com about a career that subverts the show business maxim: “You’re only as good as your last picture.”

“Amazing, isn’t it?” he laughed during our phone interview.

Sure, we can laugh now at the “Star Wars Holiday Special,“ but you note in the book that, for the time (1978), it was not all that crazy an idea. Variety specials of the era tended to latch onto what was big in the zeitgeist, and nothing was bigger than the first “Star Wars.” Of course, add Bea Arthur and Harvey Korman, and things get weird.

There was a level of absurdity that was accepted at the time. I mean, “Wayne Newton at SeaWorld,” and “Cole Porter in Paris” which featured Connie Stevens, who is not remembered for her renditions of Cole Porter tunes.

What was that first day in the writer’s room like? Did you all sit around the table and go, ‘What have we signed up for?’

In this case, we were sitting around a room with George Lucas himself explaining to us his conception of the show. We sat there with faces falling in dismay as we realized he had sold the network a show that starred Wookiees who could not sing, dance, or speak any known language. And they barely could barely move in their costumes.

We were being handed this concept of an original musical with stars who were non-musical. So, we knew right away we would have to import a whole lot of guest stars to do the singing, the dancing, and the talking while the Wookiees lumbered around looking like Yorkshire Terriers on steroids. That was a very bizarre meeting. And as it went on, I recall, George got quieter and quieter because he began to realize that his team was not exactly on board with him.

Have you ever been to a Star Wars convention?

That’s a very good question. No, I have not. I went to Comic-Con once, but a Star Wars convention would be scary. I think I might get mugged.

Last year marked the 35th anniversary of the so-called “Snow White Oscars” Producer Allan Carr was given the directive to shake up the Academy Awards. Which he did! Rob Lowe and Snow White singing “Proud Mary”; what could go wrong?

Many things went wrong. There was a lot of misbegotten stuff in that opening number. The audience was already taken aback by Snow White dancing down the aisle and interacting with big movie stars who had no idea what was going on. Then Allan, who was in love with Golden Age movie stars, bussed them in from Palm Springs and Woodland Hills for the Coconut Grove nightclub set on stage. But they were not as golden as they had been, and the audience was kind of shocked at the shape some of them were in. So, it wasn’t fun watching them.

But ultimately, it was no worse than any of the other Oscar numbers that had been done for years. The year before they had Teri Garr on an airplane wing with the Rockettes doing “Flying Down to Rio.” The only difference is that Rio never sued, unlike Disney, who claimed we had infringed on their copyright. But what really ensured the number’s place in history was Rob Lowe’s sex tape, which came out a couple of weeks later. And every time they mentioned Rob Lowe, it would be [intoning] “Rob Lowe, most recently, seen dancing with Snow White at the Academy Awards…”

Let’s go back: Why did you want to revisit these cataclysmic series of events?

Well, I was on podcasts during COVID, when everybody was on lockdown. They were all with hosts who were not yet born when these shows were done but had encountered them all on YouTube. And they saw my name [in the credits] and said, “Dude, how did this disaster happen? Who said yes to this, and have they paid their debt to society?” I thought there is a book in this: how I co-wrote the worst shows ever, and how they have survived, and I have survived.

The projects you write about may have been bad ideas, but they weren’t YOUR ideas. I hesitate to think how much worse these would have been without you.

What can we say? They come to you with an idea, and you think, “Well, that’s terrible. How much are they paying? Oh, well, maybe I can find a way to make this thing work.”

This is for RogerEbert.com. Roger gave the documentary about you a good review, in which he wrote fondly about your friendship. Do you have a favorite story or memory of Roger?

I do, actually. It was at the Venice Film Festival. We had lunch together with [playwright] Tennessee Williams, who was drinking up a storm. Later, he got into a water ferry to leave town, and as he was pulling away, someone from the hotel came running down the dock yelling, “Senor Williams, your bill.” And Tennessee Williams yelled back, “I have no intention of paying that bill. I did not have a good time.” Roger and I lived off that one for a long time. He was a good friend. I loved him.

