Memoirs of a Muppets Writer: (You mean somebody actually writes that stuff?) (5 page)

Back at CBS headquarters, the halls and offices were empty. There were only two people holding down the fort. One was Jon Stone and the other was an unknown minor employee whom Jon never named and shall be known herein as the Unnamed Perpetrator.

So, while Mike and Elizabeth were entertaining 18,000 of their closest friends, Jon and the Unknown Perpetrator were sitting around the corporate offices of CBS.

In a moment of boredom, the Unknown Perpetrator said to Jon, “Want to have some fun?” He then picked up a telephone and dialed the United States Submarine Base in Groton, Connecticut. Once he got through, he demanded to speak to a public relations officer.

Unfortunately, some hapless junior officer answered the phone. Let’s call him, “Lieutenant Dupe.”

The Unknown Perpetrator said to him, “This is CBS News in Madison Square Garden. Where the hell is the submarine?!”

“What submarine!?”, Lt. Dupe replied.

“What submarine?! We’re broadcasting live from Madison Square Garden with 18,000 people at a birthday party for Mike Todd, to whom the Secretary of the Navy promised a submarine for the party.
THAT SUBMARINE!!!
So, where the hell is it?!”

“I don’t know anything about a submarine!”

“Well, dammit! you better find that submarine and call me right back!”

The Unknown Perpetrator then gave the lieutenant the name and phone number of the CBS executive producer in the Madison Square Garden control room and hung up.

He then called the same executive producer at the Garden.

“This is Lieutenant Dupe of the US Navy Submarine Service here in Groton, Connecticut.”

“Yes?”

“Where do you want the submarine, sir?”

“What submarine!?”

“The submarine that the Secretary of the Navy promised Mike Todd. The submarine that was hauled out of the Atlantic Ocean at great expense to the United States government. The submarine that’s now on its way by truck from the Navy Base here in Groton Connecticut to Madison Square Garden. Where do you want
that submarine
, sir?”

The Unknown Perpetrator then gave the Executive Producer Lieutenant Dupe’s phone number at the sub base.

Meanwhile Mike Todd’s Madison Square Garden Celebrity Birthday Party degenerated to an 18,000 person food fight on live, CBS television, which had to be quelled by the local constabulary.

Phone calls flew back and forth between Madison Square Garden and the Groton Connecticut Submarine Base. At the end, it was reported that CBS had 70 stage hands, on overtime, waiting on Eighth Avenue to take possession of a phantom submarine which, of course, never arrived.

Finally, a short fax that Jon sent me about 15 years ago. It’s one of my favorite Jon Stone souvenirs:

My old friend, Charlie Rosen, Production Designer extraordinaire, was in town a few weeks ago and we had lunch. Afterwards, we were walking down Columbus Avenue, recollecting what studios, etc. used to be where.

We paused on the corner of 67
^th
Street and Charlie recalled that there used to be a fly-by-night prop house there, run by two brothers. And now I quote Charlie describing this true incident:

“I walked in there one morning, looking for some prop or other, and one of the brothers was on the phone:

‘Sure we do. Of course we do. We got two of them, a big one and a little one. Which one do you want? Well, then come in and check them out and you can choose. When? This afternoon? Three o’clock. We’ll be here.’

He hangs up the phone and yells to his brother at the back of the store, ‘Hey Sid! What the hell is a gondola?’

During the creation of
Sesame Street,
coming up with a name for the show became a major problem. Jon said the staff had a running gag about the name. Since it was for children, why not just call it, The
Kiddie Show.
But, since it was for pre-schoolers, someone suggested, The
Itty-Bitty Kiddie Show.
However the show had to appeal to urban ghetto kids, so, The
Inner-City Itty Bitty Kiddie Show
was volunteered. Then Jon got very silly and suggested, The
Dog and Kitty, Inner-City, Itty-Bitty Kiddie Show.

Fortunately, before it got much worse, someone finally came up with
Sesame Street
as the name for the show. Jon admitted he thought it was pretty dumb when he first heard it.

