David Isaacs and I wrote an entire half-hour sitcom episode in 45 minutes. It would have been less but our assistant couldn’t write that fast.
Yes, some background is required.
In 1993 David and I created a little show for CBS called BIG WAVE DAVE’S. You’ve all heard of it. It’s become part of popular culture.
We were given six episodes in the summer. The show premiered to excellent ratings (and should have been picked up), but CBS did give us three back up scripts in addition to the episodes we were producing. We took one and assigned the other two to our other writers. We worked out the stories with the other writers and they went off to write their episodes. Meanwhile, David and I were busy writing the last episode of production. We figured when we got the pick up for more episodes (which we stupidly thought was a slam dunk) we would produce those two scripts first, giving us time to write ours.
Then CBS canceled us. Yes, we got good numbers but they didn’t need us. In the fall they had blockbuster comedies by Bronson Pinchot, and their real ace in the hole — the hilarious Faye Dunaway. Big surprise that neither of them got the numbers we did and neither of them lasted more than 13 weeks. (Dunaway didn't even last on her own show.)
But CBS at least had to pay us for the backup scripts. We put in the payment requests. They said fine but we had to produce actual scripts. No problem for the other writers — they had finished or were in the process of finishing their drafts. But David and I had nothing.
I’m sure I mentioned this on countless occasions but the way David and I worked was to dictate scripts to a writers assistant who took shorthand then typed it up. So we brought her in and said take down whatever we pitch. We’re not going back. The first line one of us says goes in. And so we blazed through the script in 45 minutes. The assistant said, “Do you guys want to proof it?” and we looked at her like she was crazy.
So she typed it up, we turned it in, and got our money. All well and good except I have a concern.
I imagine our script is in some file container somewhere buried in a basement. I further imagine some apocalyptic event wiping out the population. And then, thousands of years from now when the planet is repopulated someone will find that container and the only remaining trace of our career is the “Marshall’s Brother” episode of BIG WAVE DAVE’S. What a legacy. 50,000 years from now people will be saying “Boy, those guys were hacks.”
And no, I don’t have a copy. Why the hell would I?
from By Ken Levine
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