I remember when they screened “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” for the Chicago film critic community. It was a little screening room on Chicago Avenue. Roger was sitting in the back. When it finished and the lights came on, there was silence. And then Mike Royko got up, turned around and said, “Roger, go to your room.”

I was unexpectedly moved by the last line of the book about saying yes to things even if they seem to be a bad idea at the time.

You have to keep the adventure going. If you don’t say yes, you’ll never know what happens.

Moving on to a good idea, you were paired with Marc Shaiman to write the parody song, “You Made Me Watch You,” for Bette Midler that she sang on the penultimate “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. One of the great moments. You won an Emmy for it.

We spent an evening in Marc’s house working up that bit. And I was in the studio watching. I was standing with Robin Williams’ manager, huddled together under the bleachers. It was astonishing to see because it was a cultural moment; the last “Tonight Show” with guests. Everything just went so beautifully. You get this unbelievable feeling when something actually works. If I’m at the theater and something falls together exactly the way it should have, and it’s having an effect on the audience, I tear up because I know how hard it is to get to that.

The post Can’t Stop The Vilanch! Spills On His Guiltiest Pleasures 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!.

Metro Weekly
Bruce Vilanch On His Biggest Flops, Awards Shows, and Bette
By André Hereford
March 13, 2025

Bruce Vilanch, the famously bespectacled writer, actor, comedian, songwriter, and erstwhile Hollywood Square, has long been the sassy pen behind some of your favorite funny people’s funniest jokes. But, on this late-winter afternoon, he and I settled in for a cozy video chat about the times the funny flopped.

In his insightful, hysterical new book, It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote, the two-time Emmy-winner pulls back the curtain on a litany of infamous misfires he had a hand in, like The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Based on George Lucas’ characters and concepts, the special aired around Thanksgiving 1978 to a TV audience mystified by the musical variety show featuring Chewbacca’s Wookiee relatives, guest stars Art Carney, Bea Arthur, and Harvey Korman, and precious little else that made much sense.

“The phone didn’t ring too much the weekend the show aired,” Vilanch writes in the book, which broadly chronicles his career of hits and misses in Hollywood since the early ’70s. “The ones who did call were mildly amused by what they had seen. They recognized the show for what it was. The ones who really would have appreciated it were too stoned to reach for their remotes.”

Vilanch is characteristically irreverent throughout the book, whether discussing the slings and arrows of writing for the Academy Awards telecast for 25 years or considering the legacy of his performance as the evil emperor Weird Wendon, a disembodied head plopped onto an android body, in the 1984 Star Wars-parodying disaster The Ice Pirates.

Initially, Vilanch was called in during the troubled Ice Pirates production merely to “fluff” up the comedy, as the sci-fi adventure starring Robert Urich evolved into a spoof. But somehow, the funny man wound up as a severed head bouncing down a set of stairs.

“It’s amazing how many people know it,” Vilanch marvels now. “Anjelica Huston, it was her second movie and she won an Oscar for her third movie. So they had nothing to show when they would [do] ‘It’s Anjelica Huston Night on TNT,’ and they had to show those three movies.”

Like many so-called failures, “Ice Pirates never went away,” Vilanch says. The film has gained cult status, as his pal Huston attests. “She says, whenever she’s interviewed by somebody younger, the first question is, ‘Tell me about The Ice Pirates. How did that happen?’ Which is actually what my book is. People saying to me, ‘How did that happen? Who said yes to that?!’”

Although, sometimes the more pertinent question is “What were you thinking?” — as I asked Vilanch regarding a project not mentioned in the book, the 1985 dance-pop album Sex Over the Phone by The Village People, another perplexing item on his lengthy resumé.

Vilanch co-wrote the album’s suggestive title track and other tunes with the group’s late producer-impresario Jacques Morali, after the two collaborated on another box-office bomb that’s reported in the book, the disco-themed curio Can’t Stop the Music.