Jon and I milked the
Itty-Bitty
title in a sketch for a
Sesame Street
road show. We had a Muppet committee dream up a name for a kids’ television show. They finally came up with:
The Dog and Kitty,
Pretty-Witty,
Nitty-Gritty, Itty Bitty, Kiddie Show.

Jon actually wrote a song for the sketch which included the phrases:
it’s been named by our committee; it’ll be the hit of New York City; we think we got a sure-fire hitty;
come and
join our little ditty; sing along like Conway Twitty; throw away that old self-pity; and dream a dream like Walter Mitty.

Jon hated offices, bureaucracy, dressing up, Richard Nixon, and committees. He also wasn’t big on people with last names for first names. Names like Anderson Cooper made Jon nervous. “How can you trust a guy named McGeorge Bundy?”, he would demand.

Jon loved Porches, rebellion, the Marx brothers, Johnny Walker and beautiful women. Over the years, he won 18 Emmys for writing, producing and directing
Sesame Street.
He used them as the base for a large glass coffee table in his living room.

On March 29, 1997, Jon Stone passed away after a long battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was the greatest creative influence in my life.

Chapter 7

Writing Sesame Street

I
n 1973, The Children’s Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop), the non-profit company that produces
Sesame Street
, was (and is) located in a modern office building across Broadway from Lincoln Center, in the ASCAP Building, headquarters of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

Over the years of watching
Sesame Street
, I had romanticized Children’s Television Workshop into some kind of intellectual think tank with the emphasis on
Television Workshop
, even though I had no actual idea about what a television workshop might be.

I imagined there would be seminars about the latest video techniques. I expected a guest speaker program with people like Norman Lear and Lorne Michaels addressing the creative and production people. I even thought there might be mini studios for creative experimentation.

Children’s Television Workshop was and is a television production company, and a very good one. It gave Jon Stone and Jim Henson their great big sandbox. In 1973 it was producing
Sesame Street
and
The Electric Company.
Having spent two years writing
Jabberwocky
alone at home, I was looking forward to working in a creative environment.

I enjoyed working in advertising agencies surrounded by other creative people. I assumed a large production company was much like a large advertising agency with corridors of offices full of creative people. And I assumed the writers more or less kept regular office hours, as ad agency copywriters did.

When I asked Jon Stone about an office, he hemmed and hawed for a few days and finally came up with a windowless little room about the size of a broom closet. It was then that I discovered that Jon avoided going to the office as much as possible. Jon hated going to the office. I soon discovered that the
Sesame Street
writing staff worked at home.

But, I liked the idea of going to an office every day, to sop up some atmosphere. So, I tried it for a while. It turned out my office was next to the educational research department. I got friendly with them and got some good script ideas from our discussions. But, there were no creative people to be found.
The Electric Company
writing staff seemed to like hanging around and writing at the Workshop. But their offices were on another floor. So, I only saw them at lunch.

After a few months, fate pretty much made my decision to work at home when it broke my left ankle while I was moving. On crutches with a cast up to my knee, cabbing across town every day wasn’t an option, especially since I really didn’t have to be there. My contract guaranteed the show a certain number of scripts. It didn’t say where I had to write them. So I was working at home alone again.

The annual
Sesame Street
production schedule was broken into several segments. The writers would write a batch of scripts for about ten or eleven weeks. Then, the show went into the studio to shoot them for about the same amount of time. When the shooting finished, the show would go into hiatus and the writers would go back to work on scripts for the second taping of the season.

Therefore, it was some time after I started writing
Sesame Street
before I got to see my material produced and even longer to see it on television. Scripts were shot as much as two months after they were written. Then, the shows didn’t air for another four months.

In those days,
Sesame Street
produced 130 original shows a year. There were five of us on the writing staff: Emily Perl Kingsley; Ray Sipherd; Norman Stiles; Jeff Moss; and myself. Jon Stone also wrote five or six scripts a year. And, Jerry Juhl, for whom I would later work on
The Muppet Show,
contributed Muppet inserts from his home in California.

