Michael leads off.
I enjoyed the new Vanity Fair article on Frasier and was glad to see you were interviewed. The article mentioned the "Three Valentines" episode from season 6 in which Niles starts a fire in Frasier's apartment. I re-watched it immediately and was astounded by David Hyde Pierce's performance. My question is this - Given the live fire was that scene filmed in front of a live audience and in real time? If so would fire staff have been located actually in the apartment but out of frame?
That was pre-shot without an audience. And filmed in pieces... with half the fire department of LA on the stage. It’s still my favorite sequence in FRASIER. Step aside Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Lucy – make room for David Hyde Pierce.
Howard Matthews asks:
Ken, for those of us blessed/cursed with living on another continent, are any of your play scripts available online? I'd love to read some of your plays.
Stay tuned. I am in the process of putting together a website dedicated to licensing and selling my plays. It’s coming very soon. My goal is to get my work out there for more people to see (and hopefully enjoy).
From Frank Beans:
One thing I've been wondering: Do you ever reuse your rejected pilots/scripts later on down the road, with a different network or even the same one? Is this a common thing to do?
It’s not common but it does happen, and for David and me it’s happened three times. We had a family pilot at CBS. They ultimately passed and ABC picked it up. We had a political pilot for ABC that they felt was too controversial (at the time) and HBO had us redevelop it and make it even more controversial.
And finally, we had a pilot at FOX that they passed on saying it was more of an NBC show. A few years later one of the executives in that meeting went to NBC and sure enough she bought it for the peacock.
None of those projects ultimately got on the air, but we got paid twice for the same script so you won’t hear me complaining.
And finally, Andrew has a question about the great writer, Larry Gelbart.
When he wrote Oh God!, did he have George Burns and John Denver in mind? Or did the casting come later? It was certainly a perfect match between the script and the actors.
No. And this is going to sound crazy but Larry’s original conception was Woody Allen playing the John Denver part and Mel Brooks playing God.
Yes, Burns and Denver were great, but wouldn’t you have LOVED to see the Allen-Brooks version?
What’s your Friday Question? Leave it in the comments section. Thanks.
from By Ken Levine
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