“After the debacle of Can’t Stop the Music, Jacques continued with the Village People, [and] he wanted me to write an album,” Vilanch recalls. “So we wrote an album and it was called Sex Over the Phone. That was a popular thing in those days before the internet and smartphones and all that, the hotlines.”

The video for the track — which we highly recommend as a chaser to this story — is a beautiful relic of mid-eighties music video “edge,” and a daring representation of the queer sensibility that Vilanch, who’s been out as a gay man his entire career, has always infused into his work.

Even as we sit parsing his greatest flops, he currently has a hit — the Dolly Parton musical Here You Come Again, for which he co-wrote the stage book — making its gay way around the world. It seems like a good idea, for the time being, to keep counting on Vilanch for laughs.

METRO WEEKLY: In the book, you mention you have the EGOT of TV writing, since you’ve written for all the shows — the Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys. Which is the toughest gig?

BRUCE VILANCH: The toughest gig is the Oscars, because it’s the most observed, and there are so many fragile egos on the line. And it is a big deal. They’re so fraught with emotion, there’s so much riding on it.

The Tonys are wonderful because they’re very supportive. It’s people who are doing shows eight days a week, and they’re at the top of their game. So you know the performances are going to be terrific. And they also are accustomed to being on stage live, so when they come up to accept an award, it’s fun, it’s theater. Even when they present something, it’s fun and it’s theater. So that’s just a gift to do that show. Of course, the same seven million people watch it every year. It’s never more, never less. It’s always the same seven million people.

The Grammys are fun, but the Grammys have become a concert show. They have like 88 categories, and they can do maybe 12 in three hours. So they have to do the most popular things, and it’s become famous for the mashups, the duets, and the special-event aura that comes from that.

The Emmys are hard only because it’s the same people winning every year for a stretch. The Game of Thrones stretch, the Sopranos stretch. And now, what we’re looking at, The Bear. Also, the dichotomy of the Emmys is that the town — what we call “the town” — is in love with certain shows that the public doesn’t necessarily embrace, like The Bear. I mean, the town loves The Bear. It’s on Hulu, and who knows what fraction of America actually watches it, as opposed to a rerun of The Big Bang Theory, which is a big popular network show. So that’s always weird because you have to reinvent it every year, and it’s the same people parading up. And also, there’s no, what we used to call, entertainment value on the Emmys. They stopped doing production numbers. Maybe they’ll do one, depending on who they get to host, but it’s a parade of people you’ve seen already.

MW: As far as your skills are concerned, what is your secret to writing funny?

VILANCH: If you could bottle that, I’d be much wealthier. I mean, I wouldn’t be talking to you from this man cave. I would be at my burned-out beach house or something like that.

I think it’s just a way of looking at the world that develops when you’re a kid, mostly. And some people keep it very close to the chest until they’re older, but when you’re a kid, and you’re not a standard-issue kid, when you’re not athletic and you’re awkward and you have a life of the mind, and you find that if you can make them laugh, as Whoopi says, you’ll get a head start. They won’t come after you because you’re the funny one.

I once said this a few years ago on The View, and Joy Behar said, “Well, I had a wonderful childhood.” I’m not going to fight with that. I don’t know her childhood. She apparently does. So I think it is kind of an ingrained thing that comes from, I just think it blossoms at different stages of people’s life where they say, “Okay, oh, I can do this. I can write this or I can perform this.” The stand-up comics are generally the kids who were banished from the Thanksgiving table because they would make jokes about the relatives, because that was how they expressed themselves. Now, I was the kid who was dancing at Thanksgiving, whether you wanted me to or not. So I think we see all this stuff early on, and it just stays with you. You either got that or you don’t.

MW: Other than the fact that it’s funny to talk about flops, why compile a book of misfires?

VILANCH: [Laughs.] Well, it seemed like a bad idea at the time. I just did so many podcasts during COVID, where people were just on podcasts and entertaining each other online, and all these Gen X and younger guys would be asking me about these TV shows that they had encountered on YouTube. These were all things that were done before they were born, and they sincerely wanted to know how things happened.