So, each staff writer was responsible for about 20 scripts a season. Since each script had five to seven scenes of original material, it meant that each writer created about 125 vaudeville skits (for that is, in fact, what they were) a year or about one every three days, including weekends and holidays. That’s a lot of funny.

But those early years on
Sesame Street
were when I really learned how to write for the screen. I referred to the show as Stone’s Kollege of Komedy, because that’s where I learned to find the finish for a bit before starting to write it, how to get to the pay off as quickly as possible and all the other techniques of comedy writing.

Comedy, you see, is very serious business. And when the people who create comedy discuss it, they discuss it very analytically. Once you become one of them, you watch Laurel and Hardy movies and Jay Leno monologues in a very, very different way.

On
Sesame Street,
I quickly learned that pre-schoolers are a very specialized audience because they have a very limited vocabulary and attention span. But, one of the best pieces of advice on writing television for children I ever got came from Dr. Jerome Kagan, a Harvard University professor and child psychologist. Dr. Kagan was our Education Advisor on
Jabberwocky.

During one of our sessions Dr. Kagan said that when a person is born, he or she is as intelligent as they will ever be. They lack experience and vocabulary but they’re not stupid. Inside of every child is a human intelligence with all its brain power intact, and a tremendous curiosity about the immediate world around it.

(My other insight into the mind of a child came from Al Capp, the cartoonist who created Lil’ Abner. Capp once described the experience of childhood as being, “half the size of everyone else and having no money.”)

So, I began to picture an audience quite different from the cute toddlers in play suits who were squirming in front of the TV and (we hoped) mesmerized by
Sesame Street.
I imagined an alien intelligence out there equal to mine, but with whom I only shared a vocabulary of a few hundred words and, I hoped, a sense of humor. So, whatever I was trying to explain had to be broken down to the simplest of terms and presented as visually as possible. Actually, this is a basic tenet for any kind of screen writing.

Unlike many other shows which are group-written around a table,
Sesame Street
writers were responsible for individual scripts. The writer was assigned a show and was then expected to complete the script to the head writer’s satisfaction. After that, the script went into production.

So, material that I had solely written was shepherded through production, set up in the studio, rehearsed, shot and aired. And, I wrote a lot of material. The experience was invaluable. Not only did I see what worked better comedically, but I also got a sense of how my comedic timing worked with real performers. Additionally, I saw how much time actors (and puppets) took to perform certain gestures, as well as how difficult some sketches were to physically produce in the studio.

That point was driven home during my first season on the show. I saw a desert island on a list of available props and scenery - material that had been made or built and used previously, and was now available from storage. So I wrote a skit that took place on the desert island to teach
Imagining
, another
Sesame Street
educational goal.

It started in the Fix-it Shop with a very busy Luis. The phone rings constantly. Gordon and Susan come in with a TV set that needs fixing. Ditto David with a radio and Big Bird with a toaster. Finally, he gets a break.

Luis turns to camera and talks about taking a break by imagining that he’s somewhere else, like a desert island.

We dissolve to a desert island with Luis relaxing on the beach. But, suddenly, from behind the palm tree, Gordon and Susan appear with their TV, David comes in with his radio, and Big Bird enters with his toaster, all are demanding repairs. David answers a phone from behind the palm tree.

“It’s for you.”, David says as he hands the phone to Luis.

It was all sort of abstract until the day of the shoot when I got to the studio and saw the crew assembling a 20-foot desert island in the middle of the floor. As two stage hands passed me carrying a 10-foot palm tree, I remember thinking, “This had better be funny!”

The piece worked pretty well and I breathed a sigh of relief when it wrapped. A staff member complimented me on it. And I remember bragging about how economical it was since I used existing scenery.

“Yes,” she replied. “But in order to make the actors disappear, we had to build an exact duplicate of half the island and lay it electronically over the original.”