Still waiting for that rejection, 40 years later
Yes, I was a kid raised on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and so many, many other classic sitcoms of the era. I knew their characters and their dreams, their homes and their workplaces. I knew them like you know family. Which, in a way, they were.
So during college, when my friend, Jeff, who’d written a movie screenplay, pushed me to try writing one too, I didn’t attempt a movie. Writing a movie from scratch – creating characters and a plotline that could sustain 120 pages of story – seemed intimidating. But being a longtime fan of sitcoms, I had both an affinity for and inherent understanding of the form.
And I knew which show I would choose.
At the time, I was drawn to the nightly reruns of Barney Miller. Set in New York City’s 12th Precinct, the show involved a squad room of quirky detectives dealing with one or two crimes (usually with equally off-kilter suspects and complainants), and some interpersonal conflict, typically of a light-hearted nature. I loved the well-drawn characters, the understated humor, and the format of the show, which was very much like a stage play on two sets.
After a couple of drafts and some input from Jeff, I had my first script, Barney Miller: Burning Questions. (Yep, it's a pun.)
In it, the detectives deal with a woman who was mugged but can’t remember when or where it happened (turns out she was mugged by her hypnotist); a businessman arrested for assaulting an arrogant “ambush” reporter (who drops the charges when he realizes that the TV station he works for is owned by the businessman’s corporation); and a man who believes he’s in danger of spontaneous combustion (but is calmed with the help of the arrested hypnotist).
As the first script I ever wrote, for a TV show or movie (oh yes, there would be more attempts), it certainly betrays my inexperience. Among other things, it’s at least a third too short for a half-hour show (I didn’t understand sitcom script formatting well enough), with very stereotypical interactions between the regular cast, and some weak punch lines.
But despite these and other drawbacks, my script did demonstrate my (still embryonic) ability to write for established characters and follow the basic format of a given show.1
Also in retrospect, I should have just put that script in a drawer, chalking it up to learning experience, and a stepping stone to a better next script. But deluding myself that it was good enough for The Big Time, I wrote the Barney Miller producers, at the production company listed in the show’s end credits.2
(This was naïve in more than one aspect. Few, if any, shows accept unsolicited submissions without an agent. Producers want to avoid amateur writers assuming their ideas were stolen if a similar story appears by coincidence on a show they’ve approached.)
In my letter, I talked about being a fan of the show, teased my script plotlines, and offered to send it to them to read. Amazingly, I received a reply a month or so later, signed by Danny Arnold, the show’s creator and executive producer. I wish I still had the letter, but I well remember the gist of it. The show was in the process of wrapping up its current season and if it was renewed for another year, I was told I could submit my script in the fall.
Despite my aforementioned naivete, I found it hard to believe that Mr. Arnold was really keeping the door open for a future submission; more likely, it was just a way of letting me down easy.3
Barney Miller didn’t return that fall, making the question moot. But 40 years later, I stumbled across an answer of sorts, in a 2016 interview of series star Hal Linden by the Archive of American Television:4 At one point, Hal “Barney Miller” Linden says,
…the essence of Barney Miller was the script. Danny eventually had a heart attack and he couldn’t spend the energy to oversee it … he wanted to close the show because he was having trouble finding writing sources. He came to us, at the beginning of the year and said, “Gentlemen, I am going to take submissions for “Barney Miller” from anybody. For the next two months, I’m just going to read scripts, from college kids, from amateurs, from anybody who wants to send me a script, I’ll read it. If I can find a writing force that can execute this show, we’ll go on. If not, no. …
And he disappeared, and two months later, came back and said, “Gentlemen, we’re closing at the end of the year, there’s no way. Of course, every submission was a copy of what we had done, was nothing new, nothing vital, it would be just copies … they were all the same, recycled. And he said, “Why? It was good the first time, leave it alone." And Danny closed the show.
So had the show been picked up, it’s possible my script could have actually gotten a reading. Of course, it would have been quickly rejected for being another “copy of what we had done, nothing new, nothing vital.”
But one of the hardest tasks for any first-time scriptwriter is just finishing the script, so in that sense, it was a success.
* * *
(1) One of my plotlines – the man convinced he was in danger of spontaneously combusting – wasn’t just typical of the kind of oddball vignettes the show liked to use to balance out the main story. I later discovered it had already been used on the show.
(2) I don’t recall where I found the address for Danny Arnold’s Four D Productions – it may have been from the Writers Market guide, or simply a Los Angeles phone book in the Journalism School library.
(3) I suppose that raises the question of why a successful TV producer would bother sugar-coating a reply to a “nobody.” But for all I know, the letter was written by an assistant or secretary, not dictated by Mr. Arnold himself.
(4) Hal Linden, Archive of American Television interviews, EmmyTVLegends.org, published July 28, 2016
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