And so I started explaining why this happened and that happened, and how George [Lucas] managed to sell CBS a musical special starring characters who cannot sing, dance, or even move in their costume. So as I was doing this, I said, there’s a book in this, because I had so many of them. The Brady Bunch Hour, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, The Ice Pirates, Can’t Stop the Music. I mean, they would find things that they had seen way after I was involved in them. And I thought, well, this is interesting because people want to know how did these disasters occur?

MW: I have a couple of “How did this happen?” questions, but they’re not necessarily about disasters. I’m just going to throw one out there: “Where Is My Man” by Eartha Kitt, which I was unaware of, until yesterday.

VILANCH: Really?

MW: Yeah. I don’t think I’d heard it in a club or anything.

VILANCH: Because you weren’t around in a disco when it was out in a disco.

MW: Did you and your co-writers [Fred Zarr and Jacques Morali] write it for Eartha Kitt? How did the song find its way to her?

VILANCH: Jacques Morali, who created The Village People, and I got friendly on Can’t Stop the Music. And afterwards, he said to me, [thick French accent] “Darling, I think you are a lyricist.” He’s very French. And I said, “Okay, thank you.” And he had a show in Paris. There was a club called The Crazy Horse, which was a famous club in Paris, and it was all gorgeous, six-foot-tall Amazonian women with huge boobs, and they lip-synched to recordings, many of which were original songs done by famous singers.

And he said, “I’m working with Eartha Kitt. I’ve got to write a song for Crazy Horse, and you can write the lyric.” He gave me the melody and the title, “Where Is My Man.” So I wrote a lyric to it, and he liked it, and he said, “Now we have to pitch it to Eartha.”

Eartha was living in Connecticut, raising a kid and had been blacklisted after she spoke truth to power. She went to the White House and talked to LBJ about Vietnam, and she was kind of blackballed after that for a while. She was looking to reemerge. And so we recorded the demo, and I kind of did my Eartha Kitt impression. “I don’t want to be alone/Where is my baby?/I don’t want to be alone/Where is my man?” And she called me up, and she said, “You do a very good impression of me. If I hear you are getting paid for it, I will kill you.”

So, we went to New York and she recorded it, and then Jacques went back to Paris and it went into the show, where it was sung by a six-foot-tall blonde Amazonian woman doing Eartha Kitt’s voice, lip-syncing. It was hilarious. And Jacques’ partner, Henri Belolo, in Paris, got a record deal for a disco record, and it went all over the world. I have gold records, platinum records everywhere but the U.S., where they wouldn’t play disco on the radio. Back then, it was AM radio and a couple of FM stations that were called Progressive. That meant they played album cuts. The AM stations played singles. And this was neither nor — this was a 12-inch, you should pardon the expression.

It was so big that we did an album called Where Is My Man. I mean, we wrote about 12 other songs for Eartha, and some of them were very funny, and none of them got the traction that “Where Is My Man” got. But it really did bring her back, because all over the world, suddenly she was a star and she would go play all the clubs that she used to play in and do concerts. And she couldn’t do this number because she had to sing to track. She would have a combo with her because she was doing her old nightclub act. But she wound up doing a lot of theater and all that. I mean, she never went away after that. Eventually, she found a way to do it. I was in Chicago, and she was appearing at a disco there singing the song. And she said, “I’m going to sing your song because I know you wrote it for me, but it’s really about you.”

MW: Was her insight true?

VILANCH: What, where is my man? Oh, of course, I’m on the endless hunt. Yeah, sure. I’m still looking. So was she, but actually, she would never let on. I mean, I think actually that part of her life had ended. She was very busy being a grandmother and having a good time, because it was truly a Norma Desmond comeback, a real one. I mean, she came back with guns blazing. She was fabulous, a fabulous character. I loved her.

MW: It’s timely we’re talking about people coming back since you write in the book about Victor Willis leaving the Village People and the movie Can’t Stop the Music partly because he didn’t want to be branded with the pro-gay image. And now, he’s back, using the Village People — and letting the Village People be used — as a tool for the right wing, which is bizarre. How does that strike you, knowing from exactly where they came?

VILANCH: I didn’t get to know Victor because he was… Well, I did get to know him a little bit before he left. He quit right before the picture started shooting. I was already off the picture, but Allan Carr kept calling me for things because we were friends. And even though there was a salary dispute, he kept calling. So I think that Victor was always conflicted. Also, there’ve been a lot of substances in Victor’s life, not the Demi Moore kind, other kinds of substances. And I think in his mind, he always felt that it was an acting job. He is willfully ignoring the fact that Jacques wrote all those things about his experiences as a gay man from Paris coming to New York in the ’70s. So I think [Victor] got control of the Village People because they gave him a writing credit on “YMCA” and a few of the other songs. I don’t know how that happened. So now he owns it all, and he’s restaffed it with people. He sees people doing “YMCA” at baseball games, standing up in the stands and doing a wave with all the “YMCA” stuff, like it’s a “Macarena.” So as far as he’s concerned, I think all the sexuality has been removed from it. He probably really does believe what he is now saying, and he likes the fact that Trump is using it because Trump won. But to try and figure out, and go into the mind of Victor, it’s a task above my pay grade.

MW: Something of a similar stripe, our magazine actually ran a story recently about the Dolly Parton musical, Here You Come Again. They were on their U.K. tour and being disrupted on basically every stop by people who were objecting to the gay content.

VILANCH: That’s an exaggeration. There was one drunk Karen in Manchester, and the actor who was playing the lead opposite the actress who plays Dolly Parton got a lot of press by putting this thing online. While I applaud him for taking a stand, because he is gay himself, it’s not exactly accurate. I mean, yes, in every city we’ve ever played it, in the States or the U.K., there are walkouts because there are homophobes everywhere. And when they come to the theater and they discover that it’s about a gay guy and she’s helping him with his problems, they don’t want any part of that. But it’s a very small group. This was the first time anybody had ever actually stood up and spoke back to the stage, and made a literal disruption.

So it was wildly exaggerated. On the other hand, it got the show a lot of press, so what can I say? Y’know, no publicity is bad publicity. And we finished in the U.K. last week, and now we go to Australia for six months starting in June. Who knows what’ll happen there.

One headline said, “Dolly Show Suspended.” I thought, “Suspended. What are they talking about? I’m getting a check every week.” And they said, “No, that performance was suspended while that woman was escorted out.” Oh, I see, that kind of suspension. So it’s amazing how the media, especially now when everybody is online, it’s all this keyboard warfare, how it’s all blown out of proportion.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to belittle the fact that the homophobia is out there, no question about it. And it’s been a delicate marketing situation because you don’t want to scare people away because it’s not a gay play. It’s about people. At one point, we were in Nashville, actually, and somebody at the theater said, “Well, you could make it a straight guy that she’s helping out.” And the play is about a guy who’s a gay comic, the club closed, he never happened. And he’s quarantining during COVID in the attic of his parents’ home in Longview, Texas, having an intimate relationship with his imaginary friend, Dolly Parton, who steps off a poster. He’s a Dolly Parton fan. And it’s about what happens that night and how she straightens him out, as it were. I said, a straight guy spending a night with Dolly Parton would have other things on his mind that would not be in this play. So that’s a page-one rewrite. I don’t think so.

MW: Good defense.

VILANCH: Yeah. That’s another play. And also because Dolly has been such an ally to everyone, but especially to gay people. I mean her whole idea, her classic line, she says, “Well, if I came back in another life, it would be as a drag queen.”

MW: Did you and your co-writers get to spend time with Dolly to write this?

VILANCH: I had worked with her over the course of 30 years. I’d worked with her on her TV show and her stage act. And so, I knew her, and she knew Trisha [Paoluccio], who was playing her, because Trisha played her in the 9 to 5 musical, so she had seen her, and in fact, Dolly had cast approval and said “She can play me anytime, anywhere.” But once we had it together and we did a Zoom of it, we sent it to her because we needed the music rights. And I thought, “Nah, she’s not going to do this, she’s got her brand.” And she loved it. She’s become our partner.

MW: Way to go, Dolly. Did you work on the variety show where she comes down in the swing?

VILANCH: Why, yes, I did.

MW: Oh, my God, I love that show!

VILANCH: I was part of the rescue team that came in when the ratings were tanking, and they said, “You know, she’s not Carol Burnett. We can’t turn her into that. We have to focus on her strengths.” And that’s when I was brought in to do it. And it became less of a sketch thing and more of a show about her in various places, various gimmicks that we used, but there were still a few sketches. I mean, she had a couple of characters. She had a truck stop waitress that was a great character, and a truck stop, the stories literally drive in the front door. They don’t put on the brakes. So that was always a good thing, a good place to go.

I’m glad you enjoyed it. It flamed out brilliantly. I mean, by the time it ended after the first season, they canceled it, so she didn’t have to do a second season. It was a pay-or-play deal, which is always wonderful. They pay you for not working. It’s fabulous. I love passive income.

MW: So that seems like one of the hits because you tease in the intro of this book that there could be a book of the hits. Are you really planning that? What might be in that?

VILANCH: Well, I’m not, but I suppose it would be the Oscar shows that worked, and Hairspray, which I did for two years. I mean, I would write memories of that. And I don’t know, Bette Midler probably, but I don’t want to write a book about Bette Midler. We made a pact that we wouldn’t write a book about each other. She doesn’t want to write a book about herself anyway, so it’s fine. But I don’t know. I really haven’t thought about it because part of what interested me in doing this book was I didn’t have to do a memoir. People say, “Oh, write a book. You have great stories.” And I thought, “Oh, everybody writes that book, and I want to find some other way in.” So if this one works and they come pounding on my door saying, “More! More!” maybe I’ll find more flops, I don’t know. I have no shortage of either, so it’s a good thing.

MW: You also talk a lot about the people that will call you up and ask for some material here, a few jokes there. The people you talk about are amazing: Bob Hope, Diana Ross, Midler. Who, among the people that you’ve worked with this way, was the funniest without any assistance?

VILANCH: Oh, my God. Well, I suppose Robin. Robin Williams comes to mind because he was a font. It just kind of poured out of him. He was really, really funny.

I mean, what happens is when you start working and nobody’s interested in you, you write all your own material. Then you hit, and suddenly, you’re in what Joni Mitchell called the star-making machinery, and you’re all wrapped up in being on Fallon and Colbert and all these things. The time you used to have to write is gone. You’re very busy being in makeup and hair and all of that, and talking to your lawyer. So that’s when you begin taking on collaborators. And that was generally where I would step in, with people like Billy Crystal and Bette and Nathan Lane and all of these people. It happens after they have established themselves.

So they’re all funny to begin with. They’re all brilliant to begin with. They’re all driven. Some of them are real type-A personalities that you have to realize these are the people who become the head of General Motors or President of the United States or something like that, because they’re alphas. And you have to remember when you’re dealing with an alpha, the alpha is who matters most. As wonderful as they are as people, they are alphas, so they’re looking out for themselves.

But they’re all brilliant to begin with, the ones who I’ve worked with. So it’s hard to say who was automatically funny, but Robin, with that machine gun delivery of funny stuff, he was one of a kind. Although he would bow to Jonathan Winters, who was his mentor and inspiration, who was similar that way, but he was weirder. Robin was much more of his generation.

MW: Who are your comedy inspirations?

VILANCH: Well, I liked all the fat guys when I was growing up. Jackie Gleason, Zero Mostel. I liked the fat guys who could dance, move well. I wanted to do that, and those were the ones, because I thought I had a shot at being something like that. I mean, I had a lot of people who I thought were brilliantly funny, obviously — Jack Benny’s timing was like nobody else’s. But I had a soft spot for the fat guys. Even the dramatic ones, like Wallace Beery. Wallace Beery was a big MGM star, and he was not pretty. He was a character actor with a gravelly voice, but he had terrific timing. If you see him in Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight, he’s always playing the self-made guy who came from the gutter and really is not polished at all, but is moving among high society and they consider him a buffoon and he’s trying his best to be accepted by them. So there’s an undercurrent of sadness to everything he does, but he has great timing in the way he does it.

MW: Something else you mentioned in your book, two things that were gay awakenings for me. One, you talk about watching Tony Danza train at —

VILANCH: Boxing. Yes!

MW: Train at boxing during off-moments shooting Taxi. You also mentioned Battle of the Network Stars, which was absolutely a gay awakening for me, thanks to John James from Dynasty and Willie Aames. I asked about your comedy inspirations. What about your gay awakening?

VILANCH: My gay awakening? What does that mean, realizing you’re gay?

MW: I guess, yes, some idol that might’ve made you aware.

VILANCH: There wasn’t one, there were just a whole lot of them. When I was growing up, I was in love with Fabian and Tab Hunter, who I actually got to know as an adult, and Troy Donahue, who I got to know as an adult, and Tony Curtis — I got to know them all, actually. I mean, I fantasized about them when I was a kid, and then I got to actually meet all of them and have fun with some of them.

MW: What kind of fun are you talking?

VILANCH: It wasn’t a single thing. My awakening of what I wanted to do was when I was about, I don’t know, eight and I went to see my first Broadway show, which was a musical, a flop called The Vamp that starred Carol Channing. She was this apparition with these big eyes and big mouth, and everything she did was large and timed brilliantly, and the stage was gorgeous and full of pink lights. I said, “Well, I just want to live on that stage. I just want to be in that world.” There you go. And the first movie was The Greatest Show on Earth, which was a circus picture. I think it was always something I wanted to do, and my birth mother was a showgirl, so I think that some of it comes from that, down in the womb.

MW: You didn’t know that, I’m presuming, because in the book acknowledgments, you mentioned your “newfound birth family.” How did that come about? Did that happen recently?

VILANCH: Well, DNA was invented, and after my mother died at 95, I spit into a cup and seven years later, a first cousin showed up and we reached out to each other and I discovered through DNA and Ancestry, 23andMe, all those things, confirmed that this was my birth family. The elder generation was gone except for one Aunt Helen who has a gay son — so I wasn’t the first gay element in the family — but everything matched up. So I discovered this phenomenal new family. They all live out here in L.A. in what I call Kardashistan. It’s out in Calabasas, where all those reality people live. And it’s been great finding all that out, the last thing I expected to happen in this part of my life.

MW: That’s really great. So, your last question pertains to another book that you had writing in, but it wasn’t your book, A. Ashley Hoff’s With Love, Mommie Dearest. You wrote in there that you were at one point going to do the Mommie Dearest musical, which didn’t happen.

VILANCH: Yeah. I tell that story in the foreword to his book.

MW: I feel like you probably have a bunch of interesting ideas that didn’t happen.

VILANCH: Yeah, that could be the next book, stuff that didn’t fly.

MW: There you go. You’ve got your title. What else didn’t fly that you wish had?

VILANCH: Oh my God, it’s so arcane. When I mention it, it won’t mean anything to anybody. But Patrick Dennis, who wrote Auntie Mame, had a book called Genius, which is a hilarious novel about a disgraced director like Orson Welles at the time, who is fleeing the tax man in Mexico, living with one of his old mistresses. And he has to make a movie on a shoestring to pay off his tax debt to go back to the States. He cobbles it together from all the elements down there.

It’s a hilarious novel, and it’s been tied up in a rights dispute for sixty years now. There was a movie called The Stuntman that Peter O’Toole did that was similar to it, to the idea. But that is my personal favorite that got away. This never happened, but I’m sure there are others that I haven’t thought about. Now, that’s a good question. I’ll have to start thinking about it.

Bruce Vilanch’s It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote is available wherever you buy books.

The post Bruce Vilanch On His Biggest Flops, Awards Shows, and Bette 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!.